As the cloud networking experts, Aviatrix wants to elevate the work of cloud networking heroes who labor to keep networks secure, effective, and performant. We’re proud to highlight people who have taught themselves the necessary skills, designed and managed successful networks, and have the expertise to share, including several who joined Aviatrix in New York at the NASDAQ tower.
Our next hero spotlight is on Henk Giesbertz, Network, Security, and Cloud Consultant. See our previous hero spotlights here.
Background: IT QA to Cloud Services
Henk’s journey in cloud networking began with an interest in technology. From early youth to his studies in Technical Engineering, he’s focused on work with automation and computer technologies. He started in IT as a quality assurance test consultant, moved on to first-line support teams, backend support, and finally moved to networking. From LAN and WAN to security and smart network devices (firewalls, load balancers, accelerators), the logical next step was moving to what he sees is the unification of all: cloud services and networking.
“For the last 4 years of my 25 years in IT, cloud networking and services have caught all of my interests and is still my main focus to continue growing in knowledge and experience,” he said.
Over the course of his career, Henk has seen networking evolve very rapidly from “the limiting factor to the full enabler (commodity) over the years” or “from being the root cause of incidents or capacity issues, to ‘It is not the network!’ as a default argument.”
In his current role, Henk finds that his biggest challenge is rallying people and teams to “look in the right and same direction and convince them on the best way forward.” This project focus comes from the new requirements of a changing networking landscape: “With the converged model of cloud constructs (network, hosting, application, security), a different approach is needed and company structures are not always set up to accommodate this, or are still on the path of catching up.”
The Network is the Cloud: Cloud Infrastructure
When asked what “the network is the cloud” means to him, Henk clarified the priorities of networking. “The network (moving packets with information from A to 
is as simple and as complex as cloud infrastructure,” he explained. “It starts out simple but in the end is quite complex. In the converging world of applications/hosting/security and networking to become one, we need help to keep track of data flows, performance, and most importantly, the security aspect.”
Over the next ten years, Henk envisions cloud networking evolving to “a full dynamic on-demand connection platform with overall insights on all levels. As networking in cloud and cloud2site connectivity is often quite static in setup, in my view it will move to the on-demand connection patterns to the remaining on-prem world.”
He also sees the “old networking world” gradually passing away: “More and more applications will be developed cloud-native and legacy systems will be on fast decommission pace and the development of on-prem endpoints becoming internet-only devices for both IT and OT domains, will make a lot of the old networking world obsolete.”
Henk also sees “proper insights-tooling” including monitoring, application aware, and flow aware features as the standard in the near future.
Outside of Work
Outside of work, Henk enjoys spending time with his family, holidays to go camping, and live music events. “For sports I like to play paddle ball, squash, and do fun-runs (10k to 21k),” he said. “Next to this I am quite skilled in DIY projects and if there is time left in the day, I like to spend time on my old gaming consoles and Commodore 64 collection.”
Curious about other cloud networking heroes like Henk?
- We’ll keep highlighting networking professionals on this blog.
- Learn more about the Cloud Networking Heroes program and apply on The Cloud Network Community.