802.11ac wave 2 is the splashy new kid in the wireless technology pool, but some experts caution that you might not want to let it play without lifeguards present just yet.Wave 2 access points are now available from major wireless vendors, and have started to make inroads into the enterprise. The technology has been gaining ground in sales statistics recently, to the point where it’s starting to undercut sales of first-gen 802.11ac gear.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Study shows 802.11ac wave 2 APs gaining sales ground + US lawmakers question police use of facial recognition techTo read this article in full, please click here
I know, I know, I’ve heard it before. A new technology comes along, and it promises to be the next big thing. Consumers and businesses buy it, and what happens? It fails to live up to the hype. In my opinion, almost every iPhone release over the past five years has been that way. Sure there were some cool new features, but overall it’s not something I’d say was game changing. One technology that does promise to live up to the hype is 802.11ax, the next standard for wireless LANs. I say that because this next generation of Wi-Fi was engineered for the world we live in where everything is connected and there’s an assumption that upload and download traffic will be equivalent. Previous generations of Wi-Fi assumed more casual use and that there would be far more downloading of information than uploading. To read this article in full, please click here
Three years after acquiring FPGA maker Altera for $16.7 billion, Intel’s strategy and positioning is coming into focus with the disclosure of its plans for Stratix 10 hardware and accompanying application development and acceleration stack.Altera made two FPGAs, chips that are reprogrammable to do different functions. The Arria 10, which is the low-end card, and Stratix 10, the high-performance card. The two are aimed at different target markets and use cases.“Each has its own tier, its own sweet spot for features and form factor,” said Sabrina Gomez, director of product marketing at Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group. “Arria is smaller, fits in 1U form factors. Stratix is dual PCI card. The power draw for Arria is 75 watts, while it’s 225 watts for Stratix.”To read this article in full, please click here
The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is having a big impact on lots of areas within enterprise IT, and data analytics is one of them.Companies are gathering huge volumes of information from all kinds of connected of objects, such as data about how consumers are using certain products, the performance of corporate assets, and the environmental conditions in which systems operate. By applying advanced analytics to these incoming streams of data, organizations can gain new insights that can help them make more informed decisions about which actions to take. And with companies placing IoT sensors on more and more objects, the volumes of incoming data will continue to grow.To read this article in full, please click here
Some Cisco Webex users are still having some problems with the collaboration system over a week after the service went dark. According to the company’s website a major outage began on September 25 and shut down all Webex services from – Calling, Meetings, Control Hub, Hybrid Services and Team. At the time the company stated that “Webex Teams services are currently impacted by an ongoing service outage. Engineering resources are online and working to restore services. We apologize for the impact and all hands are on deck to restore Teams, Meetings, Calling, Care and Context services.”To read this article in full, please click here
Like any kind of large-scale computing system deployment ever, the short answer to the question “what should my fog compute deployment look like” is going to be “it varies.” But since that’s not a particularly useful piece of information, Cisco principal engineer and systems architect Chuck Byers gave an overview on Wednesday at the 2018 Fog World Congress of the many variables, both technical and organizational, that go into the design, care and feeding of a fog computing setup.Byers offered both general tips about the architecture of fog computing systems, as well as slightly deeper dives into the specific areas that all fog computing deployments will have to address, including different types of hardware, networking protocols, and security.To read this article in full, please click here
In a wide-ranging, free-form chat on Tuesday night in San Francisco at the 2018 Fog World Congress, legendary computing figure Steve Wozniak discussed the future of technology and its role in making the world a better place.Taking the stage alongside the senior director of Cisco’s corporate strategic innovation group, Helder Antunes, Wozniak took the audience through his personal history with technology, from phone hacking in the late 1970s, through his up-and-down relationship with Steve Jobs and Apple, to his current role as a sort of ambassador for the good that technology can do for the world.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s the classic Industrial IoT problem – a 40-plant network of old-school manufacturing and production lines, run digitally by 9,000 outdated programmable logic controllers running on legacy Windows industrial PCs, was having difficulty in minimizing downtime.According to fog computing and automation startup Nebbiolo Technologies – which declined to name the client directly, saying only that it’s a “global” company – the failure of one of those Windows IPCs could result in up to 6 hours of downtime for said client. They wanted that time cut down to minutes. More on IoT: What is the IoT? How the internet of things works What edge computing is and how it’s changing the network 10 hot IoT startups to watch The 6 ways to make money in IoT What is digital twin technology and why does it matter? Getting grounded in IoT networking and security Building IoT-ready networks must become a priority What is the Industrial IoT? Why are the stakes so high? It’s a tricky issue. If those 9,000 machines were all in a data center, you could simply virtualize the whole thing and call it a day, according to Nebbiolo’s vice president of product management, Hugo Vliegen. But it's a Continue reading
