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When it comes to network security, there should be no disconnect between the corporate and the distributed locations

Background: I have a number of customers in the retail industry.  Usually, they have a large number of remote locations (restaurants, brick and mortar stores, and kiosks). Before the cheap/high-speed Internet connections being used for enterprise connectivity (IPsec tunnels over these connections) and before the SD-WAN revolution, all of these remote locations’ traffic traversed private connections such as MPLS or frame relay connections to one or two centralized data centers to reach corporate resources or the Internet. Securing these types of set up were rather less complicated because you had one or two centralized points to secure (mostly at the edge where Internet was accessed). We are now faced with every remote location acting as an “Internet PoP” (point-of-presence).  These locations will use an IPsec tunnel over the Internet connection to reach corporate resources.  The Internet traffic is locally routed using their existing high speed connection but wit...

A book to start the journey

About me: I love books, specially history books, biographies and autobiographies.  I love learning from other people's experiences, struggles, shortcomings and success. Career History: I have been a pre-sales systems engineer (SE) since September of 2010 after working in various industry's IT departments as a network/security engineer. ( My LinkedIn profile ) I was introduced rather late to "Great Demo!" by Peter E. Cohen .   James Cabe who is one of the smartest people I know recommended this book at my on boarding at Fortinet. I think it is essential to learn the principles of pre-sales engineering and what a "real demonstration" is before even getting in front of customers. Now, the book talk about software demonstrations but I think it applies to any technical pre-sales engagement and demonstration. My good friend and colleague Eric Hastings  came up with an idea of standardizing and streamlining our demonstrations, proof of concepts and pilot...