NETWORKING

Cisco Study: 91% of local government leaders consider internet access critical to economic growth The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated many of this country’s preexisting inequalities, especially for the more than 20 million rural Americans without access to reliable broadband internet.  Students in communities across America were left behind during remote learning. There was unequal access to the growing use of telehealth. And the ability to work from home was all too unreliable in too many parts…

Did you know that you can ask your Linux system to tell you what upgrades are available for the packages installed on it? You might be surprised by how many you’ll see, especially if you’re using the current release and don’t have your system set up for frequent or automatic updates. Updates play an important role in keeping your Linux systems secure and performing well. Since most packages are updated as fixes or improvements to…

With cloud comes complexity As organizations accelerate their transition to hybrid cloud, multicloud, and other dynamic environments, static security controls are no longer adequate. The shift of applications and the associated security controls within dynamic cloud environments create challenges for firewall teams to keep up with security requirements. Workloads spin up and down faster than traditional security policy change management can accommodate, straining NetOps and SecOps teams with the rapid pace of change and continuous…

The average tenure for tech workers in Silicon Valley is three to five years, according to a survey by Inc. Magazine. Yet here I am still working at Cisco, 16 years after I joined the company. I’ve stayed because I’ve had the opportunity to work on groundbreaking technologies, to have my voice and ideas heard by superiors, to advance my career from individual contributor to manager, and to witness the evolution of Cisco into a close-knit family.  From Shakespeare to Switching    I came to California from India 25 years…

The trend towards increasingly distributed organizations has only been possible due to the availability of business-critical, cloud-based applications and tools. But many cloud-based applications and services place a great deal of demand on legacy WAN infrastructures, especially as expectations for a high-quality user experience continue to increase. To meet these demands, many organizations—especially those with multiple remote offices—have begun switching from performance-inhibited wide-area networks (WANs) to software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) architectures. Before the recent pandemic, many…

An unexpected effect of the global pandemic has been the importance of leaning on and cultivating local business and personal relationships. From your next-door neighbor, to the small business that provides your favorite takeout dinner around the corner, it’s important to start local in order to support your community and stimulate the local economy. Cisco EDGE Incubation Center The Cisco EDGE (Experience, Design, Go-to-Market, Earn) Incubation Center concept in Africa is a great example of…

By Eric Hanselman, Principal Research Analyst, 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence Are there any organizations that don’t face challenges in making their technology teams more productive? It’s tempting to speculate about the ideal environments that seem to exist at hyperscalers or cutting-edge startups, but the reality is that there are always challenges in any operational pattern, and even the loftiest struggle to do better. That doesn’t mean that dramatic improvements aren’t achievable….

Availability and speed of internet connectivity for individuals or households can greatly affect the quality of education, healthcare, and economic opportunities they receive, as well as access to critical public services. The pandemic exacerbated the digital divide and brought this urgent problem to the forefront. Cisco and its public and private sector partners believe now is the time for the industry to get together to solve this complex challenge. This week, Cisco held two panel…

Bringing focus back to organizations’ IT, and empowering security heroes Esports are becoming massively popular, and you’ll commonly hear about how a player “carried the team on their back,” a phrase often used when a teammate perseveres through adversity, contributes more than their fair share, and ultimately delivers a win. Over the last year and a half, IT and security heroes globally have adapted and met the needs of their workforces that had to rapidly…

Network-attached storage (NAS) is a category of file-level storage that’s connected to a network and enables data access and file sharing across a heterogeneous client and server environment. “Ideally, NAS is platform- and OS-independent, appears to any application as another server, can be brought online without shutting down the network and requires no changes to other enterprise servers,” says research firm Gartner in its definition of NAS. NAS history: evolution of network-attached storage NAS evolved…