Software skills are set to play a more prominent role in Cisco’s network engineering curriculum. The company is launching a new coding-focused certification track, as well as giving its existing certifications a major revamp to address software-defined networking (SDN), automation, the Internet of Things, and other emerging technologies that are changing the job requirements for today’s network professionals. "They’re not trying to turn network folks into developers, but they are certainly trying to make it easier for us to do our job," says Dan Groscost, solutions architect at Computer Design & Integration, an IT services firm based in New York, N.Y. Groscost holds a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) certification, and he’s in the final stages of his Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) Route/Switch certification. To read this article in full, please click here
Software skills are set to play a more prominent role in Cisco’s network engineering curriculum. The company is launching a new coding-focused certification track, as well as giving its existing certifications a major revamp to address software-defined networking (SDN), automation, the Internet of Things, and other emerging technologies that are changing the job requirements for today’s network professionals. "They’re not trying to turn network folks into developers, but they are certainly trying to make it easier for us to do our job," says Dan Groscost, solutions architect at Computer Design & Integration, an IT services firm based in New York, N.Y. Groscost holds a Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) certification, and he’s in the final stages of his Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) Route/Switch certification. To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco’s network certification lineup is set for a major overhaul. The company is adding a new coding-focused track to its offerings, and it's continuing to streamline its core designations: Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP), and Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE). To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Cisco’s network certification lineup is set for a major overhaul. The company is adding a new coding-focused track to its offerings, and it's continuing to streamline its core designations: Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP), and Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE). To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
After years of shifting applications to the public cloud, enterprises realize it’s not the right fit for every app and are pulling some of them back to private clouds, forcing the businesses to adopt a hybrid strategy. But it’s not an easy process and one that may require formal training and certifications for the IT pros tasked with this important transition.“A huge desire to move to the cloud, and pressure from lines of business to move to the cloud, have created an experience gap that has led to serious missteps and forced IT teams to repatriate workloads they had put in the cloud back into the data center,” says Scott Sinclair, senior analyst at IT research firm ESG. “IT’s level of competence, experience, and education in how to integrate with the cloud is woefully inadequate.”To read this article in full, please click here
IoT needs edge computing. The world is on pace to hit 41.6 billion connected IoT devices generating 79.4 zettabytes of data in 2025, according to research firm IDC. To make the most of that data, enterprises are investing in compute, storage and networking gear at the edge, including IoT gateways and hyperconverged infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here
Data backup and restoration can be somewhat of a black-box effort. You often don’t know whether you fully nailed it until disaster strikes, and there is always room for improvement, especially as cloud and hybrid options grow. We asked four network professionals to share what made them realize they should do more to bolster their organization’s backup and recovery processes, and how they made that happen. Here are their stories.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Data backup and restoration can be somewhat of a black-box effort. You often don’t know whether you fully nailed it until disaster strikes, and there is always room for improvement, especially as cloud and hybrid options grow. We asked four network professionals to share what made them realize they should do more to bolster their organization’s backup and recovery processes, and how they made that happen. Here are their stories.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Jason Pichardo’s career path has mirrored the changes in networking over the past decade, moving from a traditional hardware-dominated past to a software-centric future that reflects the network’s growing importance to business operations.“The industry started having conversations about digital transformation, and already we have moved to a hybrid-cloud state with programmability and orchestration. We’ve gone from talking about switches and routers to talking about how to speed to market faster and how to accomplish business tasks at a faster rate,” says Pichardo, senior network architect at insurance provider Anthem. (The opinions he expresses are his own, not those of Anthem, Inc.)To read this article in full, please click here
The IT team at Perkins+Will used to support a sprawling SAN environment for its complex commercial-building renderings.When the Chicago-based architecture firm – which has 2,500 employees in 30 locations around the world – outgrew its SAN environment, Perkins+Will chose to migrate away from on-premises data centers and edge devices to a cloud-based storage system. Suddenly CIO Murali Selvaraj faced a difficult challenge: How to restructure the firm's 50-person global IT organization to meet the needs of the hybrid cloud?To read this article in full, please click here
The IT team at Perkins+Will used to support a sprawling SAN environment for its complex commercial-building renderings.When the Chicago-based architecture firm – which has 2,500 employees in 30 locations around the world – outgrew its SAN environment, Perkins+Will chose to migrate away from on-premises data centers and edge devices to a cloud-based storage system. Suddenly CIO Murali Selvaraj faced a difficult challenge: How to restructure the firm's 50-person global IT organization to meet the needs of the hybrid cloud?To read this article in full, please click here
WAVE Life Sciences was barreling toward its commercial launch when it hit a critical speedbump. The company’s network, a key part of the launch, received a negative assessment and would need to be re-architected. Anthony Murabito, vice president of IT at the Cambridge, Mass. biotechnology company, only wanted one thing from the IT pros that would be helping him fix the issue fast – to be Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts (CCIE).“We needed to do a major refresh and replacement on our network and, when I looked around, I had no network skills available in the organization,” Murabito says. Cisco’s top-tier certification would serve for Murabito and his hiring team as an indicator of a candidate’s expertise.To read this article in full, please click here
WAVE Life Sciences was barreling toward its commercial launch when it hit a critical speedbump. The company’s network, a key part of the launch, received a negative assessment and would need to be re-architected. Anthony Murabito, vice president of IT at the Cambridge, Mass. biotechnology company, only wanted one thing from the IT pros that would be helping him fix the issue fast – to be Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts (CCIE).To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
WAVE Life Sciences was barreling toward its commercial launch when it hit a critical speedbump. The company’s network, a key part of the launch, received a negative assessment and would need to be re-architected. Anthony Murabito, vice president of IT at the Cambridge, Mass. biotechnology company, only wanted one thing from the IT pros that would be helping him fix the issue fast – to be Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts (CCIE).To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
AutoNation spent years trying to establish a disaster recovery plan that inspired confidence. It went through multiple iterations, including failed attempts at a full on-premises solution and a solution completely in the cloud. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based auto retailer, which operates 300 locations across 16 states, finally found what it needed with a hybrid model featuring disaster recovery as a service.“Both the on-premises and public cloud disaster recovery models were expensive, not tested often or thoroughly enough, and were true planning and implementation disasters that left us open to risk,” says Adam Rasner, AutoNation’s vice president of IT and operations, who was brought on two years ago in part to revamp the disaster recovery plan. The public cloud approach sported a hefty price tag: an estimated $3 million if it were needed in the wake of a three-month catastrophic outage. “We were probably a little bit too early in the adoption of disaster recovery in the cloud,” Rasner says, noting that the cloud providers have matured substantially in recent years.To read this article in full, please click here
When Tim Callahan came to Aflac four years ago to take on the role of CISO, enterprise security at the insurance giant was embedded deep in the infrastructure team.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
When Tim Callahan came to Aflac four years ago to take on the role of CISO, enterprise security at the insurance giant was embedded deep in the infrastructure team.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Sandra Gittlen