Cisco today said it has teamed with SAP to make it easier for customers to manage high volumes of data from multi-cloud and distributed data center resources.The companies announced that Cisco’s Container Platform will work with SAP’s Data Hub to integrate large data sets that may be in public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Hadoop, Microsoft or Google, and integrate them with private cloud or enterprise apps such as SAP S/4 HANA.[ Check out our 12 most powerful hyperconverged infrasctructure vendors. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Cisco introduced its Kubernetes-based Container Platform in January and said it allows for self-service deployment and management of container clusters. SAP rolled out the Data Hub about a year ago, saying it provides visibility, orchestration and access to a broad range of data systems and assets while enabling the fast creation of powerful, organization-spanning data pipelines.To read this article in full, please click here
The Web Application Firewall (WAF) issue didn't seem to me as a big deal until I actually started to dig deeper into the ongoing discussion in this field. It generally seems that vendors are trying to convince customers and themselves that everything is going smooth and that there is not a problem. In reality, however, customers don’t buy it anymore and the WAF industry is under a major pressure as constantly failing on the customer quality perspective.There have also been red flags raised from the use of the runtime application self-protection (RASP) technology. There is now a trend to enter the mitigation/defense side into the application and compile it within the code. It is considered that the runtime application self-protection is a shortcut to securing software that is also compounded by performance problems. It seems to be a desperate solution to replace the WAFs, as no one really likes to mix its “security appliance” inside the application code, which is exactly what the RASP vendors are currently offering to their customers. However, some vendors are adopting the RASP technology.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco said today it had closed the $2.35 billion deal it made for network identity, authentication security company Duo.According to Cisco, Duo’s zero trust security model authorizes secure connections to all applications based on the trustworthiness of users and devices. Duo’s cloud-delivered technology lets IT professionals set and enforce risk-based, adaptive access policies and get enhanced visibility into users’ devices and activities. As more devices come onto the network remotely this issue takes on more importance.“Outdated devices are particularly vulnerable to being compromised, which can easily spiral into a full-blown, major breach,” wrote Richard Archdeacon, Duo Advisory CISO about a recent Duo study on remote access security. “Organizations don’t necessarily need to block individuals from using their personal devices, but they do need to re-shape their security models to fit these evolving working practices…If you don’t know what’s connecting to the network, how can you protect data from being compromised? “To read this article in full, please click here
Many companies boast about going entirely digital, but continue to work with mountains of documents. Don't be that company.The bulk of said documents are normally those that require signatures, like contracts, tax forms, reimbursement sheets, and — well, the list is seemingly endless, which also means that the work allocated to creating and organizing them also never stops. A simple solution? Electronic signatures or eSignatures.Having the same legal weight as handwritten signatures, eSignatures could revolutionize the way you do business, and could potentially pave the way for more profit and innovation. And using a renowned tool like HelloSign can help ease your journey in the transition.To read this article in full, please click here
The Internet of Things (IoT) didn’t just create smart houses and enable predictive analytics for industrial applications. It’s also creating a wide variety of new business opportunities and spawning new threats and challenges. Sometimes, all those things happen at once.At least, that’s my takeaway from a new partnership between AT&T and Dedrone, a drone detection technology startup based in San Francisco. (De-drone, get it?)Using IoT sensor data to detect drone threats According an AT&T spokesperson, “AT&T and Dedrone are teaming up to deploy IoT sensor technology to protect against malicious drones. Powered exclusively by AT&T, and using sensor data like radio frequency, visual, and radar, Dedrone detects and classifies approaching drones, pinpointing their locations and triggering alarms to alert security.”To read this article in full, please click here
