Across Cisco, hundreds of teams host interns in every function of the business. Internships help attract early-in-career talent that brings new skills and diversity to the workforce. Cisco has a… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Across Cisco, hundreds of teams host interns in every function of the business. Internships help attract early-in-career talent that brings new skills and diversity to the workforce. Cisco has a dedicated group – the Early Talent Recruiting team – that serves as a global recruiting engine to help managers find and hire interns. The team drives best practices across the company, leads intern onboarding, and hosts professional growth events. With a strong track record for converting interns to full-time roles, Cisco is a destination for interns across the globe.

Gia Mule majored in Computer Security at the Rochester Institute of Technology before joining Cisco as a full-time employee.

To celebrate National Intern Day, we talked to some people who went through Cisco’s internship program and are on the path to very bright futures. Here’s Gia’s story:

When Gia Mule started her junior year of college in the fall of 2019, she had no idea that COVID was about to derail lives and shut down offices across the world, and yet her career launched like clockwork. Just four years later, she is a Security Consulting Engineer with Cisco CX Americas, thanks to an internship that gave her a great start.

Gia was ahead of the game that fall. She already had one technology internship and a career path in mind. “I expected to be a software developer, and then I watched a corny documentary about security, and I didn’t know that such a realm existed,” she said the opportunity to shadow a security program during a college open house sealed the deal. “It seemed important, and it is.”

Gia was working toward a degree in Computer Security at Rochester Institute of Technology when she targeted the CX Security Consulting Engineering team, which is known for hiring most of their interns into full-time jobs. Gia was a perfect match. The program works to spot people with the right potential and skills and quickly get them working with customers, something she hadn’t experienced before.

The Security Consulting Engineer (SCE) team that Gia interned with is the bridge between the technical and non-technical members of a project team. SCEs work with the customers technical support team and a cross-functional group within Cisco to drive project success.

Aside from her work at Cisco, Gia is also passionate about her hobby of powerlifting. She recently placed first in the Virginia Battle on the Border with a total lift of nearly 900 lbs.

“There is more tangible work in the Cisco internship,” Gia said. “You do things that are meaningful. You do research, go back to your mentor and ‘lab it out’ and then present to the customer,” she said, adding that it’s a goal for every intern in the group to interact directly with customers.

After her internship, Gia built a business case to continue as a part-time intern until graduation, then interned full-time in the summer of 2021 before she was hired full-time. Due to the pandemic, Gia worked remotely when she was an intern but relocated to Research Triangle Park, NC when she was hired full-time. She has since relocated back to Upstate New York but was glad to work with her team in person. She now knows the internship program from both sides and appreciates why it’s so successful.

“We’re looking for the right technical background to at least show that you’re on the right track, but more important than the knowledge is if they’re self-starters and motivated,” she said. “We can teach you the technical skills that you may or may not be lacking. But if you don’t know how to communicate and be a person, if you’re not actually interested in being here, we can’t really help you at that point.”

The team’s secret to bringing in great interns is pre-screening for basic skills, then open-ended interviews to get real answers. After that, it’s up to the interns to show what they can do. “It’s like a summer-long interview. We look at how they would mesh with the team,” she said.

As a full-time employee, Gia has benefitted from the early-in-career programs that Cisco offers. She says it’s like an internship turned up a notch. There is dedicated time for training, shadowing, and learning consulting skills that tapers off as newly hired team members transition into their roles by the end of their first year.

With onboarding behind her, and mentoring now on her plate, Gia is thinking about her own future. She’s building her annual training plan with a focus on automation, but she’s in no hurry to leave the team she loves. “The biggest asset is the people, and I stand by that. The people who choose to be here are all on the same wavelength, and we make connections and learn new things.”

Her advice to potential interns: “Look for somewhere that is going to enable you to learn as much as you can, whether you stay or not,” she says. “Resources, training, and certifications are huge pluses. Identify what you want, set a goal, and reach out to find someone who will help you.”

Gia’s advice for interns:

Identify what you want

Set a goal

Find someone to help you

  To celebrate National Intern Day, we talked to some people who went through Cisco's internship program and are on the path to very bright futures. Here's Gia's story.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Across Cisco, hundreds of teams host interns in every function of the business. Internships help attract early-in-career talent that bring new skills and diversity to the workforce. Cisco has a… Read more on Cisco Blogs

​

Across Cisco, hundreds of teams host interns in every function of the business. Internships help attract early-in-career talent that bring new skills and diversity to the workforce. Cisco has a dedicated group – the Early Talent Recruiting team – that serves as a global recruiting engine to help managers find and hire interns. The team drives best practices across the company, leads intern onboarding, and hosts professional growth events. With a strong track record for converting interns to full-time roles, Cisco is a destination for interns across the globe.

