NETWORKING

Manufacturing company Megablok was experiencing frequent network outages that were halting business productivity and forcing employees to work from home. Like most, it blamed its current network and decided to recheck all network cables and expand its broadband to help resolve the issue. Frustratingly, the outages continued to happen. The company learned shortly after that the issues were a result of a cyberattack. There were millions of ransomware attacks in 2020 and hackers continue to…

Graphcore, the British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning, has greatly increased the performance of its massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) servers. Graphcore sells its AI-oriented chips in rack-mounted designs called IPU-PODs. Up until now, the maximum per cabinet has been 64 units (in the IPU-POD64). The newest racks are twice and four times as large: the IPU-POD128 and IPU-POD256. With 32 petaFLOPS of AI compute in the IPU-POD 128…

To say cybersecurity is an in-demand field would be a gross understatement. Last year alone, 3.12 million cybersecurity positions globally remained open, according to (ISC)2.  And a recent Coursera Industry Skills Report reveals that job growth in the industry globally between 2020 to 2025 is projected to result in 149 million new jobs. Cisco Networking Academy is providing a powerful skills-to-job pathway for learners around the world to these in-demand jobs. I had the opportunity…

I grew up in a ravishingly small village in Gujarat, India named Vekariya. My parents were farmers, and I was going to a rural private school where my teachers found me as a bright student. I eventually left school to take up the responsibility of caring for my younger brother, doing house chores, and cooking at the age of seven. All of this, while helping my parents on the farm. After a few days of…

Optical media is the longest lasting medium currently in production. It can reliably hold onto your data for 50-100 years without power or cooling, and without the worry of magnetic degradation.  Using recordable optical media such as DVD-R is perfectly suitable for long-term archiving because it is write-once, read-many, meaning it is physically immutable—cannot be changed—so the data on it is tamper-proof. It seems, then, that optical media might dominate archived storage, but it doesn’t….

Anyone can set up a Wi-Fi network. Setting up a 4G LTE or 5G network, that’s a different story. It took expensive, proprietary hardware from incumbent network equipment manufacturers. Now, thanks to a partnership of Dish Network, Helium Network, and FreedomFi it’s become affordable to set up your own small-scale cellular network. Here’s how it works. Dish Wireless provides the cellular data backbone. If you’re thinking, “but isn’t Dish a satellite TV company?” You’re right,…

The growing impact of hybrid work is resulting in a reassessment of the IT network infrastructure including the ability to glean analytic details from remote workers and ensure collaboration assets are working properly. Going forward, organizations should expect Cisco products that will help to further lock down networks and support application-monitoring and collaboration environments for hybrid workers, Todd Nightingale, the company’s executive vice president and general manager for enterprise networking cloud told Network World head…

Co-authored by Justin Buchanan: Director of Product Management, Security Policy and Access In this digital era, Enterprise IT Operations are beset with challenges such as security, seamless end-to-end connectivity and policy consistency. Dealing with campus environment itself is challenging because of the very nature of users bringing in their own devices as well as IoT requirements entering the network space. The solution is to go software-defined as much as they can. Cisco Software-Defined Access along…

The demands of hybrid work require secure connectivity, flexibility, sustainability, and environmental health and wellness. All at once. Now this may seem daunting at first blush, but with the right network infrastructure and the right partners, you can unleash your building “super-power” to handle it all. And that super-power gets its energy with a network infrastructure powered by 90W Power over Ethernet or 90W PoE. 90W PoE opens the doors to a vast array of…

Every IT organization strives for excellence by continuously driving down their operating expenses (OPEX) while providing the best-in-class experience to their user base. Several factors affect OPEX, such as increasing IT cases that require more resources to address recurring requests. Having a focused approach to reduce cases can significantly optimize on cost and improve the efficiency of IT Operations teams. One way that Cisco IT is driving down OPEX is by harnessing the power of…