In a recent interview, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Sancho Lerena, CEO of Pandora FMS on the impact of traffic visibility on modern IP networks. Sancho joins us in a series of discussions with leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies, assessing the need for traffic filtering technologies that can deliver real-time, granular application awareness. The series explores how advanced analytics power various network functions amidst the rapid growth in traffic and applications.
Ariana: How do your solutions and products fulfill the demands of today's networks?
Sancho: Today's networks include different manufacturers, different models, and different casuistry. A rigid model does not work, regardless of what technology is used.
We believe that the power of Pandora FMS lies in incorporating a solution that allow to implement different monitoring strategies from the same tool. Pandora allows us to combine Netflow with SNMP and integrate application data obtained right away from software agents. All data can be combined and displayed not only on the same platform, but also in the same reports.
We understand observability as the ability to use data from different areas of knowledge to combine them in the same decision-making process, for which it is key to have a flexible tool that combines legacy systems with new paradigms.
Ariana: What is your view on commercial DPI vs open-source DPI?
Sancho: It has already been proven that Open-Source projects make a lot of sense when you have your integration team (in-house), thus allowing unlimited flexibility - but it is always at the cost of variables such as long-term project sustainability, updates and operating expenses and security issues. The easiest vulnerabilities to find are always based on the availability of the source code.
For most projects, using a commercial product means not only having the reliability of a brand name backing up the product, but also being able to reliably estimate the real costs over time. More often than not, what appears cheaper at the beginning ends up costing much more in the long run.
Sancho Lerena was born in 1975 in Madrid. His interest in technology and hardware led him to study computer engineering at the Pontifical University of Salamanca and an MBA at the business school of the Polytechnic University of Industriales in Madrid. His first professional job in the world of technology came in 1995, creating web pages at REM Infográfica, which would go down in history as one of the first .com companies to emerge – a true paradigm of the startup. In 1999, he founded one of the most important BBS networks, FidoNet, in Madrid. Since then, he has undertaken and founded several companies in the technology sector, with the most important one to date being Pandora FMS, where he is the CEO. On a more personal note, he has hobbies such as literature, playing the guitar, photography, and an unusual pleasure in discovering all that he still has to learn.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode's Traffic Visibility segment, featuring leading networking, analytics and cybersecurity companies and their views on the importance of network intelligence and DPI for today's IP networks. A research report on this topic will be published in June 2024 - for more information, visit here.
