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BrandPost: Securing Remote Access to Enterprise Applications Behind the Firewall – Complex, but Solvable

In today’s digital era, a mobile, distributed workforce is common—and growing. According to IDC, the number of mobile workers will rise to more than 105 million by 2020—almost three-quarters of the U.S. workforce. While offering employees this flexibility makes it easier to recruit new job candidates, it has also made securing the corporate network and providing access to enterprise applications behind the firewall more complex than ever.The reasons for this growing complexity go beyond just anywhere, anytime, any device access to corporate data and applications, both on premises and in the cloud. The growing number of devices (employees, customers, or partners) accessing the network from beyond the traditional perimeter has increased the attack surface. The number and variety of cyber threats continue to grow. Compliance and regulations, especially for privacy and protecting customer data, are stricter than ever. Add to this the growing volume of newly connected devices, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), and the remote-access challenge becomes even more daunting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Five New Rules For The WAN In The Digital Era

It’s safe to say that no one likes change.It makes us uncomfortable and puts us in positions that we are not familiar with. This is certainly true in our personal lives, but it’s also true in our jobs. It seems every time there is some kind of major technology shift everything changes, and IT needs to adapt, adopt new best practices, and develop new skills. Think back to the transition from mainframes to PC computing, TDM voice to VoIP, and physical servers to virtualization. Each of these seismic shifts required IT organizations to completely change the way they operate.The enterprise WAN is in the midst of a major transformation, requiring network managers and administrators to do things differently and to develop new skills. The key to developing a plan for the new world is to understand the new rules of networking in the digital era. Below are five “rules of the road” for the WAN in the digital era:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: From Self-Driving Cars to Self-Driving WANs

I realize that the idea of a ‘Self-driving’ WAN could seem like science fiction. But if you think of the visions propelling companies like Google, Tesla and Amazon, you can begin to realize how big an impact artificial intelligence (AI) will have in the next few years, both on our personal lives—and the way IT runs enterprises.MOVING FROM AUTOMATED TO AUTONOMOUSEnterprises are already turning to Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions to connect employees consistently and securely to applications—whether the applications are in the data center or the cloud.Automation plays a key role in these current SD-WAN offerings, eliminating many of the repetitive and mundane manual steps required to configure and connect remote offices and branch locations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Automating Business Intent with an SD-WAN

I love to drink a latte (or three) in the morning. To get it, I rely on a “super-automatic” espresso machine.Just a single button press, and all the grinding, dosing, tamping, pre-brewing, etc. are done for me, the way I like it, every morning.Automation in the WAN is a much more powerful tool for an enterprise. It is one of the revolutionary ideas embodied in SD-WAN. Today I’ll outline the relationship between automation and business intent.In my last blog, I discussed the complexity inherent in the legacy WAN today, and how the move to cloud applications is forcing businesses to rethink their WANs. For instance, an assumption embedded firmly in the legacy WAN is that configuration happens at the device level—and that networking professionals must focus their skills and time on learning and applying complicated CLI commands, device by device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: It’s Time: Why Cloud Applications Demand Moving to an SD-WAN

When I’m talking with customers, I hear about a lot of challenges their businesses experience with their legacy WANs.In particular, the network architects and administrators talk about the problems their WANs present as applications move from the data center to the cloud.The challenges occur whether it is SaaS replacing traditional applications, or specific applications migrating to an IaaS service.The benefits of cloud-based applications are often readily apparent to end users, and to most IT folks. But many networking staff see the cloud opportunity differently. They are the ones stuck trying to make the old WAN do the new tricks required to support cloud applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: The Time Is Now For An Application-Driven WAN Edge Powered By The Latest In Silver Peak SD-WAN Innovation

While much of the market is focused on the promise of an SD-WAN to lower connectivity costs, I believe SD-WAN, when done right, can offer significant incremental value beyond the favorable economics of broadband connectivity.A complete SD-WAN solution must assure consistent application performance and resiliency, make the WAN edge more application-driven, improve network security, and overall, dramatically simplify the WAN architecture for geographically distributed enterprises. It should also enable enterprises to create a thin branch where network functions such as routing, firewalls, WAN optimization along with SD-WAN are delivered as a single integrated solution.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Why Cross-Domain Capabilities Matter for Automation: Two Business Scenarios

