A key component of SD-WAN is its ability to secure unreliable Internet links and identify anomalous traffic flows.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
What keeps me awake at night is the thought of artificial intelligence lying in wait in the hands of bad actors. Artificial intelligence combined with the powers of IoT-based attacks will create an environment tapped for mayhem. It is easy to write about, but it is hard for security professionals to combat. AI has more force, severity, and fatality which can change the face of a network and application in seconds.When I think of the capabilities artificial intelligence has in the world of cybersecurity I know that unless we prepare well we will be like Bambi walking in the woods. The time is now to prepare for the unknown. Security professionals must examine the classical defense mechanisms in place to determine if they can withstand an attack based on artificial intelligence.To read this article in full, please click here
Today’s threat landscape has led organizations to defend their networks with numerous point solutions, most of which are complex and require significant attention to operations and ongoing maintenance. While large enterprises often have sufficient skilled resources to support the security infrastructure, small- to medium-sized businesses sometimes struggle in this area.For the SMB market in particular, Network Security-as-a-Service is an attractive offering. It allows companies to get the very best security technology at an affordable price point while having someone else maintain the complex infrastructure.This has given rise to a genre of service provider that builds its own network backbone in the cloud and embeds network security as an integral service. More and more players are starting to offer this kind of service. They generally start with a global network backbone and software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN), add a full security stack, and connect to various cloud services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. Customers connect their data centers, branches, end users, and cloud apps to this network, and away they go. It’s networking, plus network security, all in one place, and all managed as a service.To read this article in full, please click here
The enterprise wide area networks are mission-critical resources for most enterprises. And when it came to managing and running the WAN, enterprises could choose between two distinct models: Do it Yourself (DIY) or managed WAN services. But with the evolution of SD-WANs, we’re seeing a new type of telco solution that merges elements of both capabilities.Traditional WAN management models
With DIY, enterprise IT procures last-mile access at a location and deploys routers, WAN optimization, and network security appliances from several vendors. Continuous monitoring and management is done in house or via a managed service provider. In short, enterprise IT owns the complex task of maintaining, configuring and monitoring the WAN for availability and optimal performance.To read this article in full, please click here
Function-as-a-service (FaaS) technologies, including AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and IBM/Apache OpenWhisk, are experiencing mass adoption, even in private clouds, and it’s easy to see why. The promise of serverless is simple: developers and IT teams can stop worrying about their infrastructure, system software and network configuration altogether. There’s no need to load-balance, adjust resources for scale, monitor for network latency or CPU performance. Serverless computing can save you a lot of time, money and operational overhead, if you play your cards right.Say goodbye to the idle instance
There’s also less waste with serverless computing. You only pay for infrastructure in the moment that code gets executed (or, each time a user processes a request). It’s the end of the server that just sits there. But with all these advantages, IT practitioners are also faced with an avalanche of complexity and new challenges. To read this article in full, please click here
You have probably heard all sorts of claims by various vendors and solutions that they are providing or supporting Intent-Based Networking (IBN), yet there is a wide range of capabilities that are all very confusing.One way to make sense of this is to apply a "maturity model" like the one used to classify the maturity level of RESTful web services implementations. The Richardson Maturity Model divides capabilities of RESTful web services into levels, starting from 0 and going up as the maturity of the implementation increases. Just like IBN, REST had received its fair share of hype. While the REST principles were clearly defined in Roy Fielding’s dissertation, in practice the REST label was attached to implementations with wildly varying levels of conformance to the original principles, starting from anything that had the words “HTTP” and “JSON” in it to full blown “hypermedia as the engine of application state.”To read this article in full, please click here
Once the data center was home only to separate compute, storage and networking infrastructures. Sure, they communicated, but the disparate systems required dedicated management and hardware to care and feed for these heterogenous platforms.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
We live in an exciting era for IT. Countless new technologies are changing how networks are built, how access is provided, how data is transmitted and stored, and much more. Cloud, IoT, edge computing and machine learning all offer unique opportunities for organizations to digitally transform the way they conduct business. Different as these technologies are, they are unified by their dependence on a properly functioning network, on what might be called “network continuity.” The key component for achieving network continuity is visibility.It’s no secret that new and emerging technologies have always driven networking best practices. With such a wide range of business objectives and activities relying on IT, network performance really is a life or death issue for most companies. So, it’s critical that we maintain a firm grasp on the latest industry trends in order to make informed, strategic network management decisions.To read this article in full, please click here
Looking to seriously amplify the use of fog computing, the IEEE has defined a standard that will lay the official groundwork to ensure that devices, sensors, monitors, and services are interoperable and will work together to process the seemingly boundless data streams that will come from IoT, 5G and artificial intelligence (AI) systems.The standard, known as IEEE 1934, was largely developed over the past two years by the OpenFog Consortium, which includes ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University. To read this article in full, please click here
If you think you know the problems facing the Internet of Things (IoT), a new Deloitte report, Five vectors of progress in the Internet of Things, offers a great chance to check your assumptions against the IoT experts.Despite the fancy-pants “vectors of progress” language, the report’s authors — David Schatsky, Jonathan Camhi, and Sourabh Bumb — basically lay out the IoT’s chief technical challenges and then look at what’s being done to address them. Some of the five are relatively well-known, but others may surprise you.To read this article in full, please click here
