For decades extranets have connected enterprises to customers, vendors, and contractors. They have been built using traditional networking gear stretched to accommodate the unique security, networking, and deployment requirements of connecting between enterprise networking perimeters. An extranet is a logical network zone meant to connect multiple parties under different admin domains across a range of
Connect SaaS to Customer Data
Network-as-a-Service is the easiest way to connect SaaS to customer data sources Delivering a SaaS application from the cloud requires a rethinking of tech, team, and processes. When committing to a public cloud, staffing for new DevOps commitments, and handling new support responsibilities, it’s important to make informed decisions. But there are also less obvious
Webinar: Next Generation Networking for Banks and Credit Unions
Next Generation Networking Solutions as a Solution As security threats increase and regulations continue to change, IT departments of banks and credit unions are facing the challenge of keeping up with the rapidly evolving landscape of technology. In order to address these challenges and stay ahead of the curve, many financial institutions are turning to
The VPN Security Gap
This time, it’s our friends at Fortinet who have been compromised. Half a million credentials were swiped from VPN routers. Once again, the vendor had issued a patch, but many customers had not updated their systems, highlighting the importance of VPN security measures to protect against such attacks. By now we all understand that there
SD-WAN Doesn’t Work for SaaS Providers
For SaaS applications that must connect to customer or partner data, SD-WAN doesn’t work. SD-WAN adoption is expected to grow rapidly over the next few years, with most companies implementing some form of SD-WAN within the next 5 years. Enterprises commonly consider SD-WAN as the modern approach to establish WAN connectivity to clouds, branch offices,
Application Providers Need to Re-Examine to use of MPLS
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 defence. How can a technology that is so widely used, be so uniformly
Cloud Networking and SD-WAN
For cloud-delivered SaaS application providers, SD-WAN adoption has been a bit slower as their cloud challenges require different networking approaches. With the rise of hybrid cloud environments (mixing cloud and on-prem resources), networking has replaced the data center as the central component of enterprise infrastructure. As hybrid cloud has become more common, so too has
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,
A Networking or Application Platform?
A service mesh is a critical component of modern Application Platform architectures. It is a software infrastructure that facilitates communications between microservices, controlling how different parts of a distributed application integrate with each other. By disassembling monolithic application architectures, service mesh allows applications to be broken down into a collection of services that can be
What is WAN Edge Infrastructure?
As Gartner defines it, WAN Edge Infrastructure is a class of networking technology that provides connectivity to distributed IT resources. Whether those resources are in data centers, public clouds or delivered as SaaS applications, connectivity is delivered through a combination of hardware and software that works to provide reliability and security to the network. What
What deploying to 20% of banks and credit unions means to us
The Importance of Security and Cost-Effectiveness in Banking IT Anyone who has worked in banks and credit unions IT departments, knows a couple of truths are threaded through every technology adoption decision. As an industry, financial services organizations are generally more risk-averse than most. And rightfully so – the data they are handling is arguably
The Limitations of SD-WAN
Secure access service edge (SASE) is currently a popular approach to network security, but many are still uncertain about the most effective way to implement it, particularly given the limitations of SD-WAN. SASE marries network functionality with security to bring policy-driven inspections and protections to every facet of an enterprise IT environment. At the heart of