There's no doubt about it: We have entered the experience economy, and digital performance is more important than ever.Customer experience is the top brand differentiator, topping price and every other factor. And businesses that provide a poor digital experience will find customers will actively seek a competitor. In fact, recent ZK Research found that in 2018, about two-thirds of millennials changed loyalties to a brand because of a bad experience. (Note: I am an employee of ZK Research.)To help companies determine if their online performance is leading, lacking, or on par with some of the top companies, ThousandEyes this week released its 2019 Digital Experience Performance Benchmark Report. This document provides a comparative analysis of web, infrastructure, and network performance from the top 20 U.S. digital retail, travel, and media websites. Although this is a small sampling of companies, those three industries are the most competitive when it comes to using their digital platforms for competitive advantage. The aggregated data from this report can be used as an industry-agnostic performance benchmark that all companies should strive to meet.To read this article in full, please click here
The combination of a blockchain-like distributed network, along with the ability to locate data at the edge will massively speed up future networks, such as those used by the internet of things (IoT), claims Bluzelle in announcing what is says is the first decentralized data delivery network (DDN).Distributed DDNs will be like content delivery networks (CDNs) that now cache content around the world to speed up the web, but in this case, it will be for data, the Singapore-based company explains. Distributed key-value (blockchain) networks and edge computing built into Bluzelle's system will provide significantly faster delivery than existing caching, the company claims in a press release announcing its product.To read this article in full, please click here
People love to eat in their cars. That’s why we invented the drive-in and the drive-thru.But despite a fast-food outlet on the corner of every major intersection, it turns out we were only scratching the surface of this idea. Burger King is taking this concept to the next logical step with its new IoT-powered Traffic Jam Whopper project.I have to admit, when I first heard about this, I thought it was a joke, but apparently the Traffic Jam Whopper project is totally real and has already passed a month-long test in Mexico City. While the company hasn’t specified a timeline, it plans to roll out the Traffic Jam Whopper project in Los Angeles (where else?) and other traffic-plagued megacities such as São Paulo and Shanghai.To read this article in full, please click here
This is the second blog of a two-part blog series that explores SD-WAN and the future of networking in the 5G era. Part 1 “SD-WAN with 4G LTE is a Reality” can be found here.5G, a game-changer for an ultra-high-speed, hyperconnected world
Telecommunications providers are racing to roll out the fifth generation of mobile wireless technology to meet today’s explosive bandwidth and network connectivity demands. 5G is poised to revolutionize several industries by bringing significantly faster connections, shorter delays and increased connectivity for users. It will aid the expansion of “internet of things” (IoT), creating a virtual network of ultra-high-speed connections across multiple devices. To read this article in full, please click here
Internet of things (IoT) vendors and pundits like to crow about the billions and billions of connected devices that make the IoT so ubiquitous and powerful. But how much of that installed base is really relevant to the enterprise?To find out, I traded emails with Rob Mesirow, principal at PwC’s Connected Solutions, the firm’s new one-stop-shop of IoT solutions, who suggests that consumer adoption may not paint a true picture of the enterprise opportunities. If you remove the health trackers and the smart thermostats from the market, he suggested, there are very few connected devices left.To read this article in full, please click here
Internet of things (IoT) vendors and pundits like to crow about the billions and billions of connected devices that make the IoT so ubiquitous and powerful. But how much of that installed base is really relevant to the enterprise?To find out, I traded emails with Rob Mesirow, principal at PwC’s Connected Solutions, the firm’s new one-stop-shop of IoT solutions, who suggests that consumer adoption may not paint a true picture of the enterprise opportunities. If you remove the health trackers and the smart thermostats from the market, he suggested, there are very few connected devices left.To read this article in full, please click here
One of the great challenges with automation in the telecom industry is that the networking and IT domains remain heavily siloed in many service providers today, with hundreds or even thousands of manual processes required to map data from Operation Support Systems (planning, fulfillment, assurance, etc.) to network management and orchestration systems. Not only does this lead to a lot of “swivel-chair” operations to bridge the gap, but fragmented data systems reduce the visibility into real-time service and network state. The quick fix is to over-provision network resources to cope with this lack of visibility, but that leads to unnecessarily high Capex in addition to the Opex overhead associated with highly manual operations.To read this article in full, please click here
Extreme Networks has taken the wraps off a new security application it says will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to help customers effectively monitor, detect and automatically remediate security issues with networked IoT devices.The application – ExtremeAI security—features machine-learning technology that can understand typical behavior of IoT devices and automatically trigger alerts when endpoints act in unusual or unexpected ways, Extreme said.
