I am not typically nervous when I go into podcast interviews, but I have to admit that I was more than a little intimidated by the time I'd finished my research on Patrick Crowley.

It wasn't just that he is the Stealthwatch Cloud CTO. I mean, I suppose that alone is intimidating on its face, but we have technically wise individuals on the show all the time and generally I find them to be approachable and fun and enthusiastic about their specialty. No, for me the intimidation factor came from the fact that Patrick is also a college professor (with a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering) that runs a federally and commercially sponsored research program focused on cutting-edge network security. And if that weren't enough, he's a successful entrepreneur, having founded Observable Networks, grown it into a thriving business and sold it to Cisco last year.

I really think that's more than enough to qualify him as intimidating.

The great news though is that in spite of all his impressive achievements, Patrick is a terrific guy. Easy to talk to, and like the best professors, he's excellent at making really complicated things easy to understand. So if network security is your thing, I strongly encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity to hear what Patrick has to say. In our interview he explains:

• How "unsolvable problems" drove him from being a dyed-in-the-wool deep packet inspection guy to someone seeking new, sustainable security solutions
• What AWS did that was key to Observable Networks success
• What network flow records do and why they're important for security purposes
• What entity modeling is and why it's central to the Stealthwatch Cloud approach
• How Stealthwatch Cloud learns what a threat looks like and how long that learning takes
• How Stealthwatch Cloud fits into the Cisco security portfolio

To hear all of this in a much more detailed and interesting format, check out the full episode below and hear it from Patrick himself. If you prefer audio-only, it's also available on iTunes and SoundCloud.

And if you'd like to check out past episodes of this podcast (we've got almost 50 of them!), just pop on over to the archive at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/cloud/podcasts.html. Really. Do it. There's some great stuff in there.