Chief Technology Officer of Enterprise, Netscout
Search every verified Paul Barrett interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In 2020, Paul Barrett, Chief Technology Officer of Enterprise at Netscout, discussed the company's data model and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on enterprise VPN usage. He described Netscout's data model as having multiple levels, including the storage of raw packets and rich data related to individual transactions, and noted that for most network protocols the company can map data to a common model, allowing insight into different applications and protocols in a single pane of glass. Barrett stated that Netscout services the largest and most complex organizations in the US and globally, and that for many of these organizations, VPN services were originally designed for a small subset of the workforce. Barrett explained that the shift to widespread remote work created challenges, as many organizations' VPN configurations were not architected for the sudden increase in demand. He distinguished between full VPN connections, where all internet traffic goes through the enterprise network, and split VPN connections, where only business service traffic goes through the VPN. Barrett said that a lot of energy had been put into providing visibility around VPN services, which had previously not been seen as a critical component. He also noted that customers were thinking about future needs, such as split VPN migration and over-provisioning, and that organizations that had already transitioned to virtualized infrastructure were in a stronger position to adapt.
“A lot of energy has been put into providing that visibility around VPN services because quite honestly it was never seen as a particularly critical component of the overall enterprise. It was that kind of, oh, that's just something to help the guys on the road and all of a sudden it became the most important piece.”
“It's also not just been about giving sufficient visibility for you to keep the wheels on the truck; it's also helping the customers think forward about planning, like split migration, split VPN, but also thinking about their future needs.”
“A lot of customers are looking to over provision, and the ones that have already transitioned to virtualized infrastructure are actually in a stronger position because they've got a lot more flexibility and ability, for example, to spin up more VPN resources or more virtual desktop resources.”
“With NETSCOUT we service the largest, most complex organizations both in the US and globally, but for many of these organizations, the VPN services they provided really was for a quite a small subset of their workforce, people working on the road, maybe they had a small subset of their employees working from home.”
“Almost overnight, everyone found themselves struggling to work from home, and quite frankly most organizations' VPN configurations were just never architected to deal with this kind of situation.”
“One of the perhaps most important distinctions between the different types of VPN is whether you have a so-called full VPN service or a split VPN service because that really impacted the ability of organizations to deliver VPN.”
“With a full VPN connection, everything that you connect to on the internet or any business service has to go over your VPN connection; you can't make any direct connections from your PC to the internet, it has to go through your enterprise network.”
“If you've suddenly moved tens of thousands of employees to working from home, every single communication activity performed by those employees goes through your VPN concentrators.”
“With a split VPN, only when I need to connect to business services that are provided over my enterprise network do I actually go directly to my enterprise network over the VPN; if I'm just going to Google or any other regular internet resource, then I get a direct connection to that internet resource and that really ta...”
“We do store the raw packets and we're intelligent how we do that — we actually store the parts that you really need and we store rich data relating to individual transactions; that's very useful for troubleshooting.”
“For most network protocols we actually can map it to a common data model, and that's extremely powerful because it means that in a single pane of glass I can get an insight into all of the different applications and protocols running on my network.”
“The data model has multiple levels — everything from raw packets to rich transaction-level records.”
“With Netscout, we service the largest, most complex organizations, both in the US and globally. But for many of these organizations, the VPN services they provided really was for quite a small subset of their workforce. People working on the road, maybe they had a small subset of their employees working from home. And...”
“One of the perhaps most important distinctions between the different types of VPN is whether you have a so called full VPN service or a split VPN service, because that really impacted the ability of organizations to deliver VPN.”
“With a full VPN connection, everything that you connect to on the internet or any business service has to go over your VPN connection. You can't make any direct connections from your PC to the internet, it has to go through your enterprise network. So if you suddenly moved tens of thousands of employees to working from...”
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Paul Barrett, CTO at NetScout joins theCUBE host Dave Vellante (@dvellante) for a CUBE Conversation from our Boston studio.
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