Tom Nolle
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Tom Nolle
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Surprise! The metaverse could be great news for the enterprise edge
When you think about the metaverse and the enterprise, do you think about millions of workers buzzing about in a virtual world to do their work? Maybe employees picking Star Wars characters as avatars and fighting with light sabers? CEOs likely blanch at that image; to most, virtual workers implies virtual work, and it’s hard to say how that generates real sales and products. Fortunately, there’s an alternative that depends not on enterprises using the metaverse but on riding its coattails.If you ask enterprises what they think about the next frontier in cloud computing is, the responses are mixed between “the edge” and “IoT”, and of course the latter is really an example of an edge application. Well that frontier may be delayed because service providers would have to make a significant investment in infrastructure just to create an edge/IoT option for enterprises, and most enterprises aren’t willing to start planning for that next frontier until services are available. With buyers waiting for services and sellers wanting proven demand, we could be in for an era of false starts, edge-wise.To read this article in full, please click here
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Virtual networks need a rethink to meet hybrid-, multi-cloud demands
Everyone in tech likely thinks they know what “cloud computing” and “networking” mean, but they’re probably wrong, and their misconceptions about the first topic color their view of the second. Yes, the cloud is dominating computing, but most stuff isn’t “moving to the cloud”. This subtle point is already changing how we think about networking.I’ve worked with the cloud from the first, and while there was a bit of “move this to the cloud” going on for server consolidation reasons, the overwhelming majority of stuff enterprises run in the cloud today isn’t an entire application at all. It’s the presentation layer of legacy data-center apps.Corporate transaction processing, data storage and retrieval, and analytics are all things that demand security and reliability. From the first, enterprise executives have been telling me that these activities aren’t going to move to the cloud because they believe that their requirements can’t be met, and the cost would be greater rather than lower. My work with them proves out that view. Despite all the hype about the economy of scale of the cloud providers, the fact is that most enterprises achieve economies close enough to those of the cloud that the difference wouldn’t Continue reading
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Virtual networks need a rethink to meet hybrid-, multi-cloud demands
Everyone in tech likely thinks they know what “cloud computing” and “networking” mean, but they’re probably wrong, and their misconceptions about the first topic color their view of the second. Yes, the cloud is dominating computing, but most stuff isn’t “moving to the cloud”. This subtle point is already changing how we think about networking.I’ve worked with the cloud from the first, and while there was a bit of “move this to the cloud” going on for server consolidation reasons, the overwhelming majority of stuff enterprises run in the cloud today isn’t an entire application at all. It’s the presentation layer of legacy data-center apps.Corporate transaction processing, data storage and retrieval, and analytics are all things that demand security and reliability. From the first, enterprise executives have been telling me that these activities aren’t going to move to the cloud because they believe that their requirements can’t be met, and the cost would be greater rather than lower. My work with them proves out that view. Despite all the hype about the economy of scale of the cloud providers, the fact is that most enterprises achieve economies close enough to those of the cloud that the difference wouldn’t Continue reading
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Growth of hybrid and multi-cloud demands new thinking about virtual networks.
