Network Security - Don't Fix the Engine While The Plane is Flying

You know, one of the things, we're gonna talk about a lot of different stuff, but one of the things we wanna talk about is network resiliency.

It's kinda one of those terms that gets thrown around a ton.

Everybody defines it a little bit, and it's a different challenge for everybody.

So maybe you could talk a little bit about how you put some parameters around it and some of the bigger challenges you see folks facing right now.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Um, resiliency to us is the ability to maintain access, visibility, and control when you need it most, right? Um, that can have an impact on, on production networks.

Um, it can also impact your, your operations teams because outages can, can really affect, you know, just that, uh, operational tempo and, and how people act or react more specifically.

Uh, and so, you know, important things to look for is to root out, like, those single points of failure.

Um, I always advocate, you know, pay attention to your vulnerabilities, especially in your very old infrastructure, um, and, uh, c- 'cause it's, it's very likely to fail, right? And when you least expect it, when you least need it.

And so resiliency is being able to, you know, have visibility into all of your infrastructure, how it's operating.

Um, and, and we, we like to say that, uh, visibility without control is just data, right? It's, it's unactionable or, or limited actionability from it, and so you need the ability to take control in the moment and, and fix, interrupt, uh, r- resolve, right, course correct the thing.

And o- one thing that we feel is very important is you can't do that with ...

You can't fix your production network with the production network.

It's like trying to repair the engine of an airplane while you're flying it, right? You just can't.

And so independence is critical because a failure at the, the edge, you know, your WAN, uh, it might keep the rest of the network up, or a failure of the core switch could take all of it down.

And unless you're planning for every possible kinda issue or outage, uh, and building independence throughout the entire infrastructure, um, you're gonna, you're gonna have a bad day.

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's interesting you bring up that analogy of trying to fixing the airplane while it's flying.

I know we've got a bunch of OT people listening and watching this going, "I don't have a choice, man.

I have to do that.

We cannot have downtime on the floor." How do you address some of those concerns?

Yeah.

Uh, planning is the most important thing, right? Um, and, and giving yourself the right degrees of control and, and as a utility, right? I get it that, um, y- the power you're providing is also the power you're using, and if, if one of those goes down, or if that power goes down, right, then you can't use it.

And so you need to plan for those kinds of failures, and architect in reliability and redundancy as it makes sense.