Strategy Series: Do not sweat the details; or take a risk and embrace change

I was originally going to be inflammatory and title this “Details don’t matter”, but at the last minute I walked it back. This topic is consistently a pile of hot garbage. Why? Many reasons. Because technical people are, in general, extremely detail focused, and often binary minded (right/wrong, black/white, yes/no, 1⁄0). Because of this, a great many times we as technical people can hyper-focus on the details, especially when change is on the table.

Strategy Series: Build vs. Buy (sorta)

Build vs. buy is an often lamented and always hotly debated question in all aspects of IT, however, if one is able to truly look at all angles the answer is typically straightforward and can be rooted in one simple strategy: don’t reinvent the wheel. Don’t reinvent the wheel Too many times we as an industry don’t do our homework - we are all guilty of it - and we reinvent a wheel.

Strategy Series: How do you view outside of your network?

In the tradition of my NIX4NetEng series I’m going to dive deep into the world of strategy, and specifically into the strategy of how we look at and operate our networks, the data they generate and the analytics that are available (and often overlooked) in how networks are managed both long term and day-to-day. So, in the spirit of visibility, lets think about how typical networks are monitored. My guess is that you either already know, or will soon realize that visibility and testing across disparate networks is hard.

Strategy Series: What is your netflow strategy?

You have one, right? Even if your entire strategy is “collect some flow data”, there is absolutely NO reason not to have a netflow implementation, and frankly, it will save you time and money over time if you make the effort to do it. I love network data and analytics and I have waxed poetic about how important they are at every opportunity. There are a myriad of options for analytics and flow data.