The digital economy has IT up against the wall. Lines of business are focused on boosting innovation and enhancing the customer experience through digital transformation initiatives, but network complexity can be a significant obstacle for IT. According to one study, 75% of CIOs admit that the network is impacting their organization’s ability to achieve business goals, with an estimated 35% of all network downtime attributed to human error.This problem has understandably led IT to embrace automation in each technology domain, including the network, as a means of accelerating service delivery. But automating service delivery within each domain alone isn't enough. There must be seamless automation across the entire data center, or the ability to perform consistently and efficiently will suffer serious setbacks. It’s this growing need for agility and operational efficiency that ultimately validates the business case for introducing open, cross-domain automation capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: The Smart Business Case for Open-Network Automation

Lines of business demand agility, and IT teams that utilize legacy infrastructure and operations face hard limits on how agile they can be. Automating and integrating networking tasks streamlines operations and makes the network much easier to manage, minimizing downtime caused by human error while increasing organizational agility and efficiency. But implementing network-wide automation that also integrates with cross-domain technologies presents three primary challenges.Challenge 1: Vendor Lock-in. Vendor-specific network automation solutions may not completely address your organization’s unique automation needs and they lock you into the vendor's strategy and goals rather than your own. The result is often a flawed approach that doesn’t align and support your organization’s business and technical objectives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Empower IT Innovation with Cross-Domain Automation

Digital transformation has ignited a new economy where organizations are increasingly expecting IT to embrace a bigger role, drive business innovation, and move with greater agility. This often means IT must take immediate action to help the organization compete, or risk becoming irrelevant as line-of-business leaders go around IT and outsource projects to the cloud.Simply put, as your organization becomes increasingly digital, your ability to be agile is heavily dependent upon the agility of IT, which is why technology is at the heart of this new order.Automation is one of the key technologies organizations are embracing to achieve IT agility at the pace of today’s business. Unfortunately, while automation has been implemented in many domains within the data center, network automation has lagged behind. Additionally, automation tends to be implemented in silos within the data center, creating islands of automation that lead to disparate tools and highly disjointed operations. This siloed approach ultimately hinders the pace of service delivery and increases operational costs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: How to Plan Your Move to Multi-Gigabit Ethernet

Gigabit Ethernet has been in the market for more than 15 years, but with rapid advances in Wi-Fi speeds and the rollout of increasingly bandwidth-intensive applications, many enterprises and SMBs are finding it’s finally running out of steam.Whereas once the only alternative to wired gigabit Ethernet networks was a jump to 10G, which requires new cabling, now there’s another option: 2.5G or 5G, using the Cat 5e/Cat 6 twisted pair cable you already have installed. Thanks to the work of the 45-member NBASE-T Alliance, you can find products based on the IEEE 802.3bz standard for 2.5/5G Ethernet ratified in September 2016.In this post, we’ll provide guidance to help you plan an upgrade.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: How to develop mature DevOps practices

Every company must act like a software company these days. That's why DevOps is so critical to your success: DevOps methodologies help you get better software to your users, and build tighter feedback loops for more effective learning.If you’ve already undergone a DevOps transformation, you’re likely already seeing better cross-functional alignment and shared responsibility.  Hopefully you’re deploying software more frequently, recovering from failures faster, and dealing with far fewer security issues.Now it’s time to take your DevOps initiative to the next level to achieve greater control, predictability and flexibility. By continually improving, you make room for more experimentation and innovation, and can even retain top talent. (See the proof in Puppet’s annual State of DevOps Report.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Three Automation Mistakes You Should Avoid

