As WLAN access point and device vendors work toward product launches at the end of 2018, we will publish a series of blogs covering all aspects of 802.11ax technology. This first one introduces the motivation and main features of 802.11ax.Download our 802.11ax technical white paper.How to Improve Today’s Wi-Fi?When deciding how to improve Wi-Fi beyond the current release, 802.11ac, the IEEE and Wi-Fi Alliance surveyed Wi-Fi deployments and behavior in order to identify obstacles to wider use and causes of dissatisfaction among user communities. The conclusion was to focus more on performance under “typical” field conditions, a departure from previous upgrades that advanced peak data rates under “excellent” field conditions. With 802.11ax, peak performance and average and worst-case performance under real-world conditions will see improvements.To read this article in full, please click here
Management has always struggled how to optimize and oversee IT resources, tasks and operations. This challenge is becoming more complex due to “digital disruption”. As a result less tech-savvy companies are more likely to fall behind the competition and not able to attract top talent.Most of the times it is not that managers do not see the dangers of digital disruption coming. They do understand the challenges as well as the opportunities, and they know the competition sees them as well. Unfortunately, top management decisions often tend to focus on who is responsible for IT and where IT should be located, rather than the how.Generally, the assumption is that the right people will do the right work, either internally or in another company. However, this assumption is flawed. In that regard, an important reminder is that digital transformation is more about how companies do things, and less about who or where those tasks are performed. Digital disruption changes entire industries so fast that companies lack a structured process or the capabilities to handle it. IT management should offer not only the resources (people and equipment), but also the processes and capabilities to eliminate the risks, tackle the problems Continue reading
“Turn Me Loose”
I finally delivered four large boxes of CDs to my local library – my collection of nearly 1,000 titles, some as old as 33 years, like my Loverboy CD, when I acquired them in back in 1985. And back in 1985, or maybe 1986, I did a similar uncluttering with my cassettes and vinyl (except for a few select albums like an original release of Dark Side of the Moon).Music has gone from 12” vinyl to more compact cassette tapes to even more compact CDs and now streaming services that connect listeners to music anywhere, anytime. Just as music technology has changed through the years to provide more flexibility on how music is consumed, the application consumption model has changed, too. The “job of the WAN” has always been to connect users to applications, but wide area networking (WAN) technology based on conventional branch routers has not kept up to provide the optimal means of connecting to them.To read this article in full, please click here
Unfortunately, as cyberthreats have evolved, over 86% of companies that leave DNS unmonitored have not modernized their DNS to help thwart malware before malicious adversaries exploit the glaring hole on the network. This blog looks at the ways threats have evolved to take advantage of legacy DNS, and what organizations should do now to increase their defenses and reduce their attack surface.Remember when cyberattacks were delivered via faxes from Nigerian princes? Although the objective – separating a business from its money – hasn’t changed much, the methodologies certainly have. In the 80s and 90s, when enterprise networks were beginning to connect to the internet, DNS was simply the phone book that translated domain name to IP address. Soon enough, bad actors evolved from phreaking to phishing, dropping telephone scams in favor of the rapidly spreading internet, bombarding users with seemingly innocuous emails whose goal was to harvest network account and password information to gain inside access to applications, data, and ultimately money.To read this article in full, please click here
Just because you’ve tapped into the vast resources of a cloud service provider to replace previously on-premises IT assets doesn’t lessen your management or cybersecurity burden. In fact, cloud migration creates new issues for network admins to focus on: migrations are inherently risky from a cyber perspective – data on the move is data that can be exploited in transit.Cloud providers are prone to proclaiming that their security is better than any single business can achieve, simply because they have more resources to apply to the issue. By now, we all know that simply throwing money at the challenge is no guarantee of success, so maybe take that with a dose of skepticism.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Fabio Medina, General Manager and Vice President of Sales – Latin America
With the move toward autonomous networking underway across the CALA region, as well as the rest of the world, one thing is very clear—the current modes of operation won’t cut it in the future. Fabio Medina, Ciena's General Manager for Caribbean and Latin America explains how the Adaptive Network is the solution to remaining competitive and on the cutting-edge.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Bo Gowan, Leader, Social Media
5G is coming, and with it a host of new terms and acronyms. We try to make sense of it all with definitions for the ones that matter most for the future of 5G network architectures.Trying to digest the vast amounts of information related to 5G is like drinking from a fire hydrant, and it doesn’t help that there is a litany of new terms being introduced as part of the journey to 5G architectures.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Chris Sweetapple, Consultant, Managed Service Providers
In our final post in this 3-part series covering one hero’s journey on the road to streamlined enterprise networking operations, Ciena’s Chris Sweetapple describes how Our Hero embraces business Ethernet to shed complexity and simplify operations, creating a network that grows with the business.To read this article in full, please click here
In the second post of this 3-part series we unravel one hero’s journey on the road to streamlined enterprise networking operations. Ciena’s Chris Sweetapple follows Our Hero’s adventures as he realizes the opportunities of high-bandwidth business Ethernet.In episode 1 our hero, stuck in a tangle of outdated networking equipment, services and complexity, realizes that with business Ethernet as his WAN technology of choice, he can complement the existing network set-up and connect his branch offices, while handling massive volumes of traffic concurrently using high speed (up to 100G) high-performance Ethernet connectivity.To read this article in full, please click here
Cybercrime damage is projected to reach $6 trillion annually by 2021. That’s creating lots of demand for security protection—estimated at over $1 trillion cumulatively between 2017 and 2021. As a result, an estimated 1,200 vendors are competing to provide enterprise-class cybersecurity products, so how do you go about choosing which solution to use?There’s no doubt, cyberthreats are real—according to the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), the number of cyber incidents targeting businesses almost doubled from 82,000 in 2016 to 159,700 in 2017, and due to non-reporting of many incidents, the actual number for 2017 could well have exceeded 360,000.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Chris Sweetapple, Consultant, Managed Service Providers