More about edge networkingTo read this article in full, please click here
Remote support has long been offered to customers on desktops and laptops, but with the rise of mobile devices, times are changing. If you haven’t already considered a mobile-first support strategy, now’s the time to create one.Most people spend an average of 5 hours a day on their mobile devices, a statistic that you won’t find too surprising if you’re reading this on a mobile device. Increasingly, we rely on our mobile devices in our personal and work lives, and in many cases, customers are ditching their laptops and moving entirely to mobile.It stands to reason that if mobile is where customers are, support teams should be there too. The problem is, remote support was originally created for desktops and is often offered through channels that aren’t always readily available to mobile users, like live chat. That’s why it makes sense for support teams to look at remote support from the other side: mobile-first. This allows you to create a remote support experience that’s consistent across web and mobile, including how tickets feed into the same queue for fast resolution, and how diagnostic data is presented for the device, operating system, network, and more. Doing so enables your Continue reading
Four vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed related to Intel microprocessors. These vulnerabilities allow unprivileged attackers to bypass restrictions to gain read access to privileged memory. They include these common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs):
CVE-2018-12126 - a flaw that could lead to information disclosure from the processor store buffer
CVE-2018-12127 - an exploit of the microprocessor load operations that can provide data to an attacker about CPU registers and operations in the CPU pipeline
CVE-2018-12130 - the most serious of the three issues and involved the implementation of the microprocessor fill buffers and can expose data within that buffer
CVE-2019-11091 - a flaw in the implementation of the "fill buffer," a mechanism used by modern CPUs when a cache-miss is made on L1 CPU cache
[ Also read: Linux hardening: a 15-step checklist for a secure Linux server ]
Red Hat customers should update their systems
Security updates will degrade system performance, but Red Hat strongly suggests that customers update their systems whether or not they believe themselves to be at risk.To read this article in full, please click here
Nutanix is adding a data backup and recovery software package called Nutanix Mine to its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offerings, which integrates third-party data backup and recovery software with Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software.This allows Nutanix customers to manage their primary and secondary data storage and backup and recovery through a single management console. Nutanix claims that Mine will streamline overall deployment and will simplify the full lifecycle of data backup operations, including ongoing management, scaling and troubleshooting.Nutanix Mine will support a number of data backup and recovery software products, including Veeam, HYCU, Commvault, Veritas, and Unitrends.To read this article in full, please click here
Running out of memory on a Linux system is generally not a sign that there's a serious problem. Why? Because a healthy Linux system will cache disk activity in memory, basically gobbling memory that isn't being used, which is a very good thing.In other words, it doesn't allow memory to go to waste. It uses the spare memory to increase disk access speed, and it does this without taking memory away from running applications. This memory caching, as you might well imagine, is hundreds of times faster than working directly with the hard-disk drives (HDD) and significantly faster than solid-state drives. Full or near full memory normally means that a system is running as efficiently as it can — not that it's running into problems.To read this article in full, please click here
For the companies looking to implement the biggest and most complex IoT setups in the world, the idea of pairing up with AWS, Google Cloud or Azure seems to be one whose time has come. Within the last two months, BMW and Volkswagen have both announced large-scale deals with Microsoft and Amazon, respectively, to help operate their extensive network of operational technology.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)
Server maker Supermicro, based in Fremont, California, is reportedly moving production out of China over customer concerns that the Chinese government had secretly inserted chips for spying into its motherboards.The claims were made by Bloomberg late last year in a story that cited more than 100 sources in government and private industry, including Apple and Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Apple CEO Tim Cook and AWS CEO Andy Jassy denied the claims and called for Bloomberg to retract the article. And a few months later, the third-party investigations firm Nardello & Co examined the claims and cleared Supermicro of any surreptitious activity.To read this article in full, please click here