Frankly (no pun intended), I have to admit that I’m growing increasingly frustrated with certain trends in networking.For example, it’s not that I don’t like the dream or idea of software-defined networking (SDN) — it’s not that I don’t think it’s superior to the older way of setting up or monitoring a network. It’s just that I’m becoming increasingly concerned that small- to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) won’t be able to keep up. And the media that follows this trend isn’t really brining to light the extreme cost of some of these systems.Pricewise, many of the product lines are intended for large networks. There's no way that a smaller company could even begin to afford them. For example, one trainer told me that a certain SDN product was scaled to start at 500 site deployments!!To read this article in full, please click here
Like any industry, networking has a proprietary slew of acronyms and jargon that only insiders understand. Look no further than Network World’s searchable glossary of wireless terms.Turns out, multiplexing has nothing to do with going to the movies at a place with more than one theater.I also like to think that each networker has their own favorite list of terms, ready to share at a moment’s notice during family dinners, holidays and networking events … or maybe that’s just me?To read this article in full, please click here
The data-center network is a critical component of enterprise IT’s strategy to create private and hybrid-cloud architectures. It is software that must deliver improved automation, agility, security and analytics to the data center network. It should allow for the seamless integration of enterprise-owned applications with public cloud services. Over time, leading edge software will enable the migration to intent-based data-center networks with full automation and rapid remediation of application-performance issues.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
The topic of SD-WAN has been a hot one over the past several years. This makes sense because in most companies, the WAN hasn’t been updated for decades and SD-WANs have the potential to modernize the network and bring it into alignment with the rest of IT.However, like most new technologies, I find there are a number of common misconceptions when it comes to SD-WANs. Part of the problem is that the vendor ecosystem has exploded, and the many vendors that approach the market from different angles muddy the waters — making it hard to discern what’s real, what’s misleading, and what's downright wrong.[ Click here to find out more about SD-WAN and why you’ll use it one day and learn about WANs and where they’re headed. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
The top SD-WAN myths
To help buyers make sense of what's happening in the SD-WAN world, here are seven myths to watch out for — and why they aren't correct.To read this article in full, please click here
The fifth floor of the cafeteria at Cato’s Israeli office transformed last Thursday morning into a celebration of innovation, coding, and food. Our 2018 Hackathon was kicking off with a sumptuous breakfast buffet decorating the tables, and flags of the 10 project teams dotting the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto southern Tel Aviv.Hackathons are usually meant for folks who know something about, well, hacking code. But the dynamic duo who conceived and ran the event – Eyal, our director of product management, and Jordana, Cato’s human resources manager – poked, prodded, and dare I say implored, every employee to join the festivities – and I do mean everyone. The call to sign up for Cato’s Hackathon wasn’t just limited those who could program in C but even employees who could spell with a C – all were encouraged to sign up. Thankfully singing in C wasn't a requirement.To read this article in full, please click here
Last week, AT&T said it would launch a Narrow Band-IoT (NB-IoT) network in the United States and Mexico. And this isn’t the first network dedicated to the Internet of Things that AT&T is working on. The carrier had previously announced an IoT network using the LTE-M standard to cover some 400 million people in the U.S. and Mexico by the end of last year.Just as important, many other U.S. carriers also have various flavors of low-power IoT networks in the works, including Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and even Dish Network.To read this article in full, please click here
For most businesses, the decision of “to cloud or not to cloud” has been answered with a resounding yes. The burning question now is which cloud provider to use, and that has no easy answer because every cloud provider has different pricing models and strengths and weaknesses.The reality is that almost every business of any significant size will embrace the concept of multi-cloud where a combination of Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and others are used.Multi-cloud rapidly becomes the norm
Several factors are driving companies to multi-cloud — some business related and others technical that will continue to force this architecture upon companies. Pricing considerations and avoiding being beholden to a single vendor are a couple of issues that business leaders might be concerned with, whereas tools, innovation and functionality are factors that developers and IT individuals would prioritize when making a choice.To read this article in full, please click here
The next great leap forward in progress will be marked by an exponential growth in connection and connectivity. As sensors become smaller and more energy efficient, mobile devices become more capable and our networks become more robust, industries as disparate as healthcare, transportation, education, government and entertainment will find opportunities for new efficiencies, new ways of interacting with consumers and transformative approaches to serving their communities.In short, advancements in network technology are helping us achieve great things. We’re seeing the well documented benefits of agility, reliability and performance of networks in healthcare, where wireless networks are supporting complex EHR systems and M2M communications are delivering moment-to-moment information on patient status and improving health outcomes. There’s also been an emergence of new educational (and job) opportunities provided via emerging eSports programs in K-12 and higher education settings.To read this article in full, please click here
A free supply of already-cooled deep-sea water is among the benefits to locating pre-packaged data centers underwater, believes Microsoft, which recently announced the successful launch of a submarine-like data center off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland.The shipping-container-sized, self-contained server room, called Project Natick, submerged earlier this month on a rock shelf 117 feet below the water’s surface also has the benefit of potentially taking advantage of bargain-basement real estate near population centers — there’s no rent in open sea.“Project Natick is an out-of-the-box idea to accommodate exponential growth in demand for cloud computing infrastructure near population centers,” John Roach writes on Microsoft’s website.To read this article in full, please click here
Earlier this year, fellow industry analyst Lee Doyle wrote a blog post on the software-defined branch (SD-Branch) market hitting $3 billion by 2022. Doyle defines the SD-Branch as having SD-WAN, routing, network security, and LAN/Wi-Fi functions all in one platform with integrated, centralized management. An SD-Branch can be thought of as the next step after SD-WAN, as the latter transforms the transport and the former focuses on things in the branch, such as optimizing user experience and improving security.I don’t often critique other analysts work, as their opinion is theirs and not everyone agrees. However, in this case, I don't think “all in one platform” should be a requirement. The integrated and centralized management hits the nail on the head, but the software should act as a management overlay, so even though the infrastructure isn’t a “single box,” it’s managed like it.To read this article in full, please click here