Like their peers in other industries, state and local IT leaders are interested in modernization, but budget constraints often stand in the way. In my experience working with government agencies, many organizations wait five years or even longer to upgrade their data center infrastructures. One obvious consequence of maintaining this legacy infrastructure is suboptimal performance….

Most IT managers understand the potential benefits of adopting orchestration and automation tools within their data centers to streamline the provisioning of private and public cloud resources. These solutions can dramatically speed up the time to value (the period between when a business need arises and when infrastructure fulfills that need). By automating manual tasks…

Due to the popularity of collaboration platforms such as Facebook, Microsoft Teams, Slack and so on, the usage of bots has become increasingly common. Running bots on these platforms can increase productivity, inspire innovation and provide the opportunity for employees to learn new skills. Interested in creating your own bots but unsure how to get…

At a recent trade show, someone referred to me as a software-defined networking veteran. This struck me as odd, because I’ve only been talking about SDN for five years, but also as being true — because I’ve been studying it for five years. I started speaking about this technology because it was so clear to…

How much time do you spend building servers, configuring the settings and installing software? In my experience, a typical server can take anywhere from four to eight hours before it is ready for production. And it can take even longer to wait for numerous approvals and even purchase requests. Once it is built, how do…

IT departments usually have more work on their plates than they can handle, which explains the appeal of intent-based networking solutions that elevate manual tasks into smart, automated optimization that the network performs on its own. For example, Cisco’s Digital Network Architecture eliminates a lot of grunt work, such as manually provisioning network elements —…