Every day we speak with IT and product leaders looking for ways to improve the networking component of their application delivery. When the topic of MPLS comes up, there is a predictable groan of resigned disappointment. No one is coming to its defense. How can a technology that is so widely used, be so uniformly
Cloud Fintech Needs a Better Network
After years of taking a ‘wait and see’ approach, fintech applications are moving to the public cloud. As a vendor with the privilege of talking to both application providers and financial institutions (FIs) daily, we find very few who are happy with the WAN solutions available to them as they move to the cloud. Initially,
Secure a Remote Workforce by Killing the VPN
VPN served its purpose well, but Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) is now transforming the definition of remote access solutions. When it was created, VPN was an answer to the IT architectures and business challenges of the time. Centralized data centers hosting enterprise applications needed to be used by employees when they were ‘off-site.’ These
SASE and the Electric Vehicle Revolution
When electric cars first began gaining popularity, traditional car companies thought they could easily replicate them and didn’t devote much time to develop a competing product. You could argue some still have their head in the sand, but we’ll reserve that topic for another blog. What the traditional car companies were reluctant to realize was
The Security and Compliance Benefits of Integrating Identity and Network Access
The term “identity-based networking” refers to the concept of an end user’s identity being tied to the network services they are allowed to receive. The initial implementations of this concept can be seen in ubiquitous network services such as 802.1x. Wireless networks have been applying the basics of identity-based networking to users who joined wireless
Predict the Future of SASE With an Eye to the Past
It was not that long ago that a wide variety of security and networking technologies first erupted in the market. Firewalls, anti-virus, IDS/IPS, web content management, site-to-site and user VPNs were offered by dozens of different vendors on dedicated appliances without a thought to centralized management or product integration. From this chaos came the next
Zero Trust and the Software-Defined Perimeter
The workplace has never been more exposed to security risk than it is today. Even before staff was forced to work from home, employees were on the road, accessing diverse applications from planes, hotel rooms, and coffee shops. To ensure productivity and business continuity, IT teams have been tasked with ensuring that these applications are
How a Data Mesh Works
Our customers always come to us with a problem… “I want to get data from the factory floor to my cloud application” “My customer wants to run my application on-premise, but we don’t deploy our applications onsite.” “My data is scattered across multiple data centers and I can’t replicate it centrally” I could go on
SDN’s role in automating compliance requirements
As Michael Vizard notes here, virtualization of network features helps automate the onerous and often changing tasks of compliance. Legacy systems demand massive amounts of labor or expensive toolsets (or both) to achieve even baseline compliance.