The latest update to the Wi-Fi protocol standard, 802.11ax, has been designed to transmit data even faster, to better negotiate bandwidth among several computers and other devices connected to a network, and to more reliably deliver high-bandwidth applications to them, such as streaming video, than the protocol standard it succeeds, 802.11ac.To take advantage of these gains, client and networking devices need to have hardware that supports the new protocol, of course. Many network device makers have announced 802.11ax products to come. They’ve also filed 802.11ax devices with the FCC for licensing, which reveal more technical information about them.To read this article in full, please click here
Hitachi Vantara launched a wide range of new hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) systems, software management, and automation tools at its Hitachi Next 2018 conference taking place in San Diego.The move is meant to be a convergence of products, just as Hitachi Ventara as a company is going through a convergence. The U.S. subsidiary of the Japanese tech giant was formed last year by combining three business units: Hitachi Data Systems, the systems and storage infrastructure business; the Hitachi Insight Group IoT business; and the Pentaho Big Data business.With on-premises hardware falling out of favor to the cloud, Hitachi Vantara is trying to help customers that keep on-prem systems get the most out of their systems and bring as much of the cloud experience to the data center.To read this article in full, please click here
Over the past five years, SD-WANs deployments have skyrocketed. And for good reason: They increase network agility and cut the cost of network transport.One common myth about SD-WANs, however, is that they improve application performance. They certainly can under some circumstances, but there is no guarantee they will under all situations. SD-WANs address only part of the transformation of the network to becoming a digital enabler. SD-WANs must now become smarter, or “application aware,” to optimize user experience, improve customer service, and increase worker productivity. The requirement to have an application-aware network has never been more urgent, as application performance has a direct impact on a company’s top and bottom line. For example, according to an Accenture survey, 66 percent of millennials have changed their brand loyalties because of a bad user experience. Also, a recent ZK Research survey found that workers are 14 percent less productive than they could be as a result of poor application performance. Make no mistake; poorly performing applications are costing companies today.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco Webex users continue to experience intermittent problems today, some 24 hours after a complete outage of the collaboration system started – a situation that prompted company CEO Chuck Robbins to Tweet:“The @webex outage today is unacceptable, and we apologize for the disruption caused to you, our customers. Webex Meetings is now functional. Our engineers are working to restore Webex Teams and ensure this doesn’t happen again. Thank you for your patience & trust.”RELATED: 4 reasons Microsoft Teams will kill Slack… and 4 reasons it won’t According to the company’s website, a major outage began at 0122 GMT on Sept. 25, 2018, and shut down all Webex services, including Calling, Meetings, Control Hub, Hybrid Services, and Team. To read this article in full, please click here
Edge computing can greatly improve the efficiency of gathering, processing and analyzing data gathered by arrays of IoT devices, but it’s also an essential place to inject security between these inherently vulnerable devices and the rest of the corporate network.First designed for the industrial IoT (IIoT), edge computing refers places placing an edge router or gateway locally with a group of IIoT endpoints, such as an arrangement of connected valves, actuators and other equipment on a factory floor.To read this article in full, please click here
Unfortunately, as cyberthreats have evolved, over 86% of companies that leave DNS unmonitored have not modernized their DNS to help thwart malware before malicious adversaries exploit the glaring hole on the network. This blog looks at the ways threats have evolved to take advantage of legacy DNS, and what organizations should do now to increase their defenses and reduce their attack surface.Remember when cyberattacks were delivered via faxes from Nigerian princes? Although the objective – separating a business from its money – hasn’t changed much, the methodologies certainly have. In the 80s and 90s, when enterprise networks were beginning to connect to the internet, DNS was simply the phone book that translated domain name to IP address. Soon enough, bad actors evolved from phreaking to phishing, dropping telephone scams in favor of the rapidly spreading internet, bombarding users with seemingly innocuous emails whose goal was to harvest network account and password information to gain inside access to applications, data, and ultimately money.To read this article in full, please click here
High-speed Ethernet is taking center stage this week at the European Conference on Optical Communication in Rome, Italy where a number of vendors including Arista, Cisco and Huawei are showing off gear that will power large-enterprise and hyperscale networks.The key demos come from the Ethernet Alliance and the 100G Lambda multisource agreement (MSA) group that are pushing technology advances needed to support 400G Ethernet, including new pulse amplitude modulation or PAM4 for electrical and optical interfaces, high-bandwidth switching silicon and a new high-density pluggable connector system known as QSFP-DD.To read this article in full, please click here