The necessity for protocols to keep communication secure has been around since the dawn of the internet. The first ever VPN was jointly developed by a vendor consortium (which included Microsoft) in 1996, and came in the form of Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol. Although many are skeptical about the value of VPNs in 2022 and beyond, customer consumption of cloud provider VPN services have paved the way for additional features and exponential scale.

Blowing out cloud spend is an easy thing to do. This McKinsey Report notes that 80% of enterprises consider managing cloud spend a challenge. I recently presented at the Cloud Security Alliance in Kansas City and had the opportunity to network with some tremendous DevOps and Security professionals. One excellent side conversation somehow transitioned to a deep discussion on better ways to understand cost implications in the era of infrastructure-as-code. Shouldn’t cost be someone else’s problem?

Optional attributes for object type constraints is almost here! I’ve been waiting for this feature to come along for a while. I have tested it extensively in -alpha, and I can confidently confirm that it is a game changer. This feature is long in the making, being discussed as far back as this thread in 2018. Today, it is now in beta, so the official release could be any day now.

There is a reason why enterprises prefer the best-of-breed approach to connect and secure their network and intellectual property. Alkira announced its integration with Fortinet at AWS re:Inforce in July, and this is a perfect example of the best in action. As anyone that reads my blog knows, I have an automation first approach to everything. Alkira’s Terraform Provider is Fortinet ready, so let’s take it for a spin! Intro Key FeaturesThis partnership comes packed with great features, including the seamless integration of FortiManager (which orchestrates the Fortinet Security Fabric), extending existing firewall zones into and across clouds with auto-mapping of zones-to-groups, and weathering traffic surges with auto-scaling.

I had the opportunity to present at the 4th annual AWS Community Day for the Midwest in June. This event was planned, organized, and delivered by AWS user group leaders and was an absolute blast. I got to catch up with a few remarkable individuals I haven’t talked to since pre-pandemic, and I got to meet many new people and listen to their stories of transformation in their respective enterprises.

Zero Trust is all the rage lately, and traditional VPNs are getting a lot of scrutiny since they essentially add and remove encryption at the firewall. This means bad actors can skip off into the sunset (laterally) and gain access to those legacy systems with less effort. Another challenge with using a traditional VPN is scaling with the dramatic shift to hybrid work. ZeroTier is an interesting solution that claims to combine the capabilities of VPN and SD-WAN, among other things.