Meet Balaji Bandi - Cisco Designated VIP 2024 and Hall of Fame Member

Gabriela Godoi do Prado · ‎05-03-2024

Meet Balaji Bandi, our Cisco Designated VIP 2024 and new member of Cisco Community Hall of Fame.

Seasoned IT professional with 20+ years in the industry, holding diplomas in Electronics, Telecommunications, and IT Engineering. Expert in Networking, Security, Data Centre Infrastructure, and Cloud Services (AWS, Azure). Advocate for cost-saving open-source solutions, skilled in Automation, and proficient in RDBMS. Versatile experience with Cisco, Checkpoint, Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Juniper. Actively expanding expertise in SDN and ACI Fabric technologies.

Spotlight on Success: A VIP's Transformation into a Hall of Fame Icon. Join us in this interview!

Please tell us a little about yourself.

With 20+ years of experience in network engineering and a passion for solving complex technical challenges, I am currently working as a Senior Technical Consultant with expertise in Routing and Switching, Network Infrastructure Security, Wireless, VOIP, and Cloud Domains. I have strong qualities such as attention to detail and analytical thinking, which I adopt when designing and analyzing robust network architectures that are scalable, secure, and optimized for performance.

2. Could you talk about your professional career?

My career started as a managing partner for a business in ISP(providing various services to customers) and software development alongside Bio-Fuels Farming back in India, and I excelled in the ISP business under my management for x years. I chose to quit my partnership as the business had to be sold due to the losses in the Bio-fuel area.
I then moved to the UK for good and worked in the area of my absolute passion for networking as a Senior Network and Security Consultant in the healthcare industry.

3. How did you get involved in the Cisco Community?

My passion for Networking with Cisco is a leading provider of technology solutions; I was a member of the Cisco community from the beginning of my career. After moving to the UK, I had the opportunity to work very closely every day with the latest technologies Cisco has been releasing in the market. Working most of the time with Cisco Technologies at work, it increased my passion. It brought me even closer to the Cisco community to contribute to the forum providing inputs and expertise to our community peers to solve through their technology challenges. Providing these solutions elevates my knowledge and passion for recreating scenarios and solutions while learning through the community.

4. What inspires you to answer questions in our Community?

Answering or providing inputs to the questions in our community extends my learning space within the technologies by learning new challenges other members have been experiencing in their experience and how it was resolved. I get motivated to learn more when the inputs provided to me would help them resolve their issues in many cases. I try to recreate the scenarios in my lab before providing the solutions or my input, which gives me more confidence and pride in supporting our community when the solution resolves the issue.

5. How do you find time? You are very generous with your time. Could you let me know why you do that?

With this rapidly changing technology and new products released every month on different technology platforms, we often experience security issues in our infrastructure. I would like to keep myself up to date and analyze the threats in advance to protect from attacks by tightening our Network in all possible ways; this will help my role in my organization and my contribution to society through our community forum discussions. I like to spend most of my free time outside of family time exploring new technologies and learning through different forum communities. Other platform solutions could also impact networking technologies, so I would like to stay up to date.

6. Could you tell us briefly about your path to becoming a Hall of Fame and how this experience has been for you so far?

When I joined the Forum back in India, I was always fascinated with all experts' inputs and was wondering how they could stay up to date with all technologies so fast; when I moved to the UK, I realized that I also needed to be fast-paced with updating our knowledge with these growing technologies. Every day, my passion for technology kept growing, and my motivation to provide the right inputs increased every time I solved a community member's questions/challenges. It is not an easy journey to keep up our day job and manage daily family responsibilities. However, as I have always dreamed of becoming an expert in networking and security, I am thrilled to see my dream come true when my hard work pays off. I am very Thankful and really honored with the Cisco Community Hall of Fame badge, and I feel pride in being a valuable myself. Thank you, Cisco, for recognizing the effort.