Everyone in tech likely thinks they know what “cloud computing” and “networking” mean, but they’re probably wrong, and their misconceptions about the first topic color their view of the second. Yes, the cloud is dominating computing, but most stuff isn’t “moving to the cloud”. This subtle point is already changing how we think about networking.I’ve worked with the cloud from the first, and while there was a bit of “move this to the cloud” going on for server consolidation reasons, the overwhelming majority of stuff enterprises run in the cloud today isn’t an entire application at all. It’s the presentation layer of legacy data-center apps.Corporate transaction processing, data storage and retrieval, and analytics are all things that demand security and reliability. From the first, enterprise executives have been telling me that these activities aren’t going to move to the cloud because they believe that their requirements can’t be met, and the cost would be greater rather than lower. My work with them proves out that view. Despite all the hype about the economy of scale of the cloud providers, the fact is that most enterprises achieve economies close enough to those of the cloud that the difference wouldn’t Continue reading
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5 best practices for making smart-building LANs more secure
Power, they say, corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. While that was said about politics, it sure seems like it was tailor-made for smart buildings.Facility-control technology is exploding because the concept is useful and often saves money. Unfortunately, smart devices have also proven to be an on-ramp for major intrusions. Smart buildings are surely absolutely powerful in a way; are they absolutely corruptible? Maybe, if we’re not very careful.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] If corruption means overall bad-ness, then hacking a smart building surely qualifies. It could let intruders mess with lights, heating and air conditioning, and maybe other critical systems, too. We also know from news stories that a hacker could use a successful smart building intrusion to sneak into other business applications, potentially compromising them and critical company information. It’s important to address these risks, and that means starting with how they arise.To read this article in full, please click here
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5 best practices for making smart-building LANs more secure
Power, they say, corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. While that was said about politics, it sure seems like it was tailor-made for smart buildings.Facility-control technology is exploding because the concept is useful and often saves money. Unfortunately, smart devices have also proven to be an on-ramp for major intrusions. Smart buildings are surely absolutely powerful in a way; are they absolutely corruptible? Maybe, if we’re not very careful.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] If corruption means overall bad-ness, then hacking a smart building surely qualifies. It could let intruders mess with lights, heating and air conditioning, and maybe other critical systems, too. We also know from news stories that a hacker could use a successful smart building intrusion to sneak into other business applications, potentially compromising them and critical company information. It’s important to address these risks, and that means starting with how they arise.To read this article in full, please click here
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How and why to adopt SDN despite its dark side
Five enterprise network operations managers told me they were very concerned about recent cloud outages. Why? Because every one of the outages were caused by network problems. Four of the five managers admitted that in their own containerized data centers, their problems came more often from networks than from servers. Why is this happening? Answer, according to enterprises: more isn’t better.Complexity is the enemy of efficient operations and management. The sheer volume of things going on can swamp management centers and even management tools. If you add in multiple vendors and multiple technologies that create differences in operations practices, you get something very messy. But it’s more than just size or technology scope that’s making network operations complicated, it’s the way networks work.To read this article in full, please click here
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Zero Trust is hard but worth it
At the end of last year, I heard from a long-time enterprise contact that had a major security concern. The company had installed three layers of security and just completed an audit. It showed that since thIey’d finished their installation they’d had five security incidents, and all of them had originated inside their security perimeter, bypassing most of their protection.Their question was what they did wrong and how they could fix it.What this company experienced is far from rare, and the source of their problems and the paths to correction are far from easy.We tend to think of security as a goal we can achieve with a simple toolkit. Not so. Security is the state you achieve by dealing with all likely threats, and every threat has to be addressed in its own unique way. Problems can come from hackers gaining access to an application or database from the outside, through things like stealing credentials or exploiting weak authentication.To read this article in full, please click here
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Zero Trust is hard but worth it
At the end of last year, I heard from a long-time enterprise contact that had a major security concern. The company had installed three layers of security and just completed an audit. It showed that since thIey’d finished their installation they’d had five security incidents, and all of them had originated inside their security perimeter, bypassing most of their protection.Their question was what they did wrong and how they could fix it.What this company experienced is far from rare, and the source of their problems and the paths to correction are far from easy.We tend to think of security as a goal we can achieve with a simple toolkit. Not so. Security is the state you achieve by dealing with all likely threats, and every threat has to be addressed in its own unique way. Problems can come from hackers gaining access to an application or database from the outside, through things like stealing credentials or exploiting weak authentication.To read this article in full, please click here
