Personal viewpoints on technology trends and industry developments
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A couple of days ago, I saw a meme targeted at network engineers that mentioned "the VLAN add disaster." I immediately understood what it meant. It feels like such a well-known thing now, enough to warrant a place in a meme, that it's become part of our professional zeitgeist over the last decade in networking.
The shift from traditional network perimeters to zero trust architectures represents one of the biggest changes in cybersecurity thinking over the past two decades. But there's a dangerous misconception floating around that zero trust means ditching network security controls for identity-based systems. This misunderstanding has led many organisations to roll out incomplete solutions that create new vulnerabilities while trying to fix legacy security problems.
The Arctic wind whipped across my face as I looked up at the entrance of what might be humanity's most important insurance policy. It has been a place that has fascinated me since I read a New Scientist article about it many years ago, and there I was, staring at the concrete wedge jutting from the mountainside, its façade glittering with an art installation that catches the summer Arctic sunlight.
How Economic Growth Reshaped the Gender Equality Conversation
Have we been sold a false bill of goods when it comes to gender equality in the workplace? When women fought to enter the workforce en masse in the latter half of the 20th century, the vision wasn't simply to double household working hours. Yet somewhere along the way, what was once revolutionary became a requirement—the 40-hour workweek per household transformed into 80 hours just to maintain the same standard of living our parents achieved.
There seems to be an obsession over on Reddit about the Mandela Effect which was named after a collective but strongly held false memory that the eponymous Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the '80s. It seems that our minds can play tricks on us and sometimes things which we clearly remember turn out to be a shared fantasy. I feel a little like this about those weird two weeks in about April 2021, in midst of the 'rona years, where everyone on LinkedIn got Aviatrix certification for free and then shared it with their contacts so that they too could benefit from a free certification in an emerging technology vendor's product. The reason I'm not sure if it's a Mandela Effect is that I don't really think I've heard of anyone since who has actually used that certification for anything other than to pad out their Credly.
In a recent conversation about IPv6 adoption at a Western technology company, I witnessed a familiar scene play out. Engineers and architects discussed IPv6 implementation as an optional future consideration rather than an immediate necessity. 'We don't really need it yet', was the prevailing sentiment. This perspective, common among Western organisations, reveals a profound blindspot born of privilege – one that unconsciously perpetuates digital inequality on a global scale.
In tech, we often assume technical teams should be led by the most technically skilled people. This common thinking, while it seems sensible, might actually be stopping organisations from reaching their full potential. Promoting technical experts to management creates a range of problems that affect everything from innovation to career growth.
Notifications and alerts are everywhere in our always-on, connected world. But as I've learned from personal experience and my work in enterprise IT, more alerts don't always mean better outcomes. In fact, too many alerts can be completely counterproductive.
In IT operations, there's a metric that network teams know all too well: Mean Time to Innocence (MTTI). It's how long it takes for a network team to prove they're not responsible for an outage or performance issue. While that might sound funny, it highlights a serious problem in how we structure our infrastructure teams.
The Business Case Challenge
I've found that traditional justifications for SD-WAN adoption have often focused on cost savings versus MPLS or enhanced network features. However, these arguments frequently fall short under scrutiny. The fundamental challenges that limited VPN adoption in enterprise networks – including performance consistency, reliability, and operational complexity – remain relevant despite improvements in internet infrastructure.
When Microsoft unveiled Azure Virtual WAN, it was heralded as a revolutionary solution for simplifying complex networking scenarios in the cloud. The vision was compelling: a comprehensive service that would streamline branch connectivity to Azure, enable seamless hub-and-spoke architectures, provide automated routing with simplified security, and offer easy integration with SD-WAN appliances. For organisations grappling with the intricacies of cloud networking, this sounded like a panacea and I know plenty who fell for it. However, as many have discovered, the reality of implementing and managing Virtual WAN has proven far more challenging than initially anticipated.