NETWORKING

From specialty retailers to big-box retailers, the world of retail has experienced a massive shift in the last couple of decades due to the arrival of e-commerce. Because of the virtual nature of the market today, companies like Amazon and Alibaba continue to chip away at the revenue of traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Recent events have only accelerated the need for digital transformation. To not only survive but thrive, retailers are investing to reimagine the customer…

When the call came from management to shut down operations and transition all employees to remote work, IT staff at Woodforest National Bank® had a plan. “Our existing architecture wasn’t designed to support the massive increase in remote office workers.” Said James Heck, AVP of Network Services. “Suddenly, everyone in the main offices was told to go home. The need for remote connectivity exploded—quadrupling overnight.” It wasn’t easy. Woodforest National Bank is celebrating 40 years…

John Deere, the $35.5 billion maker of farm equipment, is planting the seeds of company-owned 5G cellular networking in some of its manufacturing plants after investing half-a-million dollars in wireless licenses at an FCC auction last year. The company says that having a piece of wireless spectrum more or less to itself is key to updating certain of its production facilities. Deere bought citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) licenses in five Iowa and Illinois counties…

Overall Internet traffic on Comcast’s network spiked substantially at the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S. in March 2020, but normalized over the subsequent months, according to a report released today by the internet service provider. As the largest individual home ISP in the U.S., Comcast’s data on Internet usage represents a useful snapshot into overall home connectivity during the pandemic. Nearly two-thirds of Americans–62%–reported working from home at some point during the current…

Co-authored by Brad Saffer and Warwick Calkin Reimagining excellence at University of Western Australia Despite being located in Perth, Australia – the most remote capital city in the world, where case numbers have been measured in the dozens – not hundreds or thousands, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the University of Western Australia (UWA) in profound ways.  The university is a member of Australia’s Group of Eight (Go8) universities, the equivalent of the Ivy League in the…

Your employees are complaining of poor performance when using Microsoft applications and services. The weakest link isn’t on the IT team; it’s your WAN! As frequent users of business applications such as Microsoft 365 (Office, Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange), we often fail to notice what peak performance feels like, but we certainly know what poor performance feels like! Our frustration builds as we wait on a frozen screen, watch a spinning wheel, or listen intently…

DevNet Automation Exchange is a community-based developer center where our networkers and developers can learn to Walk, Run, and Fly with Network Automation, using Cisco’s products and the full capabilities of the new network. They are defined as follows: Walk: Get visibility and insights in their networks in a read-only way. This enables use cases such as gathering telemetry and insights from running networks and performing auditing to ensure the ongoing security of the network.  Run: Activate policy…

The network connects everything. It stands at the vortex of IT and business. It has the potential to constantly empower, protect and inform all IT and business processes. As users, devices, and distributed applications have grown in number, the networking environment has become exponentially more complex. Intent-based networking transforms a hardware-centric, manual network into a controller-led network that captures business intent and translates it into policies that can be automated and applied consistently across the…

Even before the drastic changes we saw as a result of 2020, manufacturers were under pressure to improve operational efficiency through digital transformation. While investments in digital transformation pay dividends, they also compound longstanding cybersecurity risks. When manufacturing operations are digitized and interconnected, there’s more potential exposure and greater need for proactive protection. After all, a single cybersecurity incident can drive downtime and revenue loss, rack up operational expenses and damage a manufacturer’s reputation in…

This blog post is written by our guest, Irwin Lazar. Irwin develops and manages research projects, conducts and analyzes primary research, and advises enterprise and vendor clients on technology strategy, adoption and business metrics, Mr. Lazar is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in the digital workplace, covering enterprise communications and collaboration as an industry analyst for over 20 years. A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and sought-after speaker and…