The Gateway Triangle is a new podcast series featured on The Global Gateway, Cisco's customer advocacy community with thousands of advocates worldwide! I host the podcast along with my colleague, Katie Meerstein. The podcast features team members from Cisco's Global Advocacy organization, as well as our valued customer advocates who make The Gateway possible. We love to keep it laid back while we discuss tech, advocacy, and life in general.

The first customer we're featuring in this series is Jyrki Halonen from the service provider company, TietoEVRY, based in Finland. In this episode, Jyrki sits down to talk about his role with the company, his Gateway experience, and upcoming trends in tech. Jyrki is a Lead Service Architect for Connectivity in TietoEVRY's Private cloud and Edge services. He's not only a Gateway Rockstar, which is the highest tier our customers can achieve in The Gateway, but he's also the leader in lifetime points, meaning that he is our all-time top advocate in the community! Congratulations, Jyrki! During the podcast, he shared his favorite aspects of The Gateway since joining in 2017.

"At first it was some fun games and cool prizes for Cisco Live. Then I quickly realized that it's much more than that. It's a good channel to get insights from other customers. That is maybe the most exciting thing: the information sharing. We can see how other customers have solved issues that we have."

Top priorities, two truths and a lie

Jyrki also discussed the rapidly evolving IT landscape, sharing what his main priorities are now as the Future of Work takes shape. Remote and hybrid work poses new challenges for IT professionals. Jyrki emphasized that in his role, his main priorities are security, visibility, and remaining proactive when it comes to his network.

"The big change that is happening today is that applications are spreading everywhere. Users are coming from multiple locations ... they are everywhere, they are changing locations. For me, the key thing that I am following is security. How do we keep all of these things secure and have good visibility into what is happening in the environment? Knowing that everything is up and running is not enough anymore. We need to be proactive to know what is happening."

We end every episode with a fun game of Two Truths and a Lie! Jyrki, with a straight face, said he hates shopping, he has traveled to over 70 countries, and he loves extreme sports like skydiving. Any guesses as to which statement is the lie? You'll have to tune in for our next episode of The Gateway Triangle podcast to find out!

Join us in The Global Gateway

For those Cisco customers who haven't yet joined our customer advocacy community, consider doing so. You'll be able to:

• Connect with peers in a gamified, online community
• Have an opportunity to meet with Cisco's executives
• Share your feedback, questions, and best practices
• Get access to "insider" content and resources
• Grow your professional and personal brand
• Amplify your company's success story with Cisco technology

Ready to get started? Head over to The Global Gateway and say hello!