To celebrate National Intern Day, we talked to some people who went through Cisco’s internship program and are on the path to very bright futures. Here’s Charlie’s story:

Charlie Wenig is studying Magazine Journalism at Syracuse University

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: One Summer Intern’s Journey

Charlie Wenig spent the summer as the only intern on the CX Americas Communications team. She was excited about the opportunity but wasn’t sure what to expect or what corporate communications entailed. As a rising senior from Syracuse University majoring in Magazine Journalism and Information Technology, the opportunity to work with communications professionals seemed like a good one.

“[I] didn’t know tons about corporate communications and especially internal communications,” said Charlie. “Joining a team with broad outreach in such a large company has been eye-opening to see how that work carries across all the channels, and that has been great.”

Over the course of the internship, she discovered that the team’s work spanned many areas, and she jumped right in. She began writing, became familiar with how large-scale meetings are run on WebEx, and worked to make content compelling, engaging, and even fun. Charlie contributed to employee engagement events by creating an online quiz for team members to celebrate Asian American, Pacific Islander, Haitian, and Jewish Heritage Month and recommended a virtual parade as a part of a Pride Month celebration.

“I found this to be more interesting than the ‘boots-on-the-ground’ interviewing people in the rain I was imagining,” said Charlie.

The CX Americas Communications team Charlie interned with helps keep the organization informed about business priorities and strategy, provides executive communications support for leadership, and drives employee engagement.

She was also surprised at how tightly knit her team was and how closely everyone worked together. An example she shared was being able to lean on other teammates who were more experienced with using Photoshop for design and learn from that in the process. Through the summer, she shadowed team members working on customer stories, learned about podcast production, and how to host events. She learned each team member’s strengths and where to go for help with specific questions.

Charlie, above at Buckingham Palace, has already developed a passion for travel and took advantage of her study-abroad semester in Italy to tour Europe.

“In school with COVID, there wasn’t a lot of collaborative work, and these past three years in school [there] was a lot of independent work, [so I] loved working with this team that was creative, supportive, and warm.”

She considers learning how to communicate and work as a team to raise visibility for CX Americas for internal and external audiences to be the greatest takeaway from her internship experience.

After 12 weeks with CX Americas, Charlie’s decided that corporate communications is a path she wants to continue. “At school, I really found this interesting balance between tech and writing,” said Charlie. “This opportunity created a first stepping stone.”

While she was the only intern in her group, Charlie discovered she was one of 1,700 interns across Cisco this summer. She was immersed with an extensive network of interns via WebEx and attended group sessions with the cohort. It’s a program designed to nurture young talent, whether they come to Cisco or go elsewhere for their first job out of school. Cisco often hires interns at the end of summer, and those returning to school sometimes return for a second summer role.

When she returns to Syracuse University this fall, she will take on the role of Editor-in-chief of University Girl magazine, which will involve lots of writing and creativity – both things that Charlie loves.

“At the beginning of college my dream job was to work in publishing, but after this program I find myself leaning towards communications and technology,” said Charlie.

Charlie encourages those seeking internships to give all potential internship opportunities a chance – even those you might not be entirely sure about – since it isn’t possible to know all of what an internship will involve beforehand.

“There are opportunities to learn about yourself and the field you are stepping into, even if initially you initially wanted something different,” Charlie said, noting that location, remote or virtual, and other aspects of the role are not always the most important considerations.

Charlie’s advice for interns:

Consider all opportunities

Focus on the role over the location or work arrangement

Take a chance on something new

  To celebrate National Intern Day, we talked to young women who benefitted from Cisco internships and are on the path to very bright futures. Here's Charlie's story.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my little corner of the Internet. I always take inspiration from what I’m currently working on in my day job when putting together an idea for a post and/or video.… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to my little corner of the Internet. I always take inspiration from what I’m currently working on in my day job when putting together an idea for a post and/or video. Right now, we’re building a new data center to host the hands-on lab environments for learners, whether you’re training in Cisco U. or taking a course with your favorite Cisco instructor. As you may know, A LOT goes into building a new data center. But since I’m working on building the IPSEC VPN connections between this new data center and the others in our network, let’s narrow it down and take a technical look at IPSEC VPN tunnel creation.

