The Role of vCPE in Branch Offices
Virtual Customer Premise Equipment (vCPE) provides network routing, security, and other functions via software versus dedicated hardware devices. While most enterprises have a virtualization strategy for their data center, few have one for the branch office. This needs to change!…
Will Cisco Monopolize the SD-WAN Market?
IDC forecasts that the SD-WAN market will grow from $225M in 2015 to $6B by 2020. This is a CAGR of over 90%! The global enterprise network equipment market consisting of Ethernet switches, routers, firewalls, and load balancers is approximately…
The End of the Private Enterprise Network
The network is the last thing that IT fully controls within the enterprise and consumes 12-15% of the enterprise technology budget. Compute, storage and applications are moving to the cloud with its elastic, pay for what is used, model. Users…
Managing Dynamic Sessions
Quality of Service (QoS) and Call Admission Control (CAC) are not enough to manage network congestion. As video and encrypted application traffic consume over 90% of network bandwidth, enterprise network managers must apply dynamic session management if they want their…
QUIC is Quick
QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is a new UDP based network protocol developed by Google and used in their Chrome browser to speed up applications, especially video. QUIC supports multiplexed UDP connections to provide security equivalent to TLS, along with…
Forward Error Correction – Does Your Network Need It?
The majority of SD-WAN implementations are using Forward Error Correction (FEC) to guarantee voice and other critical traffic such as credit card authorizations work well across networks that do not guarantee end-to-end QoS. While FEC sounds good in theory, real-world…
Flows vs. Sessions
Most network engineers think flows are the same as sessions, but they are not. Sessions are different from flows in six subtle, but important ways. Next generation networks are being driven to be session oriented due to the limitations of…
Adaptive Codecs – Good for Users, Bad for Networks
The Quality of Experience (QoE) for cloud based, team collaboration tools is poor for many enterprise users. This needs to change! Network managers have the responsibility of a providing a high performance and reliable network for the enterprise, but have…
Why I am Shorting Cisco’s Stock
Cisco is a dominate player in the networking, security, and communications markets, but they are facing ever stronger head winds. Their current business model cannot sustain these headwinds and their ability to quickly innovate and adapt is getting weaker. One…
Penny Wise, Dollar Foolish
Most large enterprises spend 15% of their IT budget on networking and communications. Smart enterprises spend half this amount by following these simple principles: Buy Wholesale – Instead of bringing 1 or 2 Network Service Providers (NSPs) into the enterprise…
SD-WAN to the Rescue #WebRTC
WebRTC is a new protocol that is giving network managers grief on their WAN as it gains adoption. Built into WebRTC are media security, media transport, and media encoding/decoding. For security, WebRTC uses SRTP for encrypting real-time audio and video…
Post Freemium: Value-Based Models
Moving past freemium to a value based business model that shares the risk represents the next evolution in cloud based services. Thanks to the cloud, gone are the days where an enterprise pays for software and services upfront. The consumption…
IPv6 is Tactical, NDN is Strategic
Enterprises should limit their investment in IPv6 and see it as a tactical protocol that will be displaced by Named Data Networking (NDN). My last assignment with the National Science Foundation in 1996 was IPv6. Even 20 years ago, we…