Tech Field Day Coverage

Our delegate panel includes independent writers and thought leaders, and we collect their coverage of the event, Tech Field Day presentations, and sponsoring companies here.

My Take: Ixia’s Visibility Portfolio

Ixia made a return to Field Day with their presentation at Tech Field Day earlier this year. We were lucky to have Wes Milliron around the delegate table for the event. In this piece, he looks at their overall visibility platform, and came away impressed at the scope and capabilities. While he admits their UI is due for a refresh, the underlying functionality provides the visibility you need to best take advantage of your security tools.

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My Take: Ixia’s Visibility Portfolio

Thinking About Veeam Cloud Tier

At Cloud Field Day last month, David Ball got to hear from Veeam. The company is no stranger to Field Day events, and it was great to have them back presenting to the delegates. Their presentation on Veeam Cloud tier answered a key question that David had been asking himself, how can smaller organizations buy what they need for backups, but still allow for on-demand flexibility. It’s a great piece looking at their solutions.

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Thinking About Veeam Cloud Tier

Ixia Helps You See All the Stuff You Need to See

Dan Frith heard from Ixia at Tech Field Day last month. While the company was acquired by KeySight a few years ago, they still bring a long legacy of network insight and visibility to the market. At the event, they talked a lot about Vision X, their modular network packet broker. This is designed to offer a flexible feature set today, that can be built out by developers over time. It aims to offer high performance, high density visibility. For Dan, getting that visibility across the stack is incredibly valuable for modern IT.

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Ixia Helps You See All The Stuff You Need To See

Patch! Patch! Patch!

Jasper Bongertz enjoyed the messaging around VMware’s presentation at Security Field Day. They reminded everyone about the importance of patching, something in an age of continuing exploits certainly resonates. They went over some of their hardening guidelines, what they’ve done with CPU schedulers to reduce the threat of speculative attacks, and more.

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Patch! Patch! Patch!

PathSolutions – Nova Forma De Troubleshooting

Rodrigo Rovere heard from PathSolutions at Networking Field Day earlier this year. The company has been around since 2007 and showed their TotalView solution at the event. This monitors all the interfaces of a network device and searches its 19 counters to show you a complete view of the health of your network. Rodrigo found it to be a great tool for mapping a network, although he wished it could be exported to use in other tools going forward.

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PathSolutions - Nova Forma de Troubleshooting

Automation, Anywhere You Want It

At Tech Field Day, Jim Palmer got a look into the fascinating world of Robotic Process Automation, thanks to the folks at Automation Anywhere. While this is the fastest growing enterprise software market, it was one that Jim hadn’t heard much about before. He was impressed by the company’s vision of having a “digital assistant” for every worker. They provide not just a platform to make this happen, but lead the industry with their education resources. For someone new to the space, that was an invaluable aspect for Jim.

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Automation, Anywhere You Want It

Next Gen Firewalls With a Side of Cloud Services

Prior to seeing Palo Alto Networks present at Security Field Day, Michael Davis saw them at their Ignite Conference. He was curious what the company would add to their presentation to make it stand out with that event so recently in the rear view. They showed off their Panorama next-generation firewall management solution. But the real meat of the presentation was on Prisma Public Cloud, the result of their recent Redlock acquisition. There were also demos of Cortex XDR and Demisto, designed to help combat alert fatigue. It was a lot of information to take in, but had a lot of interesting security implications.

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Next Gen Firewalls with a Side of Cloud Services

Ixia at Tech Field Day 19

Ixia is no stranger to Tech Field Day, and they made their return to the event last month. In this post, Ixia’s Jason Lackey reviews what was shown at the event. They overviewed the company’s history with the event, discussed network visibility fundamentals, introduced their Vision X packet broker, and showed how Ixia Cloud Lens offers visibility into cloud environments. It was a busy presentation, so be sure to check out the full video on our YouTube channel.

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Ixia at Tech Field Day 19

Meraki’s Eye in the Sky

Meraki may be the last name you think of when it comes to security cameras. But the engineering effort put into their line of on-premises security devices is very impressive. Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at a couple of their new offerings that they showed at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US 2019 and gives his perspective on how Meraki sees the world.

