From the Edge to the Core - Kicking off the Cloud Infrastructure Blog

Welcome to the Iron Networks Cloud Infrastructure blog! My name is Richard Hicks and I am the Director of Sales Engineering for Iron Networks. As the lead author for this site I wanted to start off with a brief personal introduction and outline the direction and subject matter for this new blog. I am a network and information security expert specializing in Microsoft technologies. I am a four-time Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the Forefront security discipline, and I’ve spent the last five years helping customers design, implement, and maintain perimeter defense and secure remote access solutions using Microsoft products like ISA Server, Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG), Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG), and DirectAccess. Previously I worked for more than a decade for a Fortune 100 financial services institution as an information security engineer responsible for secure Internet access, remote access, and business partner connectivity. In all, I’ve been working in the information technology field more nearly 20 years, serving in many different roles during this time.

Until recently, most of my career in IT has been focused on network security; firewalls, secure web gateways, VPN, etc. Since joining the team here at Iron Networks earlier this year, I now have the opportunity to bring my large-sale corporate computing knowledge and experience “from the edge to the core”. The datacenter is undergoing a significant transformation, with intense focus being placed on virtualization of compute, storage, and networking resources. Microsoft has some compelling solutions to enable the modern datacenter, with technologies such as Windows Server, Hyper-V, and System Center that can be leveraged to build private, hybrid, and even public clouds. In support of this initiative, Iron Networks has some exciting products to help our customers quickly and easily implement cloud solutions, which of course will be the subject of future blog posts.

With the transformation of the datacenter happening quickly, these are indeed very exciting times to be an IT professional. I’m looking forward to sharing with you more about how some of these technologies can enable and empower corporate IT to build next-generation datacenters sooner, rather than later. And for those of you who have been following me around the Internet on various platforms and social media sites, I can assure you there will be plenty of networking and security content coming too.

 Stay tuned for more!

 --Rich