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Don’t let bad press about Open RAN sink your private 5G plans
Here’s a paradox for you. Why is a technology that’s supported at the planning level by 90% of the telcos, and by the majority of enterprises, getting a bunch of negative press? Why is something that’s both 5G and open not being applauded by all?I’m referring to the Open RAN model for 5G, of course, and the answer to all these “Why?” questions could say a lot about our industry and have a significant impact on enterprises looking at deploying private 5G networks or even consuming a 5G network slice of their own.To read this article in full, please click here
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APIs pose the latest threat of networking-vendor lock-in
In my surveys of enterprises, the number worried about vendor lock-in has hovered around 90% for 30 years. When you ask enterprises how they avoid it, they respond “standard interfaces” or “open-source”. Even today, the percentage who include “managing APIs” in their list of lock-in avoidance measures is in the statistical noise level, but APIs are perhaps the fastest-growing lock-in problem today, and they’re surely going to become a major problem in the future.API stands for “application programming interface”, but the term is broadly used in software today to describe the interfaces between all the software components used in an application, a cloud, or even a network. APIs let pieces of software talk with each other, and they’re essential in every situation where software components rather than hardware devices are connected. What’s creating a challenge in lock-in from APIs today is the fact that networking is shifting more to software, which means it’s shifting to a model where APIs are just as important as those standard interfaces, and enterprises aren’t tracking that important shift.To read this article in full, please click here
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APIs pose the latest threat of vendor-lock-in networking
In my surveys of enterprises, the number worried about vendor lock-in has hovered around 90% for 30 years. When you ask enterprises how they avoid it, they respond “standard interfaces” or “open-source”. Even today, the percentage who include “managing APIs” in their list of lock-in avoidance measures is in the statistical noise level, but APIs are perhaps the fastest-growing lock-in problem today, and they’re surely going to become a major problem in the future.API stands for “application programming interface”, but the term is broadly used in software today to describe the interfaces between all the software components used in an application, a cloud, or even a network. APIs let pieces of software talk with each other, and they’re essential in every situation where software components rather than hardware devices are connected. What’s creating a challenge in lock-in from APIs today is the fact that networking is shifting more to software, which means it’s shifting to a model where APIs are just as important as those standard interfaces, and enterprises aren’t tracking that important shift.To read this article in full, please click here
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Juniper’s marketing lags its technology
Like a lot of other people, I remember the Juniper ads of decades ago that used cartoons to poke fun at competitors. It was in-your-face marketing, and it seemed to pay off for Juniper in visibility.Then they got quiet, and while Juniper continued to innovate at the product level, they didn’t make news like they used to. Then they held their Nov. 2 analyst event, and they got in their competitors’ faces again. Why, and how?The why is related to a principle of marketing I’ve talked about for decades: trajectory management. All sales processes these days aim at converting “suspects” into “customers” through a series of steps. First you get mentioned in tech news articles and analyst briefs. Second, those who see those mentions go to your website for more information, which leads them to the third step—a request to talk to a salesperson. In-your-face marketing gets good ink, and Juniper got more coverage of its event than it’s gotten for anything else in years.To read this article in full, please click here
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Juniper’s marketing lags its technology
Like a lot of other people, I remember the Juniper ads of decades ago that used cartoons to poke fun at competitors. It was in-your-face marketing, and it seemed to pay off for Juniper in visibility.Then they got quiet, and while Juniper continued to innovate at the product level, they didn’t make news like they used to. Then they held their Nov. 2 analyst event, and they got in their competitors’ faces again. Why, and how?The why is related to a principle of marketing I’ve talked about for decades: trajectory management. All sales processes these days aim at converting “suspects” into “customers” through a series of steps. First you get mentioned in tech news articles and analyst briefs. Second, those who see those mentions go to your website for more information, which leads them to the third step—a request to talk to a salesperson. In-your-face marketing gets good ink, and Juniper got more coverage of its event than it’s gotten for anything else in years.To read this article in full, please click here
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Wacky as Facebook’s metaverse sounds, enterprises will have to deal with it