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Meraki’s Eye in the Sky

Meraki in the Middle – Smart Security Cameras

John Herbert got to hear from Cisco Meraki during Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US 2019. The company detailed their new second generation MV security cameras, which John sees as a entering into a new market for the company. These fall somewhere in the middle between consumer cloud-managed cameras and high end centrally managed enterprise one. In terms of features and quality, Meraki’s cameras approach the high end, but with the same underlying cloud-managed simplicity with which it has approached wireless, switching and security. For John, the new lineup looks “really neat”.

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Meraki In The Middle - Smart Security Cameras

Cisco Live 2019 – a Whirlwind of Networking Goodness

It was great to have Amy Arnold as a delegate at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US 2019. At the event, NetBeez’s presentation really stood out to her. She’s long been impressed by the monitoring company, and with their recently announced integration with Cat9K switches, there’s even more utility in their solution. Overall it was a busy event for her, but one with a lot of networking goodness.

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Cisco Live 2019 – A Whirlwind of Networking Goodness

Hot Take From TFD19 – RPA With a Security First Mindset

Scott Driver was at Tech Field Day last month, and got to hear from first time presenter Automation Anywhere. They showed off their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution, something that caught Scott’s eye as his financial sector background is just starting to really look in that space. What really impressed him in the presentation was Automation Anywhere approaching their solution from a privacy and security first perspective.

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Hot Take from TFD19 – RPA with a Security First mindset

If You Build It….

At Cloud Field Day earlier this year, Al Rasheed got to hear from Rubrik. The company is no stranger to Field Day events, and this time they used their presentation to discuss Rubrik Build. This is a site dedicated to user education as well as for hosting events to build and bring a community together. With section dedicated to Software Development Kits, Tooling Integrations, and Use Cases, Al found it a really valuable resource. He appreciated that this wasn’t something tied to sales, but instead meant to make their customers more productive.

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If You Build It….

Tech Field Day 19 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Dan Frith is a familiar site at the delegate table for Storage Field Day, but last month he was able to attend his first Tech Field Day, seeing presentations from across data center verticals. In this post, Dan outlines what was provided during the event, where he went, and gives an impression of the overall Field Day event experience.

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Tech Field Day 19 – (Fairly) Full Disclosure

Fortinet @ NFD20

In this post, Snehal Patel shares his thoughts on what he saw from Fortinet at Networking Field Day earlier this year. At the event, Fortinet showed off their secure SD-WAN solution. This is available as a feature on all Forinet devices, allowing customers to get more features out of things like Fortigate Firewalls. This was Snehal’s first time looking at Fortinet, and he was really impressed with their controllerless approach to SD-WAN.

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Fortinet @ NFD20

Security Wasn’t Always My Day Job

Nathaniel Avery finds himself in a familiar position to a lot of people in IT. Originally his role as a Solutions Architect didn’t have to have security strictly in mind, rather focused on compliance and best practices. But the role has evolved where it is now of primary importance. At Security Field Day, these themes were reiterated, with looks at the latest in microsegmentation and zero-trust security approaches.

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Security Wasn't Always My Day Job

My Tech Field Day Experience

Evan Mintzer attended his first Field Day event as a delegate for Security Field Day. He really appreciated the unique “un-conference” quality of the event, which allowed for real communication and community building between the delegates and the presenting companies. He was really impressed not just with the technical content, but with the organization and thought that went into organizing it. It was great to have Evan there and we can’t wait to have him back.

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My Tech Field Day Experience

News From Cloud Side #2

Lino Telera put together a look at some of the big cloud news, and we were thrilled to see our most recent Cloud Field Day on the list! Be sure to get caught up on the event if you missed it live, we post all videos of the presentations on our YouTube channel. He’s also excited for the next Cloud Field Day, and so are we!

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News from cloud side #2

Vexata Execs Depart for Greener Shores

This piece covers management shakeups at the high performance storage startup Vexata. Former CMO Ashish Gupta left the company and took up a role at the security company Banyan, a presenter at Security Field Day last month. In fact, during their presentation, he revealed he had been at the company for just three days. Be sure to check out their full presentation video to see what Ashish is taking on in this new venture.

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Vexata execs depart for greener shores

Tech Field Day 19 – Day 0

Matt Callaway attended Tech Field Day out in Silicon Valley last month. In this post, he details one of the parts of the event that doesn’t make it onto the live stream, the “Day 0” before any of the presentations. This involves getting to the event, meeting up with the organizers and other delegates, and getting into great conversations over dinner. As a first time delegate at the event, Matt found it a great way to get to know the community.

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Tech Field Day 19 - Day 0