Just recently I finished my notes and assignments for my network security unit.

It’s really fascinating to hear about the different tools that have been improved upon in such a short amount of time, all just to filter good and bad network traffic (an oversimplification for sure).

In the old days, people would use basic Access Control Lists or firewalls as a way to implement rudimentary policies about what kinds of network should be permitted or denied. Often they would only serve a specific rule and were not adaptable to emerging threats.

Which is why the emergence of adaptable and flexible devices like Next Generation Firewalls are so interesting to me.

I get that AI has been all the hype lately, but using machine learning as a way to study expected network traffic and being able to identify anomalous traffic is such an innovative solution to mitigating suspicious activity on a network.

There’s only so far that a signature-based threat detection system can get you before your system becomes compromised by new threats vectors.

Cyber security is such a rapid landscape – things you learn in one day could be totally irrelevant or outdated by the next day. It is by its very nature a cat and mouse game — attackers find new ways to attack, security personnel must adapt to prevent these threats.

So when you’re always effectively one step behind the attackers, you need to find entirely new ways to circumvent these risks.

And in the current IT landscape, that involves the use of machine learning or behavioural analysis as a way to identify activity that could be a threat.

I’m beginning to question the purpose of my CCNA studies.

Don’t get me wrong, I have every intention to continue studying (and blogging) about cyber security and networking.

The amount that I’ve learnt in the past few months alone, although unsustainable, has been instrumental in giving me more insight into the cyber landscape.

Last week, I attended an entrepreneurship breakfast event and had a chat with someone who had extensive experience at the large Telco companies in Australia. I was so keen to finally chat to someone who actually worked in networking and understands what I’ve been doing in my spare time.

And by talking to him, I was able to confirm something that I’ve been suspicious about for a while — most of the contemporary tools for networking are not done via Cisco command-line interfaces anymore, but rather with the help of centralised dashboards and web applications.

To be honest, I suspect that in the real world, most IT and networking professionals are using these kinds of software to configure and manage an enterprise’s network.

So while I may be slowing down on learning the specifics of the CCNA syllabus (because I was starting to get bogged down by Cisco commands), I have every intention to continue studying core concepts and ideas in networking and cyber security,

“Study smarter, not harder,” I guess.