Brief Summary

I have over 30 years’ experience in the IT industry, most of which has been spent in networking/telecoms in the UK/EMEA and NZ/APAC.  I have worked in varied roles such as technical consulting, network design and architecture, pre-sales support, operational support and software engineering.  I moved to New Zealand in 2008, where I worked in several roles for over 13 years before returning to the UK in 2022.

My experience has been gained in a wide range of organisations, from start-ups, through enterprises and to large service providers and telcos.  I have worked in both team environments and on an individual and independent basis.  In recent years, I have also done a lot of my work in the public sector.

Though performing hands-on work is not as regular as it used to be, it has been a strong element to my background, and I gained satisfaction from being able to test a design in a lab to prove that it will work before deployment in a production environment.  I first started working with Cisco in 1994, and with Juniper in 1999.

I very much enjoy customer-facing roles since no two customers are alike, and so the variety this gives is always a challenge that I am keen to take on.  Taking part in technical discussions with customers forms a key part of being able to fully understand their requirements, which is essential to being able to deliver a successful solution.

Latest News and Useful Articles                — Updated: 26 July 2024 —

• NK hacker hired by security firm, then loads malware.  [Ars Technica]  [KnowBe4]

• Juniper open's AI test lab for customers and partners.  [Packet Pushers]

• VLAN 1 history in Cisco switches.  [Lost In Transit]

• Almost 7% of all Internet traffic is malicious.  [Schneier]  [CrowdStrike]

• It's never been easier for the authorities to break into your phone.  [The Verge]

• Encapsulation of PDUs on trunk ports.  [Lost In Transit]

• Net Neutrality in danger again.  [The Register]  [Ars Technica]

• Kaspersky quits US after ban.  [BBC News]  [The Register]

• DNS and UDP truncation.  [Geoff Huston]

• Detecting mismatched native VLANs.  [Lost In Transit]

• The resurgence of Russia's Fin7.  [Krebs]

• Russian AI disinformation spam.  [Ars Technica]  [Graham Cluley]

A more comprehensive news/article list can be found on my networks sub-domain here.

Click here for the latest full version of my CV, or find me on LinkedIn and X/Twitter.

rob (at) larsenconsulting (dot) net

© Robert Larsen.  All rights reserved.