It’s natural for IT shops to replicate their current hardware and architecture when it’s time to refresh networking equipment. But refresh cycles provide a valuable opportunity to rethink — and improve — long-standing practices. Software-defined WAN applies software-defined networking principles over the WAN, redefining the management paradigm by operating the WAN as a holistic system…

Just how solid are brick-and-mortar stores? For every brand that closes a store, two others open a new one, according to an August 2018 IHL Group study. And certain segments — such as food and grocery, drugstores, convenience stores, and superstores and warehouses — see almost four openings for every closure. Increasingly, what separates the…

Cisco recently released a new major update to its Software-Defined Access solution; the release notes detail what’s new. In this post, I assume you are already familiar with the SD-Access solution and instead focus on a few of the enhancements I think are most exciting. Distributed Campus One of the major missing pieces from SD-Access…

Several years ago, many college and university administrators’ eyes went wide when they read headlines about how students were bringing multiple connected devices to campus (some reports said up to seven!). Many schools beefed up their wireless networks to meet the growing demand, but some neglected to invest in “nonacademic” areas such as residence halls….

In Part 1 and Part 2 of my blog series, I shared some insights into how attackers continue to exploit the weaknesses of WPA and the tools and techniques they are using to gain access to poorly secured networks. In the last post of the series, I will offer some suggestions for how organizations can…

Businesses will use more than 4 billion Internet of Things devices this year, and will deploy another 3.4 billion by 2020, Gartner predicts. About the only things growing faster are the challenges of provisioning, protecting and managing all those connected devices. Intent-based networking (IBN) is an ideal way to overcome those challenges. It uses a…