Cloudflare
Part 1 covered the network itself: anycast, DNS, TLS, CDN, and the products that operate at L3 and L4. If you haven't read it, the short version is that Cloudflare is a global anycast network, and the security products covered in this post only make sense once you
Cloudflare
I've spent some time going deep on the Cloudflare platform. Not casually. Actually building things, configuring products, making notes, undoing things that broke, and going back to the documentation when the mental model I'd built didn't match what I was seeing on screen. This
API Security
Most people who use AI tools daily have no working mental model for what's happening under the hood when the AI actually does something in the world. Not generates text. Does something. Books a meeting, reads your emails, queries a database, sends a message. That gap matters now
API Security
I spent a stretch of time studying for a potential role at Salt Security a while ago. Salt is one of the companies that helped define dedicated API security as its own category, which sounds like vendor marketing until you actually look at what the API threat landscape has become.
Palo Alto Networks
I work in enterprise security at Fortinet. At one point in the past, I was seriously exploring an opportunity at Palo Alto Networks, for which I was studying their Cortex XDR platform and Unit 42 practice in genuine depth, not surface-level enough to pass a phone screen, but deep enough
Customer Success
Part 2 continues from Part 1, which covered the roles, customer lifecycle, terminology, KPIs, and CS methodologies. This post is the operational layer: the frameworks, processes, and tools that make the theory functional. The frameworks below are working models for how I think about CS execution. Some map to common
Customer Success
I spent time studying the customer success discipline properly — not surface-level, but the frameworks, metrics, and mental models that people operating in enterprise CS roles actually use. I cared about this because I kept seeing TAM, CSM, SE, and advisory roles blur together from the outside. Thees sounded familiar, but
SSL
TLS is one of those protocols you interact with hundreds of times a day and rarely think about. Every HTTPS connection, every API call over the internet, VPNs using 'SSL' — all of it runs on TLS. The handshake that happens before any of that data flows is the
IPSEC VPN
These are my notes (cleaned up by an LLM) on IPSec VPN tunnels. These tunnels are the kind that connect branch offices, remote workers, and cloud environments over the public internet. Most resources either stay at a conceptual level ("it's an encrypted tunnel") or jump straight
Security Fundamentals
Part 2 continues from Part 1, which covered foundational concepts and the attack landscape. This post covers the defensive controls, assessment methodologies, incident response processes, and industry frameworks you need to know. Multi-Factor Authentication MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) authenticates identity using more than one independent factor. The three factor categories: * Something
Security Fundamentals
These are notes I've built up studying security concepts across certifications, labs, and real-world work. Same approach as the networking and identity series — my notes handed off to LLMs with instructions on what to include and how to write it. This post covers the conceptual foundations and the
SASE, SAML & Modern Identity
Part 3 of 3. Parts 1 and 2 covered SASE architecture and SAML. This one is OIDC and OAuth 2.0: the token-based identity framework that powers most modern authentication. There's a lot of ground to cover — stick with it through the token anatomy section, because everything else