About one month ago I returned home from my first ever Cisco Live! experience, which took place in Barcelona, Spain between the 29th of January and the 2nd of February. It was an incredibly fun and valuable week for me as I attended technical sessions throughout the week learning about the latest and greatest in networking technology and walking through the World of Solutions in my downtime to broaden my horizons.
As I have had a great interest in the Identity Services Engine, or ISE (which can probably tell if you've read any of my posts) I made sure to book as many sessions possible where ISE was the main focus. If there was no ISE-related session going on I tried to cram some wireless LAN sessions into my schedule as I pretty much work with it every week. Some sessions were great and some were just "okay", mainly due to the content of the session not being detailed or deep enough. After every session, I got a chance to fill in a feedback survey where I could express how much I liked (or disliked) the presentation in general and the content of the session.
On one of the days where I had left some time open to stroll through the World of Solutions where a lot of (mostly) non-Cisco companies are showcasing their products and I stumbled upon the booth of Ekahau, who makes a very cool wireless LAN site survey program. Up until now, I had only seen various footage of this program as I've used other site survey programs and the people in the booth were kind enough to give me a key for a 7-day trial which I made good use of when I got back from the event. Their site survey program seemed feature-rich and easy to use so I'll keep an eye on their software in the future.
My favorite session was the last and only session I went to on Friday which was Aaron Woland's "Advanced Security Integration, Tips & Tricks". Aaron is the author of the official Cisco ISE books which I've read a bunch of times and I've heard his sessions are usually pretty laid back and filled with lots of fun and sarcasm. For the duration of the session, we heard Aaron taking shots at Cisco for their ridiculous marketing terms and whatnot (all in good fun, of course) while simultaneously teaching us about how ISE can integrate with a bunch of other security companies’ software to share information between them. Unfortunately, this was the only session I was able to attend on Friday due to having to get to the airport and go home in the afternoon.
You can find all of the session videos and material available for free on the official Cisco Live website (except for the all-day Technical Seminars which took place on Monday, these sessions required a special pass to attend and weren’t included in the regular conference pass).
Here's the schedule I booked and attended during the week:
Monday:
Breaking the ice with ISE (Identity Services Engine) (TECSEC-2672)
Tuesday:
Opening Keynote (KEY-2000)
Let's get practical with your network security by using Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) (BRKSEC-2464)
How to set up an SD-Access Wireless fabric from scratch (BRKEWN-2021)
Wednesday:
Designing ISE for Scale & High Availability (BRKSEC-3699)
Deploying ISE in a Dynamic Environment (BRKSEC-2059)
Best practices to deploy high-availability in Wireless LAN Architectures (BRKEWN-3014)
Thursday:
Improve Enterprise WLAN Spectrum Quality with Cisco's advanced RF capacities (RRM, CleanAir, ClientLink, etc.) (BRKEWN-3010)
Securely Designing Your Wireless LAN for Threat Mitigation, Policy and BYOD (BRKEWN-2005)
ISE under the magnifying glass - How to troubleshoot ISE (BRKSEC-3229)
Friday:
Advanced Security Integration, Tips & Tricks (BRKSEC-3557)
