Laurence Andrews

February 2017 - The Missing Blogs

February started with friends, having dinner out and settling into our new home after a busy Christmas and beginning to the year. We spent time absorbing Upnor, taking walks along the beach and past the castle, enjoying the pub and surrounding area. We watched as the boats slowly begin to re-populate the river, the process is now an unexciting a... Read more

Speaking at WAN Summit London

It has been an incredibly exciting week; it is not too often that I get nervous and even less frequently so in a work environment - but to do so was very worthwhile. For the past few months, I have been preparing to talk at WAN Summit London, a relatively notable industry symposium attended by Network Managers, IT Executives and Enterprise Servi... Read more

Cisco Live EMEA 2017 - What to Expect

Today I am lucky enough to be going travelling to Berlin, Germany with one of my colleagues; we’ll be attending Cisco’s annual conference Cisco Live EMEA. As many of you will likely know Cisco Live is the go to event for network engineering folks the world over, with classes, seminars and presentations from all manner of people across all kinds ... Read more

A Brief Overview of Firewalls

Back in 1993, while I was busy being a toddler a chap at CheckPoint came up with something called ‘Stateful Packet Inspection’. Sounds terribly boring, but it isn’t. Stateful Firewalls are the unsung security guards of the internet, here’s how they work: A long, long time ago - all we had to protect our networks were packet filters. Packet filte... Read more