Cisco Tetration and AlgoSec – The Talk Show Version

I’m a tech guy.

I’m perfectly comfortable with sitting by my computer, playing with new technologies, coding, designing. I am also very happy traveling, meeting new people or old friends, setting workshops and whiteboard sessions to come up with the optimal solutions for complex problems.

When Ravi from Cisco called to invite me to Cisco’s studios to shoot a joint video about AlgoSec and Cisco Tetration, and then later on when we had a call with the director of the video to discuss what kind of shirts to wear and how to make the video appear fluent and natural – I must admit that it took me out of my comfort zone a bit.

The content was actually the easy part. We have been working shoulder to shoulder with the Cisco Data Center Networking teams for over two years now. The value of the joint solution is clear and was validated by many customers already: First, using Tetration and AlgoSec for the initial micro-segmentation exercise, mapping existing application connectivity and automatically generating and deploying security policies on different network security devices (ACI contracts, firewalls, routers, cloud security groups). And then on an ongoing basis, with Tetration enforcing security on the endpoints, and AlgoSec taking care of the network side.

But shooting a video in a real TV studio was, well… different. Weird. Exciting. Funny.
I could get used to the five star treatment – freshly brewed coffee, makeup, someone coming over to fix my shirt and jacket every 3 minutes, soundmen, mics, 3 huge cameras, set, lots of lighting, countdown, “Action”, and the director telling me to ignore all that and just have fun and look natural… Of course I had a great co-star with me – my friend Ranga Rao from Cisco, who took the “interviewer” role and made the whole thing flow very nicely.

But it was still a bit funny to do “takes”, sound checks, and generally spend the morning as a celebrity doing a talk show in a TV studio. Next time I want my own trailer!

Well, gotta go now, my agent is calling. What’s that? Warner Bros.? A feature film? The new superhero movie “AlgoMan returns”? Well, I think I better just stick to my day job…

Ravi Balakrishnan, Ranga Rao, Asha Hegde, and of course, our director Frances Brooks – thank you so much for setting this up and making it happen, it was fun!

And here the final result: Data Center Security Management with Cisco Tetration and AlgoSec