Brand Post

Author Archives: Brand Post

BrandPost: Huawei CloudCampus Triumphs over Cisco DNA, Tolly Reports

With new technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence (AI) emerging all around us, enterprise digitalization is inevitable. But however much enterprises want to transform, there is a significant cost in terms of time and technological manpower to ensure the system runs smoothly. In particular, enterprises are often faced with a variety of human factors that can hamper digitalization projects, including organizational resistance to change, lack of a clear vision, and inability to gather and leverage customer data, to name just a few.On the technical front, the challenge is in finding the right products and services to overcome the inflexibility of technology stack and development processes. Therefore, picking the most suitable and flexible solutions to meet the transformation challenges is usually the key to success. The right solution not only streamlines deployment but also makes it easier for people who are involved in the exercise – the easier the jobs, the less reluctant the organization towards the changes.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: SASE: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why Should You Even Care

For years, enterprise networking and security leaders have had to weather the complaints and consternation of IT and business executives. IT costs too high? Blame that MPLS network.  Web taking too long to load? It’s that darn VPN client again. Now a new product category, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), is supposed to put networking and security teams firmly ahead of the game. So impactful is this new sector that Gartner’s termed it “transformational,” a lofty status that not even SD-WAN, with all of its market impact, ever achieved. Within four years, Gartner expects 40% of enterprises will have strategies to adopt SASE.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Why Your SD-WAN Deployment is Failing

I’m going to say something you may not want to hear, or you may already know: implementing SD-WAN is hard. Among the promise and hype of automation, dynamic path selection, zero-touch provisioning and a cloud-ready WAN, lies a trail of failed SD-WAN projects, with many others struggling on life support. For many, the WAN of the future has failed to manifest into anything more than another hard-to-manage, costly IT project that has failed to deliver on its promises (or, has failed to live up to your expectations), but why?The problems SD-WAN solutions address are not incremental change or gradual evolution, they are the result of industry megatrends that have upended the way we consume applications and connect our users, all in a very short period of time. These megatrends, such as Digital Transformation and the move to SaaS, IaaS and Cloud have placed new demands on network infrastructure, IT staff and application owners; requiring a complete rethink of how they are connecting locations, delivering applications and services and securing their networks. The sheer gravity of these changes, and scope of what needs to be done to support them, cannot be undertaken in an additive approach. Rather, they must be Continue reading

BrandPost: The Zettabyte Era is Coming – Are you Ready?

It’s no secret that data growth is at an all-time high. IDC expects 103 zettabytes of data to be generated worldwide by 20231. Yes, zettabytes. With the proliferation of IoT devices, 5G-enabled technologies, and the massive growth of video, we’re just scratching the surface of how companies will store and extract value from data.Machine data will play a leading role, as it is expected to outpace commercial/consumer data. By 2023, more than 90% of data will be generated by machines2 (i.e. smart cities, IoT, endpoints, autonomous cars, etc.). In addition, video, surveillance footage, and large AI/ML data sets – this “natural streaming” or sequential data – will be everywhere. To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: SD-WAN Enables Large-Scale Enterprise Deployments Including Mobile & IoT

As global enterprises continue to adopt and deploy SD-WAN as a key enabler of cloud and digital transformation initiatives, they must also consider the importance of infrastructure scalability to accommodate the dynamic nature of connecting users to business applications and services regardless of where they are physically located. This is driving an increased focus on ease-of-use, automation, and orchestration, which industry analyst firm Futuriom cites as one of the top features of SD-WAN functionality.Why is this becoming increasingly important? Many large-scale global enterprises have multiple divisions, business units or subsidiaries that may each require a dedicated SD-WAN fabric to comply with company financial policies, geography, business jurisdiction or regulatory requirements or simply to create independent administrative domains. Each fabric can be individually orchestrated and managed yet still provides centralized network-wide visibility and control, including aggregated observability of the entire network.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Survey Says End-to-End NVMe™ is in Your Future

There’s always an adoption curve when it comes to new technologies. In today’s digital landscape, where industries are constantly being disrupted by new applications and use cases driven by IoT, machine learning, AI, and analytics, those not on the NVMe™ adoption curve may get left behind. Simply put, IT managers must design for the future.Today, many IT organizations have started embracing NVMe for its high performance and low latency— and as a better alternative to legacy protocols such as SATA for accessing flash storage. But for others, the question is not “if,” but “when” you will bring NVMe into your organization.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: How to Deliver Affordable and Optimized Application Access Worldwide with SASE

Global expansion is a common goal for many enterprises. In some verticals, like manufacturing, running production lines globally is an established practice. However, deploying international sales, service, and engineering teams is becoming the norm for many other sectors including high tech, finance, retail, and more.A global enterprise footprint creates a unique set of challenges that do not occur in regional businesses. Users in a remote office will need to securely access data-center applications, cloud applications, or both. Depending on the distance between the remote location and the application—and the sensitivity of the application to high latency, packet loss, and jitter—an expensive set of technologies and capabilities will be needed to optimize the user experience.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: WAN Transformation – Security First or Network First?

