NETWORKING

As mixed cloud environments take hold and enterprises combine hosted infrastructure with private cloud and on-premises IT, networking professionals need to stay up on the latest developments in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud technologies. A good way to do that is by earning certifications. There are plenty of certifications to choose from – which has its advantages and disadvantages. There’s no one prominent hybrid cloud or multi-cloud certification, most of them are vendor specific, and some…

What climbs have you been on since 2020? It’s February 2020 and I am nearing a mountain peak in Spain. I am on my hands and knees climbing up now. My hands are slipping on tiny, jagged rocks and I am really struggling to keep my footing. I’m not Samwise Gamgee or Frodo Baggins and this isn’t Mount Doom – but it’s close. It’s been a several hour journey to get to here and I…

My wife and I have been watching the Netflix show, Arrested Development, which features the song, The Final Countdown, by Europe. It recurs when the magician character, Gob, enters the scene to perform tricks for his audience. This epic song builds hype and anticipation for the event. The song also puts me in the same anticipatory mood as I think about the first in-person event I will have attended for Cisco Live in a long,…

On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, Guns N’ Roses released their “Use Your Illusion I and II” albums in conjunction with the Use Your Illusion Tour. I remember walking to my local music store to purchase both CDs. I was planning a special event for our student-run bar, The Rathskeller, at the University of Miami to play both CDs in their entirety. I still have the flyers promoting the event and the concert tickets from GNR’s…

As an enterprise developer, you care about API quality. That’s why at Cisco we are putting so much attention on the design, implementation, and documentation of our APIs published for internal or external consumption. For many of our APIs – from security and network controllers, to collaboration and IoT – we have standardized on a REST style and invested in methodology and tooling around the OpenAPI Specification (OAS). What is the OpenAPI Specification? Perhaps you…

The pandemic has directed the way we work for the past two years, and it has brought its challenges and opportunities for Cisco IT. We were forced to invert a largely in-person model to a model that was mostly remote. We pivoted quickly, and upgraded our networking solutions to handle a new security posture that accounts for employees inside and outside the network perimeter. As soon as we pulled employees from offices during the beginning…

Amazon Web Services has officially opened its mainframe-migration service that promises to help Big Iron customers move apps to the cloud. AWS Mainframe Modernization, which since last November had been in preview, is available now and offers the tools, infrastructure, and software to manage migration of  mainframe applications to the cloud, AWS stated. The service includes tools to refactor workloads written for mainframes in legacy programming languages such as COBOL to Java-based cloud services. Or…

When you are reading about “the Edge,” do you always know what is meant by that term? The edge is a very abstract term. For example, to a service provider, the edge could mean computing devices close to a cell tower. For a manufacturing company, the edge could mean an IoT gateway with sensors located on their shop floor. There is a need to categorize the edge more, and fortunately there are some approaches. One…

Why SASE and why now? In tech, the use of acronyms proliferates every conversation. And, often to our customer’s chagrin, it’s the same at Cisco. Another day, another acronym.  ZTNA, MPLS, CASB, SDN, SWG – and the list goes on.  But if there is one acronym that needs to be on every IT organization’s must-have security and networking strategy list—it is SASE. Like all new technologies, it takes time for IT teams to fully understand…

Delivering exceptional application experiences is the requirement bar for engaging customers today. As enterprises build and migrate applications to hybrid and multicloud architectures, connectivity takes center stage. After all, latency issues contribute to customer discontent and the potential loss of a once-loyal constituency. Enterprises must carefully consider and optimize the WAN architecture not only in terms of meeting and exceeding performance requirements, but also to help protect against cyber threats, and meet compliance regulations –…