How many of us have started a home improvement project and ended up making a handful of trips to the store to complete it? Even a simple painting project can surface unforeseen problems that turn into 3 trips to the store for more tape, brushes, or plastic coverings. While this might be annoying, it isn’t
Cloud and the Complexity of Distributed Applications
We are in the business of helping software providers with tools that make them more secure and efficient. In those conversations, we get exposed to the infinite number of ways that companies architect, develop, and support their application’s infrastructure. We’ve also discovered that the complexity of distributed applications is a significant challenge. While the architecture
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,
Removing Cloud Limitations with Edge Networking
Explore the potential of edge networking to overcome cloud limitations. Discover how public cloud providers leverage coordinated systems.
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
Webinar: Securing a Remote Workforce
For financial institutions, the shift to remote workforce has put a strain on both staff and technology. In the past, banks used to conduct all their operations exclusively in offices. It was the place where the vault was located, where customers came to sign documents and where their work applications resided. Now, tools like Slack,