Systems Engineering Life

When it comes to firewall upgrades or refreshes, you need to know your: Current traffic volumes and mixture Session counts Number of users Current and future Internet or private connection pipes Current and future throughput requirements (VPN, SSL Inspection and decryption, etc...) Current and future unified threat management (UTM) needs Interface requirements  Number of IP devices LAG requirements  Future growth  I am sure you can come up with more variables and compare it to the vendors specification sheet in order to come up with an accurate size or model of a security appliance.  However, nothing beats a real/live test with a traffic generator.   When I usually size a box based on the customer's requirements, I also factor in real life examples, previous firewall implementations and what the Internet/application traffic trends. I have heard so many "oh we are not going to use such and such application" or "we will never use SSL inspection"...

Does your product integrate with other security products? At this point, you should hate product silos (point products) as much as I do.   I understand and respect “divide and conquer” or “best of breed” strategies. I also understand having different security vendors at different layers of the network could possibly prevent an incident better (one vendor might not see/catch a vulnerability but another might have a signature or way of catching it). But isn’t it time to ask your vendors how and if they can work with each other? So what we (vendors) are competitors?   If by integrating with each other, we are able to increase the return on investment (ROI) for the customer, then why not (I know it might sound naive and unaware, but could you just imagine ). Vendors have application programming interfaces (APIs) for interaction with other platforms.   However, customers have to have application development resources to write code for these APIs, and that's not answ...

Your vendors’ systems or sales engineers are a wealth of knowledge.  I don’t say that because I am one, I say that because we have been around various IT departments as employees or sales engineers.  We have seen different ways of achieving the same goals and can save you headaches or hidden roadblocks. It is mostly a myth that we only know the technology we are representing or selling.   First of all, we have to know our competitors’ technologies well enough to be able to differentiate ours. Second of all, we have to know enterprise IT applications well enough to make sure our products actually work in tandem. SEs also talk amongst themselves.   I might not know the project you are working on, but I am sure one of my colleagues do.   I work with a great group of engineers from different backgrounds.   They are sharp and always willing to help. I’ve worked in energy (both upstream and downstream) industry, healthcare (distribution and provide...