NETWORKING

While Todd Nightingale has been Cisco’s Enterprise Networking & Cloud business chief since March, some of the directions he wants to take the company’s biggest business unit—namely superior cloud-neutral orchestration and automation—are already evident. The COVID-19 pandemic and the enterprise response to it are big drivers for near-future enterprise networking technology. But the ideas of cloud  connectivity and pushing simplicity and agility in the network, while they are already important, implementation has accelerated for most…

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai said he plans to leave the commission on Jan. 20, 2021. This opens the door to President-elect Joe Biden to select a new head of the telecommunications regulator. While best known for wrecking network neutrality, in his resignation letter Pai largely ignored that issue. His only comment relating to it was “this FCC has not shied away from making tough choices. As a result, our nation’s communications networks…

A few years ago, only hardcore techies and television fans were cord-cutting. Today, there are more people watching streaming shows than there are paying for cable or satellite TV.  There are three reasons for this shift. First, the best live TV streaming services now offer pretty much anything you’d ever want from a traditional TV service. Second, even though live TV streaming services costs are catching up with cable, for now, they’re still more affordable….

Like many coders, engineers, and people who ‘code tinker’ in the small hours of the morning, I am always looking at new ways to improve my code. This is for many reasons. For example, Comprehensions in Python can provide us with a short and sweet way to construct new sequences. They are a concise and speedy way to create new lists. Python built-in functions can save you time Python has many great built-in functions. Often,…

A data center is a physical facility that enterprises use to house their business-critical applications and information. As they evolve from centralized on-premises facilities to edge deployments to public cloud services, it’s important to think long-term about how to maintain their reliability and security. What is a data center? Data centers are often referred to as a singular thing, but in actuality they are composed of a number of technical elements. These can be broken…

If you’ve ever spent time inside a data center, you know it’s usually hot on one side of the cabinets, cold on the other side, and incredibly noisy from numerous fans turning in servers, switches, routers, and security devices. And if you’ve ever been the one to unpack those devices in shipping and receiving, you know what’s leftover resembles the remnants of an online order for a family of five – cardboard, plastic, and paper…

November marks National Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience Month and is a timely reminder to keep this conversation at the forefront. Global critical infrastructure speaks to a common theme: sectors that are vital to security, economic security, public health, or safety. The pandemic has reshaped the landscape of critical infrastructure with a new generation of organizations now deemed as ‘critical.’ Most would consider hospital emergency rooms as traditional critical infrastructure, but what about medical research…

We currently live in a most amazing time in history. The concepts that just 40 years ago were only the stock and trade of science fiction are becoming reality. While time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life are all still out of reach, flying cars, moving walkways, smart buildings, smart homes, smart watches, talking robots, video conferencing – all far-off visions of a Jetsons future are a reality. And while the marvels of today’s technology…

A new startup has emerged from stealth mode with a design that converges 5G connectivity and AI compute onto a system-on-a-chip (SoC) that’s aimed at edge networks. Founded in 2018, EdgeQ was launched by former executives at Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm and has racked up $51 million in funding. EdgeQ’s AI-5G SoC is aimed at 5G private wireless networks for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). EdgeQ says its chip will allow enterprises in manufacturing,…

Moving away from VPNs as a means to protect corporate networks at the perimeter and moving toward zero-trust network access requires careful enterprise planning and may require implementing technologies that are new to individual organizations. ZTNA employs identity-based authentication to establish trust with entities trying to access the network and grants each authorized entity access only to the data and applications they require to accomplish their tasks. It also provides new tools for IT to…