There has never been a more pressing need to automate data center operations—including the network, storage, compute, and apps. End-to-end data center automation might be the fastest route to delivering the on-demand IT services needed in today’s digital economy. As such, no organization can afford to stumble as it develops and deploys comprehensive automation strategies. Let’s take a look at three of the most common mistakes organizations make as they seek to automate their environments: taking on too much, focusing too heavily on a specific tool, and letting a vendor dictate their strategy.Mistake 1: Trying to boil the ocean. Trying to do too much, too soon, is often a recipe for disaster. When it comes to automation, this approach frequently results in unmet expectations as well as management’s diminished confidence in IT’s ability to deliver.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: 17 questions to measure DevOps

If you ask 10 people to define DevOps, you’ll probably get 10 different answers. Some answers will focus on culture and collaboration; others may focus on tooling. (If you’re interested in our definition of DevOps, we wrote a post called What is DevOps?)DevOps is hard to pin down, but most people agree that it’s about much more than tooling. It’s about people, processes and tools — and probably in that order. It’s about aligning team values and workflows to achieve business objectives. By adopting DevOps practices, you can move faster without sacrificing quality, and set yourself up for future innovation and growth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: IT Professionals Weigh in on Enterprise Automation

IT professionals are singing the praises of automation. It’s a transformative technology practice that allows IT to improve agility and the availability of services while liberating IT staff from time-consuming routine tasks. These are essential factors as organizations transition to digital business.But IT leaders also preach prudence. Automation in IT must be approached with a clear strategy. It must be fully understood, skillfully deployed, and diligently monitored, tested, and optimized.We reached out to influential IT leaders to learn what factors and best practices organizations should consider in order to realize the maximum benefits of automation in the data center. Here’s what they said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: In the cloud or moving to it?

Managing a growing hybrid cloud infrastructure, no matter the size of your team, can introduce a lot of complexity. You want to be able to take inventory, diagnose and respond to misconfigurations, and monitor deployments across your environment. You want to be able to scale, and do it securely.We’ve put together a resource kit to show you how cloud management can be done. It includes:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Containers 101

As containers and microservices become more mainstream, you may wonder how to pave the way to adoption. How can you use containers to automate application deployments? What tools do you need to help your path to adoption? How can you get there faster, with fewer chances for errors and re-work?A new Geek Guide sponsored by Puppet, Containers 101, covers everything you need to know about:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Preparing Today’s Network for Tomorrow’s Storage

Most organizations are managing record amounts of data while trying to satisfy the need to access it on-demand through various analytic and operational systems. To meet these expectations in near-real time, they don't just need the best data storage technologies on the market today—they also must anticipate what will be available 18 to 24 months from now so they don’t limit their future success.Traditionally, the storage network hasn’t been the limiting factor in application performance. But the advent of solid-state flash-based storage has changed that. Once considered insufficient for mission-critical environments, flash is now aggressively being deployed for all application types in data centers around the globe. It has not only shown itself to be reliable, it has proven to be an essential technology in handling rapidly increasing data growth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: Six common DevOps myths busted

Even though the DevOps movement has begun to take hold, plenty of misperceptions about DevOps still exist. Is DevOps a set of absolute beliefs? A miracle cure for anything that ails an organization? Does it require particular software tools? Can only the unicorns of the world get it right? Because it can be hard to pin down, some people mistrust the benefits of solid DevOps methodologies. And they forget that at its heart, DevOps is about responding more quickly to business and customer needs. It’s about continual learning and improvement rather than an end state. A new Puppet ebook, DevOps Mythbusting, sets the record straight, and shows how you can benefit from DevOps practices, even if you think you don't have the time or resources.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: DevOps at Wells Fargo

Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet's permission.As one of the world's largest banks, Wells Fargo competes by innovating its IT. At the heart of its innovation is the ability to continually launch, maintain and update software. You can get some sense of the scale when you hear that the Wells Fargo IT organization manages an infrastructure that supports 1 billion transactions per day.With more than 120,000 servers, 55,000 network devices, more than 2,300 applications in production, and more than 6,000 ways to deliver change to a server, Wells Fargo IT needs a consistent way to manage infrastructure, and a consistent way to plan each application's architecture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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