Digital transformation has been a hot topic with IT and business leaders over the past few years. In fact, it’s rare for me to talk to any organization, regardless of size, and not talk about the challenges of going digital.One of the interesting elements of this shift is that it makes the network significantly more important than it ever has been. Most of the technologies used to fuel digitization, such as IoT, cloud and mobility are all network centric in nature, so the network has a direct impact on a company’s ability to become a digital organization.RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you will use it one day
In today’s rapidly changing business climate, competitive differentiation revolves around speed, and that requires a highly dynamic and scalable IT foundation. However, a business can only be as agile as the least agile component, and that today is the network. Software-defined networks (SDNs) have helped transform the data center and SD-WANs the wide-area network, but what about the campus? That seems to have been forgotten about through this transition to a software-defined world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are some people whose vision of the future simply defy words. I would put Elon Musk firmly in the category – changing the world through a single initiative isn’t Musk’s style, rather, he wants to deliver his vision of the future across multiple areas. Space travel? Check. Hyper-efficient terrestrial transportation? Also check. Personal automobiles that challenge both existing business and technology models? Check. Solar power with new economics and scale? Also check. While many would question his political leanings, there is no denying that Musk is a genius.I’ve never met Musk, but watching him speak it is obvious that this is one visionary who not only sees a “bigger picture” for the future of humanity, but he also deeply understands the technology constraints and opportunities that will deliver the future. Which is an inspiring thing to watch, but which also places huge challenges upon the individuals who need to deliver that work. By extension, it also pushes the boundaries of what existing technologies can do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are some people whose vision of the future simply defy words. I would put Elon Musk firmly in the category – changing the world through a single initiative isn’t Musk’s style, rather, he wants to deliver his vision of the future across multiple areas. Space travel? Check. Hyper-efficient terrestrial transportation? Also check. Personal automobiles that challenge both existing business and technology models? Check. Solar power with new economics and scale? Also check. While many would question his political leanings, there is no denying that Musk is a genius.I’ve never met Musk, but watching him speak it is obvious that this is one visionary who not only sees a “bigger picture” for the future of humanity, but he also deeply understands the technology constraints and opportunities that will deliver the future. Which is an inspiring thing to watch, but which also places huge challenges upon the individuals who need to deliver that work. By extension, it also pushes the boundaries of what existing technologies can do.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Demand for skilled storage pros is on the rise as enterprise IT teams wrestle with increased storage capacity requirements and evolving business needs. In particular, companies are looking for people with experience migrating from hardware-based storage to cloud storage – and that’s resulting in higher-than-average pay increases, according to Dice.The tech career hub and job-search site released its annual guide to U.S. tech salaries, which finds that overall average pay in the industry fell slightly last year to $92,081, down from $93,328 in 2015. On the raise front, 61% of tech pros received a salary increase from a year ago, and 9% reported a decrease.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
OneLogin, an identity management company which provides a single sign-on platform for logging into multiple apps and sites, was hacked. US customer data was potentially compromised,“including the ability to decrypt encrypted data.”The company, which claims “over 2000+ enterprise customers in 44 countries across the globe trust OneLogin,” announced the security incident on May 31. It was short on details, primarily saying the unauthorized access it detected had been blocked and law enforcement was notified.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Storage is a fast-evolving industry. Groundbreaking hardware technologies quickly become commoditized, which is a challenge for vendors, but a great benefit to customers. Today’s shiny new array soon becomes matched by a similarly capable JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disk) product that might not have as robust of vendor support, but costs the enterprise far less than a brand-name system. This commoditization extends into flash as well. While it is still growing in adoption in the enterprise, Gartner already sees JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash) products on the horizon in this segment as well. Cloud storage is on the rise in tandem with flash, and smart data management software can help enterprises overcome the complexity of cloud adoption and easily integrate JBOC (Just a Bunch of Cloud) with their existing architectures. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While you may associate web-scale networking with cloud giants like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, it’s not just an architecture for the large scale enterprises anymore. The industry has looked at data centers like theirs and asked the question: “What are they doing that we can mimic at a smaller scale?” Through analysis of the way these organizations ran, the term “web-scale” was born, referring specifically to the hyperscale website companies that have built private, efficient, and scalable cloud environments. Since then, it’s become a growing model for organizations to adopt in their journey toward evolving for the future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Over recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been a huge growth market. From consumer gadgets and wearables to connected cars and smart home devices, the proliferation has been rapid, and IHS predicts that the number of IoT devices globally will reach 30.7 billion by 2020 and 75.4 billion by 2025.IoT is also beginning to touch all aspects of the enterprise. This will only fuel its growth as industry sectors from healthcare to manufacturing become more dependent on IoT communications to drive business processes and missions critical systems.IoT is a key driver of the digital transformation (DX) that is taking place across industry sectors. As the demand for new digital and IoT services continues to grow, close monitoring and management of this transformation will be crucial ensure its success. The rise of IoT has been rapid and will continue to gather pace, to the point where we will soon see entirely new IT infrastructure emerge to support IoT applications and critical systems, spanning the edge, core, and cloud of the service delivery infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
About 28GB of sensitive US intelligence data was discovered on a publicly-accessible Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage bucket. The cache, containing over 60,000 files, was linked to defense and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, which was working on a project for the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). NGA provides satellite and drone surveillance imagery for the Department of Defense and the US intelligence community.The unsecured data was discovered by Chris Vickery, who now works as a cyber risk analyst for the security firm UpGuard.According to UpGuard, the “information that would ordinarily require a Top Secret-level security clearance from the DoD was accessible to anyone looking in the right place; no hacking was required to gain credentials needed for potentially accessing materials of a high classification level.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IP networks were originally designed to be fairly simple. There’s a source and a destination address, and the network devices use this information to perform some fancy calculations—and magically, things connect. But as the internet has grown and more endpoints have been connected, networking has become a black magic. Since it’s impossible to give every device its own unique IP address, the clever folks at networking companies came up with an assortment of workarounds, such as being able to NAT (network address translation) non-routable, private addresses. And as we’ve added more dynamic environments, such as private and public cloud, defining policy based on addresses or ranges has become unsustainable. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The AC1200 is a wifi range extender that transmits its signal through your home wiring via your wall outlets, so walls and floors won't slow it down. Game online and watch HD movies in any room. The powerline adapter is simple to use -- it sets up in minutes, plugs into any power outlet, works with all routers, and up to 16 can be added to the same network, making it easy to expand your Wi-Fi across your home. Right now the price on this highly rated wifi extender will be reduced $10 to $99.99 in your shopping cart when you "clip" a special coupon. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The new APC Back-UPS BE600M1 provides instant battery power to your critical electronics when the power goes out, keeping you connected and available both personally and professionally. Designed specifically to enhance the features that matter most to you, including more runtime, more battery backup outlets, and a USB port for charging convenience, the BE600M1 is also smaller and lighter than the previous model. APC's BE600M1 offers guaranteed surge and lightning protection for attached devices. When the power goes out, the APC BE600M1 will power critical devices including home networking equipment; allowing you to maintain your internet connection. This allows you to work productively, avoid the loss of valuable data, and safely shut down equipment. It currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 4,400 people on Amazon (read reviews), where its list price of $74.99 has been reduced 22% to $58.73.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The idea of crowdfunding to raise enough money to buy NSA-linked hacking tools from the Shadow Brokers is picking up steam and making some people steam.The price tag for getting hold of stolen Equation Group hacking tools is 100 Zcash. When I started the article about the Shadow Brokers revealing details about its June dump of the month subscription service, the cost of 100 Zcash was equal to $22,779. By the time I finished writing, it was equal to $23,251. As I start this article, 100 Zcash is equal to $24,128. By tomorrow, the first day to subscribe to the Shadow Brokers monthly dump service, Zcash will likely cost even more dollars. If you don’t have that kind of money, but want to partake in the spoils of the June dump, then maybe crowdfunding is the way to go?