Penny Wise Dollar Foolish: IT Network Spending
Most large enterprises spend 15% of their IT budget on networking and communications. Your network service providers and hardware/software suppliers are incented for enterprises to spend more, not less on services. Enterprise network bandwidth requirements double every 2.6 years and…
Sometimes UCaaS over SD-WAN is Great
Enterprises wanting the performance guarantees and security of MPLS without the high costs and long install times should utilize SD-WAN technologies with the Internet for their UCaaS offering. While all the major UCaaS vendors offer an SD-WAN option, not all…
The Best Way To Connect To The Cloud
Fifty percent of new cloud deployments suffer business impacting performance issues due to the network*. Cloud networking still has a long way to go to support future cloud application architectures. At a high level, there are two ways an enterprise…
Foolish Things We Do: Telecom Contracts
Stop signing 3 year Telecom contracts and paying a premium for Telecom services! The enterprise Telecom industry is the last industry to get rid of 3-5 year contracts and move to “a pay as you consume” model. I get better…
Creating The Most Secure Network – Part 4
Integrating Active and/or LDAP directories into routing is the fourth critical step in creating a world class, secure network. Quick Recap: Create a network that Denies All packets unless there is an explicit policy to allow them on the network. …
How Free Router-ware Changes Everything
Compute and storage have undergone tremendous change in both preferred method of delivery and price. Surprisingly, network routing technology has not fundamentally changed in the past 20 years and remains inherently complex and expensive. This will change as routing innovation…
RIP Viptela
Viptela represents an incrementally better solution for Cisco in the SD-WAN space, not transformational, and has a high probability of fading away, like many of Cisco’s past acquisitions. The real reason that Viptela was sold to Cisco, below market price,…
Stay Clear of Clear
Clear is the latest program to try and improve both airport security and help speed fliers through security check points. It currently fails at both and is not worth the $179/year premium. TSA Pre(check) is still the best way to…
Cisco Buys Into Named Data Networking
Named Data Networking (NDN) is the future of network routing and security. IPv6 is not the future of networking as I have blogged before. This was validated last week by Cisco with their acquisition of PARC. NDN has other names…
Why Every Enterprise WAN Is Unique
The future looks very bright for network architects. Every enterprise Wide Area Network (WAN) is unique and this will continue, even as networking technology moves to software. It is estimated that Cisco and its resellers get over $50 Billion in…
The Slow Demise of Dedicated SIP Trunking & SBCs
Ten years ago, the big question was if NSPs would be “bit haulers” as everything becomes an Over The Top (OTT) application, or if they would be able to add value to services running on their network. Video was the wildcard…
Network Utilization Will Grow 5x by 2020
Network architects need to budget for and design their networks for the peak busy hour of utilization, which will grow 5x in the next few years. The peak utilization is growing significantly faster than average utilization, driven by our real-time…
Your Next Router Will be a Firewall
Security is now the top priority for network managers, displacing reliability and application performance. With this, we will see a transition in the marketplace with more enterprises using their firewall vendor for routing. I like the prediction that in 2017,…
Video Will Break Your New Software Defined Network
By the end of 2020, video will consume 95 percent of the Internet and business networks, with a greater percentage being real-time or near-real time video. Enterprise’s, cloud and network service providers, who struggled with Voice over IP, will find…
Bold Predictions from the Gartner Data Center Conference
By 2020, 30% of your strategic network suppliers will change. Your current incremental network strategy will not meet the future needs of your enterprise in the area of digital business. This plus the other predictions from Gartner show that lots…
“Deny All” Networking
Enterprises that are tired of being hacked or impacted by DDoS attacks, must move to a new network architecture. One that denies forwarding any packet at the edge of the network, unless there is an explicit policy to allow it…
Named Addressing for IP Networks
If we combined the best of snail mail, telephony, and IP addressing, we could come up with a new IP addressing schema that would simplify, secure, and scale all global IP communications. While IPv6 addresses the scalability issue with IPv4,…
Why Network Refreshes Take 3-4 Years – Part 1
Today’s networks are very complex and enterprises have been conservative in making any major changes, for fear of causing an outage that disrupts the business. Most network projects are tactical in nature to meet short-term needs such as adding another…
The Network is More Than a Utility
Many CIO’s consider their IT infrastructure, including networking, to be the equivalent of a public utility. The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market leaders Amazon, Microsoft, and maybe Oracle have furthered this notion with their on-demand, consumption based offerings of…
SD-WANs: The Bad and Ugly
Software Defined WANs (SD-WANs) are getting a lot of good press and the Gartner 2016 Networking Hype Cycle puts them at the peak of expectations, before sliding down into the trough of disillusionment. Here are 13 things to be aware…