Knowledge sharing makes a team grow

Why do you love your job so much?

"Because this is a versatile position. Every customer brings new challenges, both technical and technological. With a wide choice of brands and technologies, you can literally go in any direction and start thinking technically about how the puzzle best fits together for each individual customer situation."

What impact can you create?

"Since we as network architects work on the foundation, we can steer the environment in a certain direction from the start. Ensuring the security aspect, creating a customized design and working out a future vision are all at the basis of a solid and future proof environment for the customer."

What tools do you come into contact with?

"Our tools are related to the vendors, at Fortinet this is a lab environment, a license portal, a kit list, training courses ... This is considerably broader than I initially expected, but in a positive sense. Each vendor brings its own tool, which makes it interesting and allows us to make a good comparison between the brands that are in our portfolio today."

What would you still like to achieve in this role? 

"Being a fun colleague who is knowledgeable and can get into certain things technically. With me, this is mainly everything regarding Fortinet. In my current role, I can fully focus on this to master the whole thing. This allows me to play "fortiwiki" for colleagues both within our team and beyond."

Can you give an example of a project you are working on?

"I am relatively new at Cegeka and we have done a nice customer migration from a shared to a dedicated platform. This brought some challenges with it, so that the current needs of the client were met and also so that there would be no surprises in the future, should the client wish to grow further. 

We did a redesign of the network landscape and added an extra layer of security. To keep it from being too invasive, we put down a security baseline that had a limited impact on the customer's current operation but did increase security sufficiently."

How could you continue to grow within Cegeka?

"Depending on your interest, you can go in many directions within Cegeka. If you are interested in something and you invest time in it, I am sure you can achieve this. For myself, this is already the case: I can focus on the Fortinet story within Cegeka itself, which is great to work on this standard. I see myself deepening and broadening my knowledge for some time to come, as I like to stay technically involved with the products themselves."

Why should people choose this role?

"The network architects team is a small (but nice) team so the operation is hugely linear, every new client is a different challenge.   You can always work with a broad portfolio of technologies to find ready-made solutions. And because it is a small technical group you have a lot of technical knowledge to fall back on.

We have data center, firewalling, and application security specialists on our team that you can always turn to with questions. This ensures that you can quickly build up your knowledge and learn an enormous amount. The mantra is therefore to share knowledge and grow as a team."