It’s an exciting time in Wide Area Networking. With the rapid adoption of software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) architectures, we’re experiencing the biggest transformation in the WAN since the introduction of MPLS back in the late 90s.As with all new technologies, there is a lot of hype and a stampede of companies looking to capitalize on a hot new category. At last count, there were about 70 companies with marketing messages all vying to hop on the five letter “S-D-W-A-N” bandwagon.Interestingly, in the newly Gartner 2019 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, there are only two companies positioned as Leaders, Silver Peak and VMware. Seventeen others are positioned across the Niche, Visionary and Challenger quadrants. Ten additional companies are listed but didn’t meet the qualification criteria for inclusion in the Magic Quadrant.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Rethink Data Centers with Data @ the Center

Mention the data center and, to most, images of machine rooms filled to the brim with equipment and the sounds of IT whirring away are what come to mind. For decades, businesses have equipped data centers with silo upon silo of servers, applications, networking, and storage in their insatiable quest to deliver business insight to line-of-business (LOB) leaders, their management, and the C-suite. Even the name data center was given based on the theory that most business-critical data would be found there, centralized, and ready for the business to derive competitive insights to bolster its marketplace advantage.However, the data center, as we have traditionally known it, often falls short in its mission to deliver business advantage. The premise is sound, but the execution has been limited by the technology at hand. For many, the problem is the data center is not a centralized repository of data; rather it is a centralized collection of applications, each with its dedicated compute and storage resources (physical or virtual, it doesn’t matter), surrounded by edge computing facilities driven by LOB concerns.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Customers Demonstrate the Benefits of Secure SD-WAN Across Industries

Given today’s expanding networks, largely being driven by cloud transformation and similar digital transformation efforts, keeping everything connected in a single, easily manageable environment is a critical challenge. Extending things like cloud services to your mobile workers and branch offices will inevitably impact your network’s performance – especially if you are still trying to route traffic through your central network using things like WAN routers and MPLS connections in a hub and spoke design. Routing cloud-based applications through a WAN link to the central network can severely impact productivity and user experience while creating continually increasing bandwidth loads.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Silver Peak Named a Leader in 2019 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure

We’re two for two! This week Gartner published its 2019 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, and I’m proud to report that once again Silver Peak has been positioned in the Leader’s quadrant.Last year Gartner published the inaugural 2018 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, providing enterprise decision makers with a comprehensive assessment of the changing requirements for a modern WAN, Gartner listened to thousands of enterprise customers, reviewed each vendor’s solution in detail and analyzed their completeness of vision and ability to execute. The published report talks about Gartner’s view of the Leaders, Challengers, Niche Players and Visionaries in the rapidly changing WAN edge infrastructure market.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Branch Office SD-WAN Availability: Last-Mile Considerations

MPLS is showing its age in the era of digital transformation. SD-WAN’s agility, low cost, and direct branch office cloud access increasingly make more sense for global, cloud-enabled organizations. The big question for many IT leaders is: Can  SD-WANs and their Internet last-mile connections match MPLS’s availability to serve as an MPLS alternative?The short answer? Yes.  Here’s why.MPLS’s Last-Mile Availability Problem MPLS has long been known for its uptime. As managed services that’s no surprise; the telcos do a very good job keeping an eye on the core of their networks. But what’s often a surprise to outsiders is the problem MPLS services have with the last mile. The high cost of MPLS services makes it impractical to equip branch offices with redundant last-mile MPLS connections, and without redundancy delivering on uptime is challenging. And even with Internet backup, failover is often manual or slow enough to disrupt the user experience.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: What Palo Alto Networks Won’t Tell You About Its New SASE Service

It has been a long time since I shared an office with Nir Zuk, the co-founder and CTO of Palo Alto Networks (PAN). Back in 1998, at Check Point’s office in San Francisco, it was early days for the network security company co-founded by Gil Shwed, Marius Nacht, and me. Since then, Nir launched PAN, which became a global leader in network security. I was honored to support Nir and the PAN team early in their journey.Last week, our paths converged again. This time, we shared a vision for the future of networking and security. On the stage of PAN’s annual event, Nir presented PAN’s vision of a converged cloud-based architecture that will displace the legacy appliance stack of today. Nir did a great job advocating for the convergence of the numerous point solutions piled in IT departments everywhere.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: SD-WANs Enable Scalable Local Internet Breakout but Pose Security Risk