In this blog post and the accompanying video, I’ll cover the IPSEC VPN tunnel creation process. We’ll explore “Phase 1” and “Phase 2” and take a look at how the ACLs that identify “interesting traffic” impact the security associations that are built. We’ll even look at the packets involved in the communications as tunnels are set up. If that sounds good to you, continue on, network adventurer!

A Technical Look at IPSEC VPN Tunnel Creation

“Technically Speaking… with Hank Preston” is a segment on The U. series.

Available on the Cisco U. by Learning and Certifications YouTube Channel. View Playlist

If you’re new here, I’m Hank Preston, Principal Engineer on the Labs and Systems team in Cisco Learning and Certifications. I’ve been building IPSEC VPNs for almost my entire career as a network engineer. In fact, one of my first jobs as a shiny new network engineer was building out IPSEC VPN connections using Cisco PIX firewalls for a Cisco Partner. For me, that meant taking the configuration templates built by the team’s more senior engineers and updating them with the details for a particular tunnel creation.

It wasn’t a problem… until there was one. You see, I didn’t really know what all the commands did back then. So when things didn’t work right away, finding the problem and knowing how to fix it was a bit of a mystery to me. Thankfully, there were some very good mentors and senior engineers to guide me.

I had to learn the commands to run to help me determine the problem and how to fix it. It was during these troubleshooting sessions I first learned terms like “Phase 1,” “Phase 2,” “Main Mode,” “Quick Mode,” and “Aggressive Mode,” as well as the protocols involved, like ISAKMP, IKE, IPSEC. It was a lot of fun, and it was only the beginning.

Over the years, my depth of understanding grew, transforming me into a senior engineer, not unlike those who nurtured my own curiosity. In addition to learning on the job, I had to dive deep into IPSEC VPNs to prepare for my Cisco certification exams. Even though I was preparing for now-retired certifications like CCNA Security, CCSP, and “VPN Specialist,” IPSEC knowledge is still important to this day.

So, should you learn IPSEC?

IPSEC knowledge is critical for real-world applications and current Cisco certification exams. In fact, it’s listed on the 200-301 CCNA exam topics, which is quite telling since the CCNA certification is the mark of someone who has the foundational knowledge to take their tech career in multiple directions. But that’s not all. IPSEC is on the CCNP Enterprise Core Exam, CCNP Security Core Exam, CCNP Security VPN Specialist, CCIE Enterprise Lab Exam, CCIE Security Lab Exam, and probably others. I didn’t check.

So when honing in on a topic for this month, my first choice was IPSEC VPNs. IPSEC VPNs is a huge topic, though. I knew I couldn’t cover everything in a single short “Technically Speaking…” installment. In fact, I hadn’t decided exactly where to focus until I was in the middle of standing up a new tunnel connection between two of our data centers.

There I was, monitoring the tunnel status to ensure everything was healthy, when I found myself on the CLI of one of the firewalls, running commands I’d run thousands of times: “show crypto isakmp sa” and “show crypto ipsec sa.” As I verified that each security association for the traffic types had come up and was healthy, I reflected on my early days of building VPNs on PIXs running these same commands and not knowing what I was looking at. And that’s when it hit me: this would make an excellent addition to the library.

And here were are. Feel free to use the video above to help you follow what I have outlined below. Alright, adventurers… let’s jump in.

Can’t have a VPN without a couple of sites to connect together…

Before we start looking at the tunnel creation, we need a network to work with.

So, I put together a fairly straightforward 2-site network:

Simple 2-site Network

Site 1 (bottom in the diagram) has two local networks; a YELLOW network and a BLUE network.

Site 2 (top in the diagram) has a single local network, the PURPLE network.

Each site is connected to an untrusted WAN by a firewall.  The firewall is configured like firewalls often are: to perform NAT/PAT on traffic passing from “inside” to “outside.”

Bringing the IPSEC VPN concept into this network, the goal is to create a tunnel between the two firewalls that will allow traffic between the sites to be securely tunneled across the WAN. This would then provide a network path for hosts on Site 1’s YELLOW and BLUE networks to reach the hosts on Site 2’s PURPLE network.