In the first installment of this 3-part series, we begin the story of one hero’s road to streamlined enterprise networking operations. Ciena’s Chris Sweetapple details Our Hero’s journey as he navigates the convoluted tangle of enterprise networking.Our hero, responsible for running his enterprise network, is hopelessly stuck in an enormous tangle of network complexity. He needs the best connectivity for collaboration, applications and cloud access. But he knows that the networking technology he has today won’t cope with the demands of tomorrow. The business depends on online transactions, connections to multiple data centers and real-time data. Failover, backup, load balancing and stringent security are essential.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Daniele Loffreda, Senior Advisor, Industry Marketing
The evolution toward a more holistic, personalized health maintenance program will create an explosion of data putting more pressure on our communication networks. Is your network healthy enough to make the sharing of this information possible? Ciena’s Daniele Loffreda discusses.In the past, an annual visit to our primary care doctor was considered common practice. But in today's era of personalized, precision medicine, the annual checkup may not be as necessary for otherwise healthy adults. In fact, research conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration suggests that yearly visits in the absence of symptoms are not beneficial. According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, patients in the United States visit their physicians for annual checkups more than 44 million times per year despite having no medical issues or concerns.To read this article in full, please click here
Network firewalls were created to block unauthorized content and code from the network while ensuring the unimpeded flow of data packets vital to the operations of the enterprise. But they were designed to intercept external incursion, not prevent security issues inside the network.“As server virtualization has increased in popularity, the amount of traffic moving laterally across the data center (East-West) has dwarfed traditional client-server traffic, which moves in and out (North-South),” industry analyst Zeus Kerravala writes in Network World. “This is playing havoc with data center managers as they attempt to meet the demands of this era of IT.”To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Daniele Loffreda, Senior Advisor, Industry Marketing
New innovations stemming from artificial intelligence, machine learning and connected health are changing the way medical professionals treat their patients. Doctors are having to adapt to take advantage of these developments – but has their network adapted to support them?Two newborns are delivered on the same day by the same doctor in the same hospital. The truth is, the decisions their respective parents are about to make can have an enormous impact on their daughters’ health and quality of life for the next several decades. To read this article in full, please click here
What impact is the internet of things having on enterprise networks and the way we use DNS? For many network and security pros today, the answer is “no clue,” due to the lack of source address validation combined with the explosive growth of IoT, expected to hit more than 75 billion connected devices by 2025[2].From embedded sensors laced with unknown code to devices that can exfiltrate data from otherwise secure networks, IoT devices are already leading a new wave of cyberthreats, from sensors designed with little or no thought towards security to network connectivity relying on default passwords, that can lead to cameras that query SQL databases. This blog post looks at some of the dangers with a view to how DNS can help stop them before they do harm.To read this article in full, please click here
Kailem Anderson, Vice President of Product Management for Software and Services, Ciena
There are many challenges that service providers must deal with in multi-layer networks. A majority of them stem from the lack of coordinated visibility and orchestration across the optical and IP/MPLS layers. Ciena’s Kailem Anderson details these challenges and the benefits that multi-layer orchestration can bring. For even more details, also be sure to attend our upcoming Light Reading webinar.To read this article in full, please click here
Daniele Loffreda, Senior Advisor, Industry Marketing
For cities to evolve and realize the full benefits of becoming “smart,” they will require real-time access to multiple sources of data from different locations. Ciena’s Daniele Loffreda explains what is needed from the next-generation of networks to make smart cities a reality.Apple CEO, Tim Cook, said it best during a commencement address at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last year when he proclaimed science and technology are worthless, if they aren’t motivated by the desire to help people. This belief can be just as correctly applied to the planning and development of smart city initiatives.To read this article in full, please click here
Constructing a more adaptive network takes more than the industry finally finding the resolve to do it. There are real technology advancements that must be brought to bear. It is these advancements – nurtured in the care of those with the will and experience to disrupt the status quo – that will drive the industry forward to the reality of the Adaptive Network. Whether you are taking the initial first steps or planning a larger-scale transformation, this sought-after webinar series will provide you the insight and proven experience to help you traverse this complex journey.To read this article in full, please click here
Ask seasoned IT professionals what they dislike most about their infrastructure, and they’ll answer in unison: Change. IT, network and security professionals all rely on tried-and-true products to keep the business humming along, but is doing so exposing them to new risks? This post looks at some hidden risk factors present in many of today’s DNS environments, and what enterprises should be doing now to ameliorate them.There are very few organizations more change-averse than enterprise IT professionals – especially their network and security teams. With network stability (read uptime) at the heart of their existence, reliance on known products and services can become a crutch – and a blindfold, limiting the ability to objectively consider new infrastructure solutions. As the advent of cloud came upon IT, many organizations needed to fight the ‘server-huggers’, who insisted that their sacred server or device located in the datacenter was the only way to run a specific application or perform a specific business function.To read this article in full, please click here
Ciena
Rick Hamilton, Senior Vice President, Global Software and Services
Ciena has officially completed the acquisition of Packet Design. Rick Hamilton, SVP of Global Software and Services at Ciena, details how the integration of these new capabilities into our Blue Planet portfolio will help our customers in their path to the Adaptive Network.Today I had the privilege of welcoming the Packet Design team into the Ciena family, following our May 31 announcement to acquire the company. On July 2, we officially completed the acquisition, bringing the Packet Design network performance management software and critical IP expertise into Ciena’s industry-leading Blue Planet software portfolio.To read this article in full, please click here
Brand Post