NETWORKING

“Digital is foundational!”– Nuno Varandas These were the welcome words from my boss‘s boss, on day one of my new job, leading Digital and Social for Global Partner Readiness at Cisco. My job description is easy to understand: Build the communications platform for distributing content equally and in a timely manner to all Cisco Partners, globally. This means that regardless of your company size, number of times you’ve been to Cisco events, or how many…

A year ago we celebrated International Women’s Day at Cisco. We were beginning to realise that our lives were about to change but we had no idea how dramatic that change would be, nor how long this crisis would last. All of us have had to make big adjustments to our daily lives. There’s no doubt that life has been tough and we have all had to find our own ways of coping with a…

Remember the old days of deploying Anti-Virus (AV) across your organization? Most often, it was a “set it and forget it” approach. It worked back then. Until it didn’t. This leaves us with a perplexing dichotomy. On the one hand, the mindset of the old AV days still persists, where many companies are reluctant to update, upgrade, or even touch their existing security technology. On the other hand, we found in our recent 2021 Security…

I’ve never been very good at fitting in.   From being the only Asian American in my entire elementary school to being the only female in my 8th grade computer science class, I’ve definitely endured my fair share of experiences where I’ve felt like the odd one out. Growing up, it felt as though my innate ability to stick out like a sore thumb was my fatal flaw.   Through the years though, my perspective of…

Rivals Intel and Nvidia are on the same side when it comes to the funding of a startup that promises to make flash storage orders of magnitude faster. The two are among numerous investors in Pliops, which is developing a specialized storage processor that it says allows applications to access data kept in flash storage up to 100 times faster than with traditional approaches while using a fraction of the electricity required by traditional hardware….

One of the great debates in networking has been whether to use wired connectivity—which brings speed—or wireless—which delivers mobility. Recent versions of Wi-Fi deliver speeds comparable to wired, removing this debate. Wired connections are still faster, but for most user applications, including video, there is no experience difference. Looking ahead, next-generation wireless will be well North of 1Gbps, making it a no-brainer to use wireless. The next big decision: What kind of wireless? In the…

Though you may know and follow basic security measures on your own when installing and managing your network and websites, you’ll never be able to keep up with and catch all the vulnerabilities by yourself. Vulnerability scanners can help you automate security auditing and can play a crucial part in your IT security. They can scan your network and websites for up to thousands of different security risks, producing a prioritized list of those you…

The software-defined networking wide-area networking (SD-WAN) wave has surprised many with its depth and penetration into enterprise and service provider networking circles. I predict it will go even deeper. This is because of the ongoing integration of SD-WAN with the software-defined branch (SD-Branch). Ongoing trends in cloud services, service provider networks, and enterprise networks are all heading in the same direction – driving more nimble networks that can be managed and secured from the cloud and scale…

In a “Part 1” of this blog series, my colleague Paul Didier explained why manufacturers are accelerating transformation of their legacy production networks. In short, a modern network can readily enable integrated end-to-end cybersecurity – making it much easier to proactively monitor, identify and mitigate threats. In this post, I step through more of the “how,” with for designing, planning, testing and deploying new switches as part of a network transformation. When planning a transformation,…

Cisco Networking Academy enables distance learning The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the traditional education model for millions of students and teachers around the world, including the nearly 12,000 learning institutions worldwide that participate as Cisco Networking Academy schools.  The Networking Academy curriculum has been delivered via a hybrid model of in-person and online teaching. So when the pandemic hit, and while many schools, teachers, and students experienced widespread disruption and challenges in making the move to a…