The cloud is not just important; it's mission-critical for many companies. More and more IT and business leaders I talk to look at public cloud as a core component of their digital transformation strategies — using it as part of their hybrid cloud or public cloud implementation.That raises the bar on cloud reliability, as a cloud outage means important services are not available to the business. If this is a business-critical service, the company may not be able to operate while that key service is offline.Because of the growing importance of the cloud, it’s critical that buyers have visibility into the reliability number for the cloud providers. The challenge is the cloud providers don't disclose the disruptions in a consistent manner. In fact, some are confusing to the point where it’s difficult to glean any kind of meaningful conclusion.To read this article in full, please click here
Christine Keck, Analyst Relations Leader, Ciena
Andy Youé, Vice President for Sales & Delivery, Ciena Blue Planet
Ciena Blue Planet now operates as its own division within Ciena. This news was announced on December 13, 2018, as part of Ciena’s Fiscal 2018 earnings call, and the decision took effect in November at the start of Ciena’s new fiscal year. This move was made to allow Ciena to continue honing our focus and resources on addressing the high-growth market opportunity for intelligent software automation.To read this article in full, please click here
Leaping toward the next generation of wireless-based data communications, researchers say they are making progress extracting and sending data using semiconductor lasers that churn out radio signals across multiple frequencies all at the same time. Data could conceivably be transmitted hundreds of time faster than today’s traditional Radio Frequency (RF) wireless, engineers believe.It’s the “first laser-radio transmitter,” Harvard University proclaims of its invention in an article on its John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) website.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco has released a patch for a critical vulnerability in software used to control large virtual environments.The weakness gets a 10 out of 10 severity score and is found in Cisco’s Elastic Services Controller (ESC), which the company describes as offering a single point of control to manage all aspects of Virtual Network Functions and offers capabilities such as VM and service monitoring, auto-recovery and dynamic scaling. With ESC users control the lifecycle all virtualized resources, whether using Cisco or third-party VNFs, Cisco stated.RELATED: What IT admins love/hate about 8 top network monitoring tools
The vulnerability in this case lies in the REST API of ESC and could let an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass authentication on the REST API and execute arbitrary actions through with administrative privileges on an affected system. The vulnerability is due to improper validation of API requests, Cisco wrote in its advisory.To read this article in full, please click here
Cloud backup vendor Backblaze issued its latest quarterly findings for hard-disk drive (HDD) reliability, and it shows a slight uptick in failure rates — but hardly something to fret over.All told, Backblaze has 106,238 hard drives spinning in three data center colocations, and every quarter it highlights the failure rate of each model drive it uses. The company first came to prominence several years ago when it highlighted an abnormally high failure rate of Seagate drives.The problem arose about two years after massive floods in Thailand (around 2011) ruined the manufacturing facilities of several hard drive manufacturers, with Seagate taking it especially hard. I did some reporting back then for a now-defunct publication and found out that some corners were cut to get hard drive production going again and that those cuts resulted in a bunch of time bomb hard drives with higher than average failure rates.To read this article in full, please click here
No big surprise here: the number of support tickets increased again last year, following the same trend it has for nearly a decade. More than 57% of organizations reported an increase in ticket volume in 2018, according to the latest HDI Technical Support Practices & Salary Report.The question is, why? It seems clear that end users are now fully acclimatized to using technology in the workplace, so what’s triggering this very consistent increase in support incidents and issues?It comes down to three factors:Greater complexity in the technology environment. Nearly 50% of organizations are supporting Internet of Things (IoT) devices, with more businesses following suit to stay competitive. These IoT devices scan, measure, and report on the network, adding a whole new world of support issues to manage.To read this article in full, please click here