SD-WAN streamlines how application traffic is routed from the branch, making it easier to create local internet breakout and allowing users to access cloud services directly from the branch. In an ideal SD-WAN scenario, every remote location and device has its own local internet breakout and corresponding security services. Yet, reality looks a lot different for many companies. This is something network professionals have wanted to enable for decades. The problem was that setting up local internet breakout using traditional routers was not trivial and required a tremendous amount of engineering work so most businesses, except for the ones that had high levels of technical talent shied away. The shift to cloud and edge computing has made local internet breakout almost mandatory today, so businesses have turned to SD-WAN as a simpler path to enable it. As this happens, organizations need to understand the security risks. To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Addressing Scalability Challenges with SD-WANs

It’s always difficult to tell how fast your business will grow, and hence how quickly you’ll need to scale your network and other IT infrastructure. When it comes to software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN), the scalability issue is particularly thorny because of the myriad factors that play into the equation.Some will tell you scaling an SD-WAN is a simple matter of adding appliances, but that is far from the case, says David Greenfield, Secure Networking Evangelist with Cato Networks. Cato provides a cloud-based SD-WAN service, so Greenfield is well-versed in the factors that make SD-WAN scalability so challenging. In this post, we’ll examine a handful of them.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: SD-WAN as MPLS Replacement: Why the Internet Isn’t Enough

As companies turn to SD-WAN services, they’re often looking to migrate away from expensive MPLS services at the same time and employ Internet services instead. But the public Internet doesn’t provide the kind of predictable performance that enterprises need, and it can introduce unacceptable security risks.A sound alternative is a global, privately managed cloud-based network that can provide the consistent performance and low latency that enterprises demand, but at a fraction of the cost of MPLS – and with security built in. To get a sense for the requirements companies should look for in a managed cloud backbone to make for a successful SD-WAN migration, I spoke with Dave Greenfield, Secure Networking Evangelist with Cato Networks, which has built just such a backbone.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: The Challenges of SD-WAN Network Planning in an Era of Unknowns

As interest in software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) continues to rise, enterprises are coming face to face with the challenge of planning an SD-WAN migration that will serve the company today and into the future, forcing them to deal with a number of unknowns.The uncertainties include how fast the company will grow, whether new sites will be required, and what revenue and cash flow will look like. Existing and emerging security threats must be considered as well. About the only certainty is that cloud services will continually factor into the equation.Challenges inherent in network future-proofingNetwork planning in this kind of environment requires a degree of future-proofing, meaning implementing a network that is comprehensive and agile enough to accommodate new requirements without compromising on service quality or total cost of ownership. But doing so comes with considerable challenges.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: SD-WAN Enables Optimal Microsoft Office 365 User Experience

It is widely known that enterprises are rapidly migrating many of their back-office business applications and end-user collaboration tools from server-based, private data center hosted services to cloud-hosted services. Commercial software-as-a-service (SaaS) application suites like Office 365, are already some of the most widely deployed SaaS applications, and adoption by enterprises of all sizes continues to grow around the world. In a cloud-first enterprise, end users frequently need to access cloud-hosted applications like Office 365 from any location. Regardless of when and where users access cloud applications, they expect a consistent, high quality of experience.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Migrating to SD-WAN? Avoid these Pitfalls, Say IT Leaders

Whether you’re switching from MPLS or Internet VPNs, SD-WAN can jumpstart network performance, agility, and scalability, particularly for cloud applications. However, as with any migration, there can be challenges and surprises. Don’t squash productivity with unplanned outages or security breaches. Plan your migration carefully, ask the right questions, and cover your bases. Here are some key pitfalls to avoid from those who’ve been there.Security Should Work with Your SD-WAN If you’re used to backhauling cloud traffic through data-center security via MPLS, you’re bound to see a big boost in branch office cloud performance using direct Internet access. However, bypassing data-center security means you must find a way to deliver the same level of security at the branch-office level or risk a data breach. Last year, enterprises with completed SD-WAN deployments were 1.3 times more likely to experience a branch-office security breach than without, Shamus McGillicudy, Research Director at analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates reported on a recent webinar.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: The Benefits of Refreshing Router-Centric WANs with SD-WAN

The advantages of SaaS applications and other cloud services has businesses rethinking their traditional router-centric WAN strategy. That’s because many of today’s business-critical applications carry the twin challenges of needing high performance, especially for latency-sensitive applications such as unified communications, combined with high volumes of data. These requirements can quickly swamp traditional WAN connections that backhaul data and transactions through the data center. Without the ability to connect directly to the internet, application speeds slow and performance suffers.The other challenge is that routers generally only view data at the packet level, with little to no intelligent recognition or prioritization of business applications. As a result, mission-critical SaaS applications must not only compete for bandwidth with other business data, but also with non-essential traffic such as YouTube videos or Spotify streams. Without the ability to recognize, prioritize, and steer connections to business-critical SaaS applications, it’s all just data going in and out of the branch routers. The result is lowered application functionality, user experience, and business results.To read this article in full, please click here

1 … 4 5 6 7 8 … 26