Just to let you know… the focus of this post is NOT on the configuration required to set up the network or the IPSEC tunnel itself. Instead, we will look at the process that happens to establish and build the connections when relevant traffic arrives at the firewall and initiates the IPSEC process.

If you’d like to see the configurations in this setup, I have posted a CML topology file for this network in the CML Community on GitHub. If you’d like to dive deeper and try some of this exploration yourself, download the file and run it on your CML server.

Saying something “interesting”

Just because a VPN is configured on a firewall doesn’t mean the tunnel will be established.

Tunnels are established when they are needed and will eventually be torn down if left idle (without traffic passing through them) for long enough.
A firewall determines what type of traffic should trigger the building of a VPN based on an access list that is associated with the IPSEC crypto map that defines the VPN.

Let’s take a look at the access list on Site1-FW that defines this “interesting traffic.”

Site1-FW# show access-list s2svpn_to_site2
access-list s2svpn_to_site2; 2 elements; name hash: 0xa681e779
access-list s2svpn_to_site2 line 1 extended permit ip object-group SITE1 object-group SITE2 log default (hitcnt=0) 0xb520aee6
access-list s2svpn_to_site2 line 1 extended permit ip 192.168.200.0 255.255.255.0 172.16.10.0 255.255.255.0 log default (hitcnt=0) 0xfab888fb
access-list s2svpn_to_site2 line 1 extended permit ip 192.168.100.0 255.255.255.0 172.16.10.0 255.255.255.0 log default (hitcnt=0) 0xb7b04209
Site1-FW# show run crypto map  YouTube

Use #CiscoU and #CiscoCert to join the conversation.

Read next: Exploring Default Docker Networking [Part 1] by Hank Preston

  Explore the IPSEC VPN tunnel creation process, including "Phase 1" and "Phase 2," how Security Associations are impacted when ACLs identify "interesting traffic," and even the packets involved in the communications.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

The Age of the Partner is here, and partners have played a central role in delivering value to our customers for over 25 years. We know that when partners combine Cisco solutions with their… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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The Age of the Partner is here, and partners have played a central role in delivering value to our customers for over 25 years. We know that when partners combine Cisco solutions with their customized services you have a recipe for achieving powerful customer outcomes.

I recently sat down with Oliver Tuszik and Bob Bailkoski of Logicalis for an in-depth conversation on Partnering for Success in the Age of the Partner. It was full of insights you won’t want to miss, so I encourage you to watch the entire discussion. In the meantime, here are my top four takeaways from our chat.

1. We are in a new era: The Age of the Partner

The pandemic and new technology trends have  accelerated a new way of partnering. In this new, fast-moving, and complex environment, customers are looking for companies that can deliver the outcomes and services they need to keep their infrastructures running. Innovation is coming from our partners like never before, and the Age of the Partner is  putting partners at the center, delivering all the benefits around the customer’s desired outcomes.

2. The changing landscape is causing more demand for managed services

If you look, the best way to deliver an outcome right now that’s been codified for the industry is a managed service. It’s what the industry understands. But what’s changed is that it’s no longer just about the outcome that’s being delivered—it’s also about the experience.

3. Everything starts with the customer

To drive business outcomes in the Age of the Partner, partners must find the problem they’re trying to solve for and the value they’re trying to generate for their customers. Partners need to understand their essence—such as security, working with SMBs, managed services, etc.—and utilize that essence.

“The primary goal is to align with customer expectations and create a comprehensive solution where Logicalis serves as the central component connecting different vendors seamlessly. With this approach, all the complexities are removed from our customers’ shoulders so that they can focus solely on achieving successful sustainable outcomes.”– Bob Bailkoski, CEO of Logicalis

4. How to find the best partner: Trust, Execution and Values

Finding the best partner starts with trust, followed by the experience they can deliver. Customers need to be able to understand a partner’s capabilities and trust them when handing over important managed services projects. Next, though, is execution—how we bring trust together and how we execute together. Trust and execution go hand-in-hand when deciding who’s the right partner for a customer at that point in time. And last, but certainly not least, is alignment of goals and values.

You can watch the entire conversation and hear more about our thoughts on the Age of the Partner, managed services, and more. And if you want a deeper dive into the Age of the Partner, check out our ebook: Age of the Partner: A New Era of Business, A New Era of Partnering.

Take part in the LinkedIn Live conversation:

‘Partnering for Success in the Age of the Partner’ 

(25:48 minutes)

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