Powering smart cities is one of the most ambitious use cases for the internet of things (IoT), combining a wide variety of IoT technologies to create coherent systems that span not just individual buildings or campuses but entire metropolises. As such, smart cities offer a window into the evolution of enterprise IoT technologies and implementations on the largest scale.And that’s why I connected with Christophe Fourtet, CSO and co-founder of Sigfox, a French global network operator, to learn more about using wireless networks to connect large numbers of low-power objects, ranging from smartwatches to electricity meters. (And I have to admit I was intrigued by the 0G network moniker, which conjured visions of weightless IoT devices floating in space, or maybe OG-style old-school authenticity. That’s not at all what it’s about, of course.)To read this article in full, please click here
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
Get ready for a future of disposable of internet of things (IoT) devices, one that will mean everything is connected to networks. It will be particularly useful in logistics, being used in single-use plastics in retail packaging and throw-away shippers’ carboard boxes.How it will happen? The answer is when non-hazardous, disposable bio-batteries make it possible. And that moment might be approaching. Researchers say they’re closer to commercializing a bacteria-powered miniature battery that they say will propel the IoDT.[ Learn more: Download a PDF bundle of five essential articles about IoT in the enterprise ]
The “internet of disposable things is a new paradigm for the rapid evolution of wireless sensor networks,” says Seokheun Choi, an associate professor at Binghamton University, in an article on the school’s website.To read this article in full, please click here
The “Shift Left” concept is all about efficiency and quality. In software development, shifting left means performing testing early and often in the project lifecycle instead of waiting until the end. By discovering and addressing errors and bugs earlier, teams can ultimately deliver a higher quality product, one that is better aligned with addressing customers’ needs.In support, it means shifting requests as close to the customer as possible – which includes offering the ability self-serve. Moving solutions closer to the operational frontline and to the point of the first issue allows customers get answers quicker and organizations to close tickets faster. There are 3 big benefits of taking this approach:To read this article in full, please click here
Linux debugging has taken a giant step forward with the release of Live Recorder 5.0 from Undo. Just released on Wednesday, this product makes debugging on multi-process systems significantly easier. Based on flight recorder technology, it delves more deeply into processes to provide insight into what’s going on within each process. This includes memory, threads, program flow, service calls and more. To make this possible, Live Recorder 5.0's record, replay and debugging capabilities have been enhanced with the ability to:
Record the exact order in which processes altered shared memory variables. It is even possible to zero in on specific variables and skip backward to the last line of code in any process that altered the variable.
Expose potential defects by randomizing thread execution to help reveal race conditions, crashes and other multi-threading defects.
Record and replay the execution of individual Kubernetes and Docker containers to help resolve defects faster in microservices environments.
The Undo Live Recorder enables engineering teams to record and replay the execution of any software program -- no matter how complex -- and to diagnose and fix the root cause of any issue in test or production.To read this article in full, please Continue reading
How do you deal with change? It’s one of the questions of our era.We can see technology disruption play out in a number of industries like computing where the mainframe gave way to the PC that gave way to the smartphone. Change sneaks up on you and before you can craft a response, those new technologies disrupt your business.Networking has seen plenty of changes over the years and when they arrive they often look disruptive at the outset. When I talk to customers about SD-WAN, some ask whether SD-WAN is so disruptive they can essentially replace their MPLS backbone with a mix of broadband providers plus a commodity box– and essentially rely on the public Internet as their backbone. Some of them even have one of those boxes they are experimenting with.To read this article in full, please click here
The use of digital or virtual assistants and chatbots has picked up momentum with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). These automated assistants have been around for years, but they haven't been all that useful, as they required a significant amount of programming to look for certain keywords and then the responses were based on logical guesses. The infusion of AI, however, has made these systems much smarter and now natural language queries can be made and responses are in plain English (or other languages).Many businesses have adopted digital assistants and chatbots to improve customer service. For example, Atom Tickets uses conversational AI to enable people to book movie tickets and even dinner with just a short sentence instead of having to go through the rigmarole of going back and forth with discrete commands.To read this article in full, please click here
A Japanese telecommunications giant and a California-based drone builder intend to start a drone-delivered internet service by 2023. The two companies, Softbank and AeroVironment, say they’ve assembled the first one already, according to materials (pdf) on SoftBank’s website in April.The HAWK30 drone has a wingspan of 260 feet and is powered by solar panels mounted on the wings that drive 10 electric motors. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will fly in the stratosphere at 65,000 feet above sea level (12 miles), AeroVironment says in a press release. That’s around twice the altitude that many passenger planes fly at.To read this article in full, please click here
The rapidly growing hyperconverged infrastructure industry – IDC says converged-systems revenue grew 14.8 percent year-over-year in the last quarter of 2018 – is starting to consolidate, with tech giants HPE, Juniper Networks, Cisco and Red Hat all buying promising HCI startups.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
There’s a lot of interest in 5G by enterprises that see is as a way to provide higher bandwidth, lower latency connectivity including IoT applications.In this video, analyst Jack Gold discusses 5G and these uses in more detail, as well as the flap between the U.S. and Huawei over banning the Chinese company’s technology from 5G networks here.Also see The time of 5G is almost hereTo read this article in full, please click here
Deploying zero trust software-defined perimeter (SDP) architecture is not about completely replacing virtual private network (VPN) technologies and firewalls. By and large, the firewall demarcation points that mark the inside and outside are not going away anytime soon. The VPN concentrator will also have its position for the foreseeable future.A rip and replace is a very aggressive deployment approach regardless of the age of technology. And while SDP is new, it should be approached with care when choosing the correct vendor. An SDP adoption should be a slow migration process as opposed to the once off rip and replace. As I wrote about on Network Insight [Disclaimer: the author is employed by Network Insight], while SDP is a disruptive technology, after discussing with numerous SDP vendors, I have discovered that the current SDP landscape tends to be based on specific use cases and projects, as opposed to a technology that has to be implemented globally. To start with, you should be able to implement SDP for only certain user segments.To read this article in full, please click here