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enterprises aren’t yet managing the risks posed by the swelling wave of IoT technology very well, according to a study released today by the Ponemon Institute.The study, which surveyed 553 enterprise IT decision-makers, found that 78% of respondents thought that it was at least somewhat likely that their organizations would experience data loss or theft enabled by IoT devices within the next two years.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: How John Deere developed one of the best GPS locators in the world + A Skunk Works with tractors: Inside John Deere’s IoT-innovation unitTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A 2016 CapGemini study found that customers believed that their banking experience had improved. They were, in general, happy about the experience they received at their retail banks — a credit to the investment and energy that has been put into transforming front end processes and services. Despite those gains, however, there were two worrying signs. Namely the younger generations — millennials — still scored low on customer experience and gains in customer experience didn’t translate into increased profit.So what does that mean for retail banks in 2017? There’s still work be done, and 2017 might just be the year to do it. Here’s our take on the three things that retail banks should double down on in the year ahead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chat apps. Hotdesks. Smart machines. In most offices, it’s easy to see how technology is redefining and transforming the modern workplace.But technology isn’t the only force driving changes. Culture plays a significant role, too. For example, today’s employees are less and less inclined to disassociate their work lives from their personal lives. Remember when the stereotype for going to work was “punching in” a timecard and adopting some kind of 9-to-5 work persona (h/t Dolly Parton)? Employees no longer want to be typecast like that; they don’t necessarily want to surrender their identities at the office door.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The WannaCry outbreak has been troubling in many regards – exposing flaws, and opening doors to much finger-pointing and blaming that have gone well beyond the handling and disclosure of nation-state cyber weapon stockpiling.The attackers likely had a good idea of how quickly and widely the attack would spread, evidenced by the fact that their ransom demand was created in 28 languages, suggesting that they had very high expectations of the success of their attack.WannaCry targeted Microsoft systems that were not running the latest patches, and older versions of Windows such as Windows XP, which is still widely deployed in the NHS despite being 16 years old and no longer supported by Microsoft, except under custom contracts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Software is now dominating IT spending.My research shows that the combination of SaaS and on-premises software is now a $650 billion market that has seen a steady growth of 6 percent per annum over the past five years. Today, almost all areas of IT are sold at least partially as software, including applications, security, storage and network infrastructure. Software is agile, enables rapid innovation and is a key component of digital transformation.This is one reason why enterprise agreements (EAs) for software have become increasingly popular with corporate buyers. Enterprise agreements are software site licenses that are issued to a large company that brings consistency to pricing and allows for the widespread use of the application throughout the company. EAs have become a common option for almost every large software company today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Recently development and DevOps vendor XebiaLabs reached out to me to see if I’d be keen to talk to one of their customers. XebiaLabs wanted to point out that while they are totally amped on their own products and believe they do awesome things for their customers, the best proof of that is to talk to a real life customer and assess the benefits directly from the horse’s mouth as it where.That sounded like a logical proposition to me, and after a concerted effort by their PR agency to get me to agree to a call (because I’m a little bit busy, and a little bit lazy), I sat down with Paychex's Dave Wilson, director of infrastructure, and Mick Whittemore, vice president of IT, to talk about what Xebia helped them achieve.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The subject of the Internet of Things (IoT) has an extremely broad range of interpretations. Some immediately think of the “thing” itself as a connected thermostat. Others see it as a means to extend products into services. Most interpretations gravitate toward financial reward through data collection and analysis.I recently attended IoT World in Santa Clara, California, and was struck by this diversity. Every conversation I witnessed had a five-minute preamble/negotiation just to agree on a common perspective. It’s kind of like the three blind men and the elephant parable, but instead of three men, it’s 1,000 people touching a sculpture made of wet clay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here