In our modern world, “metaverse” is the term applied to an artificial reality, a virtual world inhabited by avatars that represent real people and perhaps other AI virtual beings, too.What makes the concept relevant to enterprises are the Facebook decision to embrace metaverse as the future, the fact that others like Microsoft are following along, and the promise that it could redefine meetings, sales calls, support, and even work overall. Network planners would then have to consider its impact on traffic and connectivity.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] One big get-it-approved problem with the metaverse for enterprise is likely to be security. Facebook has had a lot of recent bad press for favoring profit over the welfare of its users, and that sort of thing sets compliance officers a-tingle, so self-hosting might be a solution. Executing that is partly a software issue and partly a network issue.The former, we can assume, would be handled by open-source development arising out of the interest Facebook has created. The latter isn’t as easy to dismiss.To read this article in full, please click here
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4 questions that get the answers you need from IT vendors
It’s the time of year when most enterprises are involved in a more-or-less-formal technology review cycle, as a preparatory step for next year’s budgeting. They’ve done this for decades, and it’s interesting to me that in any given year, enterprises share roughly three of their top five priorities. It’s more interesting that over three-quarters of enterprises carry over at least two of their top five priorities for multiple years. Why aren’t they getting addressed? They say their top problem is an “information gap.”Buyers adopt network technologies that improve their business, not just their network. They have to justify spending, particularly spending on some new technology that someone inside or outside has suggested. That means that they have to understand how it will improve operations, how they’ll deploy it, and what the cost will be. To do this for a new technology, they need information on how that improvement would happen—and they say they’re not getting it.To read this article in full, please click here
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4 questions that get the answers you need from IT vendors
It’s the time of year when most enterprises are involved in a more-or-less-formal technology review cycle, as a preparatory step for next year’s budgeting. They’ve done this for decades, and it’s interesting to me that in any given year, enterprises share roughly three of their top five priorities. It’s more interesting that over three-quarters of enterprises carry over at least two of their top five priorities for multiple years. Why aren’t they getting addressed? They say their top problem is an “information gap.”Buyers adopt network technologies that improve their business, not just their network. They have to justify spending, particularly spending on some new technology that someone inside or outside has suggested. That means that they have to understand how it will improve operations, how they’ll deploy it, and what the cost will be. To do this for a new technology, they need information on how that improvement would happen—and they say they’re not getting it.To read this article in full, please click here
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4 questions that get the answers you need from IT vendors
It’s the time of year when most enterprises are involved in a more-or-less-formal technology review cycle, as a preparatory step for next year’s budgeting. They’ve done this for decades, and it’s interesting to me that in any given year, enterprises share roughly three of their top five priorities. It’s more interesting that over three-quarters of enterprises carry over at least two of their top five priorities for multiple years. Why aren’t they getting addressed? They say their top problem is an “information gap.”Buyers adopt network technologies that improve their business, not just their network. They have to justify spending, particularly spending on some new technology that someone inside or outside has suggested. That means that they have to understand how it will improve operations, how they’ll deploy it, and what the cost will be. To do this for a new technology, they need information on how that improvement would happen—and they say they’re not getting it.To read this article in full, please click here
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The search for the optimum network: Don’t let IT vendors sell you on lock-in
How should an enterprise pick products to build its network? Do they look for the best of each product category, knowing this will increase both integration issues and finger-pointing? Do they select the best vendor overall, knowing that this will invite vendor lock-in and compromises in each product category?This issue is as old as networking, and we’ve still not resolved it. How do enterprises decide when to add a vendor in hopes of getting the best technology, and protect themselves from the consequences?SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors Every network vendor wants to be your only vendor. No network vendor wants to accept responsibility for problems, and most don’t even want to work hard to find out who’s causing them. Big network-equipment vendors have not only fallen behind on innovation, they work to actively stifle it, fearing it could damage their incumbent position. These are the views of enterprises, whether they favor single-vendor networks or best-of-breed.To read this article in full, please click here
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Tailoring SD-WAN to fit your needs
SD-WAN resources What is SD-WAN and what does it mean for networking, security, cloud? 10 SD-WAN features you're probably not using but should be SD-WAN may be the key to smart network services SD-WAN and analytics: A marriage made for the new normal Native SD-WAN monitoring tools are not enough, survey says Why is it that we always seem to think that we can adopt a technology that has seriously revolutionary pieces by just buying it and hooking it up? This, despite the undeniable fact that everything in tech is getting more sophisticated, more complex? Software-defined WAN is a technology like that, and because all SD-WANs aren’t the same, or even close to the same, you’ll have to do some digging to make SD-WAN your own.To read this article in full, please click here