NETWORKING

I did not sleep well last night. My rest was disturbed by oneiric memories of old situations where I wasted multiple hours in a queue, locked in my car under the sun and without an option to reach the nearby exit. Unpleasant feelings, I have to admit. Maybe not so different from what happens to storage network administrators when application users complain of poor performance and have the habit to finger point the network team….

We just wrapped up our virtual world tour of Cisco Live 2021. Teams from across Cisco presented more than 450 sessions and demonstrations on the best of Cisco’s technologies to a worldwide audience of over a hundred thousand viewers. Many people watched the online events from the comfort and safety of their home offices. Many other viewers were fortunate enough to have returned to their sanitized office and campus workplaces and participated from there with…

I still remember the day. It was a Friday in March 2020, just shortly after the world had changed. We stood in line, waiting to enter the drug store. After a walk home, with mixed feelings, we took the pregnancy test – positive. Wow. We’re becoming parents!   It was a good feeling, but not without fear or concern.   Still, we knew that there was no perfect time to become a dad or a mum. Either…

Time has buzzed by – especially if you are a Cisco honeybee. Last year, we installed beehives near our Research Triangle Park campus, in partnership with Bee Downtown and the RTP Foundation, to support the growing pollinator population in North Carolina, advance honeybee education across the region, and contribute toward the largest pollinator corridor in the country. Along with 100,000+ honeybees, our install was complete with signage, fencing, and three hand-painted hive boxes. Since then,…

In more than one conversation with large enterprise clients, we’ve heard the networking and infrastructure leaders responsible for managing the organization’s global WAN jokingly refer to themselves as the “Chief Hairpinning Officer” or CHO. At first blush, this provides a laugh. But there’s more than a bit of truth to this statement when you consider how much of networking professionals’ time, energy, and budget has traditionally been spent managing complex network routing decisions. These decisions…

Nearly all the US IT jobs lost in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic have come back, with IT employment enjoying eight straight months of growth. Of course, some of the replacement jobs were in IT specialties other than the jobs lost, as there has been a steady trend of declining data center and telecommunications positions in favor of software development jobs; that was true, even before the pandemic. At its worst, more than 100,000 IT…

Ever since Bitcoin was introduced back in 2009, this cryptocurrency has had the distinction of being something you could mine with your computer—putting your hardware to use helping the blockchain technology Bitcoin is based on record and verify transactions by solving complex math problems. As a reward, you’d get Bitcoins. But it was a very slow process for a single PC, and the necessary component for success was a high-end GPU. One GPU brought to…

The pace of transformation in manufacturing has drastically accelerated to meet the needs of today’s changing world. Businesses like yours are prioritizing workforce continuity and business resiliency by enabling workers with the tools they need to safely continue operations, either in person or remotely, while utilizing analytics to maximize productivity, reduce downtime, and ensure protection from security threats. In just one week – manufacturing leaders from across the globe will gather (virtually) for Hannover Messe…

Intelligent machines have helped humans in achieving great endeavors. Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) combined with human experiences have resulted in quick wins for stakeholders across multiple industries, with use cases ranging from finance to healthcare to marketing to operations and more. There is no denying the fact that ML and AI have helped in quicker product innovation and an enriching user experience. But hold on to your thoughts for a moment. Have…

The synergy among AWS, Cisco, and our valued channel partners creates an amazing customer-centric value proposition for those organizations migrating to the cloud. Case in point:  security. In its shared responsibility model, AWS assumes responsibly for the security of the underlying cloud infrastructure. In parallel, AWS customers are responsible for the security of applications, workload, data, and network traffic while running in AWS’ cloud—on an ongoing basis. This task is challenging because of the high…