NETWORKING

A Cloudflare outage on Tuesday knocked hundreds of websites and services, including Discord, Shopify, Fitbit, Peleton, various cryptocurrency services, and Cloudflare itself, offline for a number of hours. Founded in 2010, Cloudflare is a US-based content delivery network (CDN) that also provides distributed denial-of-service protection to online domains, speed optimization, and various cybersecurity services. The company faced similar issues last week when an outage in the India region caused several services including Discord, Shopify, Canva…

Financial institutions need to place cloud at the center of their corporate IT transformation strategy.  Cloud is where technologies are converging, and products and solutions are being innovated.  Whether public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud, financial institutions go with different cloud strategies that make sense for their organization. As such, central IT needs to play these three key roles in this transformation decision and implementation for financial institutions: Support the branch banking network Enable customers to…

As educational institutions seek to adopt technologies that power hybrid work and hybrid instruction strategies, one stands out among the rest: cloud calling. It provides advantages that are hard to ignore. This includes better space utilization and the ability to enable environments that have the flexibility for staff, faculty, and students to communicate at an enterprise level. Along with greater security, efficiency, and ease of use, cloud calling addresses a variety of needs paramount to…

Long-term storage—archiving—requires a very different approach than backup and recovery where throughput and deduplication are the main concerns. Archiving calls for storing data for long periods without becoming corrupted, so when it is retrieved, it is exactly what got stored 10 or 20 years ago. For most organizations that reach a certain size, standardized linear tape open (LTO) magnetic tape is the best choice. But for those that cannot justify the cost or believe tape…

I think about you every day. I do not know what it feels like to be forced from my home. I won’t pretend to know; I will probably never fully understand. I’ve never contemplated what I would take with me. I can’t imagine the anguish of losing a child. The best I can do right now is recognize my inability to empathize. I’m not naïve. As a middle-aged white male in the United States, I…

The digital acceleration that is sweeping across organizations has resulted in millions of new IP-based devices getting connected to the network. And the benefits to productivity, efficiency, and flexibility driven by cloud-based analysis has opened up a whole new landscape that is ripe for attack. Wired and wireless networks need to adapt to this reality by having native features to address security. In the same way that zero trust principles are being applied to how…

By: Nav Chander, Head of Service Provider SD-WAN/SASE Product Marketing. Since the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic, enterprise IT staff have been working hard to keep corporate networks on pace with the changing requirements of the business, as most application resources would no longer be serving centralized groups. This meant updating cloud, networking, and security infrastructure to adapt to the new realities of hybrid work. To achieve these aims, enterprise IT teams have…

Your network vendor has probably already told you that network as a service or NaaS would improve your network and bottom line. They’ve probably told you that they offer a NaaS strategy. The first statement is true, and the second is fast becoming irrelevant, because the fact is that you have a better, vendor-independent, NaaS option already.  It’s called the internet. The definition for NaaS that’s recently taken hold is financial more than technical—NaaS is…

Cisco Live has come and gone. If you spent any time at all in the DevNet Zone, I am sure you left smarter and more equipped to tackle tomorrow’s technology challenges! I hope we inspired you on your journey with knowledge on APIs, security trends, observability, SASE, infrastructure as code, and more. About a month ago, I made a list of my 5 favorite things about the DevNet Zone. Now, I’d like to close out…

Day three of Cisco Live 2022 is in the books. It is amazing to be at my first Cisco Live! It was fantastic to get to meet people in person, some of whom I’ve worked with for years but never met in real life. The Cisco Developer Relations (DevRel) team worked hard on the physical DevNet Zone, organizing all the sessions, lightning talks, and workshops. Countless hours went into putting it all together. The hard…