Tiny cheap satellites, self-organizing and communicating as a group, could shift the internet of things (IoT) to space. The postage-stamp-sized devices, acting as sensors, just like the ones we see in traditional IoT networks could perform tasks such as mapping or studying Earth, say scientists involved in a recent successful launch of the disposable nanosatellites.The test satellites, essentially just sensors, were deployed in a batch in March. They captured data, communicated with one another, and then after a couple of days in orbit, as was planned, burned up as they reentered the atmosphere.[ IoT in the enterprise: Download a PDF bundle of five essential articles about IoT in the enterprise ]
“This is like the PC revolution for space,” says Zac Manchester, an assistant professor at Stanford University, in an article on the school’s website. Manchester invented the ChipSats 10 years ago. It has taken until now, and after a failed attempt in 2014, to get the constellation operational—if just for those few days.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and IBM said the companies would meld their data-center and cloud technologies to help customers more easily and securely build and support on-premises and hybrid-cloud applications.Cisco, IBM Cloud and IBM Global Technology Services (the professional services business of IBM) said they will work to develop a hybrid-cloud architecture that melds Cisco’s data-center, networking and analytics platforms with IBM’s cloud offerings. IBM's contribution includea a heavy emphasis on Kubernetes-based offerings such as Cloud Foundry and Cloud Private as well as a catalog of IBM enterprise software such as Websphere and open source software such as Open Whisk, KNative, Istio and Prometheus.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and IBM said the companies would meld their data-center and cloud technologies to help customers more easily and securely build and support on-premises and hybrid-cloud applications.Cisco, IBM Cloud and IBM Global Technology Services (the professional services business of IBM) said they will work to develop a hybrid-cloud architecture that melds Cisco’s data-center, networking and analytics platforms with IBM’s cloud offerings. IBM's contribution includea a heavy emphasis on Kubernetes-based offerings such as Cloud Foundry and Cloud Private as well as a catalog of IBM enterprise software such as Websphere and open source software such as Open Whisk, KNative, Istio and Prometheus.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has released two critical warnings about security issues with its SD-WAN and DNA Center software packages. The worse, with a Common Vulnerability Scoring System rating of 9.3 out of 10, is a vulnerability in its Digital Network Architecture (DNA) Center software that could let an unauthenticated attacker connect an unauthorized network device to the subnet designated for cluster services.
More about SD-WAN
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How to pick an off-site data-backup method
SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it
What are the options for security SD-WAN?
A successful exploit could let an attacker reach internal services that are not hardened for external access, Cisco stated. The vulnerability is due to insufficient access restriction on ports necessary for system operation, and the company discovered the issue during internal security testing, Cisco stated.To read this article in full, please click here
I remember a time when people at Salesforce events would hand out pins that read “Software” inside a red circle with a slash through it. The High Priest of SaaS (a.k.a. CEO Marc Benioff) was so adamant against installed, on-premises software that his keynotes were always comical.Now, Salesforce is prepared to spend $15.7 billion to acquire Tableau Software, the leader in on-premises data analytics.On the hell-freezes-over scale, this is up there with Microsoft embracing Linux or Apple PR people returning a phone call. Well, we know at least one of those has happened.To read this article in full, please click here
“As market after market switches on 5G, we are at a truly momentous point in time. No previous generation of mobile technology has had the potential to drive economic growth to the extent that 5G promises. It goes beyond connecting people to fully realizing the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”—The opening paragraph of the June 2019 Ericsson Mobility ReportAlmost every significant technology advancement now goes through what Gartner calls the “hype cycle.” These days, Everyone expects new technologies to be met with gushing optimism and dreamy visions of how it’s going to change the world in the blink of an eye. After a while, we all come to expect the vendors and the press to go overboard with excitement, at least until reality and disappointment set in when things don’t pan out exactly as expected.To read this article in full, please click here
The era of digital transformation has injected new life into the old wisdom, “the only constant in life is change.” In our plugged-in world, change is happening at a breakneck pace and it’s pretty much impacting everything, including support. How users want to be supported and what defines a good support experience seems to be constantly evolving as the devices, connections, and channels users choose changes.So when it comes to providing fast and easy support for internal employees or external customers, what worked yesterday probably won’t carry you through tomorrow. Companies must strategize on how to keep up in this new support landscape or be left behind by your customers and the competition.To read this article in full, please click here
If you haven’t been paying close attention, you might not have noticed a small but significant change in how Linux systems work with respect to runtime data. A re-arrangement of how and where it’s accessible in the file system started taking hold about eight years ago. And while this change might not have been big enough of a splash to wet your socks, it provides some additional consistency in the Linux file system and is worthy of some exploration.To get started, cd your way over to /run. If you use df to check it out, you’ll see something like this:$ df -k .
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 609984 2604 607380 1% /run
Identified as a “tmpfs” (temporary file system), we know that the files and directories in /run are not stored on disk but only in volatile memory. They represent data kept in memory (or disk-based swap) that takes on the appearance of a mounted file system to allow it to be more accessible and easier to manage.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware punched up its data-center network virtualization capabilities by announcing it would buy Avi Networks load balancing, analytics and application-delivery technology for an undisclosed amount.Founded in 2012 by a group of Cisco engineers and executives, Avi offers a variety of software-defined products and services including a software-based application delivery controller (ADC) and intelligent web-application firewall. The software already integrates with VMware vCenter and NSX, OpenStack, third party SDN controllers, as well as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift and container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker.To read this article in full, please click here