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. There are some obvious decisions to be made like which public cloud you will be committing to, how to staff your new DevOps commitments and handling of new
The VPN Security Gap
Another day another VPN vendor is compromised. This time from our friends at Fortinet. This time half a million credentials were swiped from VPN routers. Once again, the vendor had issued a patch and once again many customers had not updated their systems. By now we all understand that there are no certainties in life.
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. For enterprises, SD-WAN is commonly seen as the modern way to build WAN connectivity to clouds,
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 defense. 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 software infrastructure that facilitates communications between microservices. It is used to control how different parts of a distributed application integrate with each other. This disassembles monolithic application architectures by allowing applications to be broken down into a collection of services that can be built, maintained, and improved independently of the
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
Anyone who has worked in a bank or credit union IT department knows a couple of truths are threaded through every technology adoption decision. Any new solution should be more secure than the last. Every solution needs to do more with less $ (or at least the same). As an industry, financial services organizations are
Webinar: Next Generation Networking for Banks and Credit Unions
As security threats increase and regulations continue to change, the IT departments of banks and credit unions find themselves constantly playing catch up. And while these are very real threats to the business, IT professionals in a typical bank or CU will tell you that budgets aren’t exactly increasing year to year. Tech updates are
The Limitations of SD-WAN
Secure access service edge (SASE) is all the rage in network security, but the best path to get there is still not understood by many. 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 this architectural paradigm shift, is the network.