To accelerate digital transformation and deliver a higher-quality customer experience, enterprises across multiple industries are attempting to shift to a “virtualized” IT and network environment. In this context, “virtualized” refers to the evolution from a hardware-centric enterprise edge to a software-centric environment. This entails replacing numerous physical network devices and application servers in each location with virtual network functions and application workloads uploaded to a single physical device. Examples include SD-WAN, Virtual Router, Virtual Firewall, Secure Access Service Edge, and others. Enterprises that make the…
Traditional security solutions still aren’t helping companies detect, recognize, and respond to rapidly changing relationships and threats. This problem is underscored by three main factors: Managers view workers as the cause of poor security. Workers make mistakes, they violate rules—they represent a problem that an organization needs to solve, instead of dealing with the underlying phenomena of security issues. Because of this, organizations intervene to try and influence workers’ behavior. Managers develop strict rules and guidelines that control what workers do, because they cannot be…
It’s no surprise that workloads are moving to the cloud in record numbers. At the same time, trends towards multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures are making networking far more complicated. Yet, network teams are often the last team to be brought in when organizations migrate. Why? Because cloud-provider tools were built for developers, not for the network. There’s a common theme emerging here: Tools, the organization, and the cloud infrastructure are optimized for application support and not networking. No one thinks about networks when building…
If you’re looking for a better way to build your network, everyone knows you go to ONUG. ONUG has proven that community collaboration transcends convention and myopic perspective. ONUG has been re-inventing what’s possible with the OSI stack allowing us to continue our forward progress when we were about to run out of road. Ten years ago, I remember an event where the presenter terrified everyone (who mostly showed up for a free steak) with the “fact” that we were about to exhaust the public…
It is unlikely that anyone would question the need for securing their hybrid multi-cloud estate; the number of mission-critical applications running in the public cloud nearly doubled between 2020 and 2021, and the growth is expected to continue. (Source: 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Information Security, Budgets & Outlook 2021). Cloud providers want to mitigate concerns, often saying, “The cloud is more secure than your on-prem network.” This is true, sort of. Public cloud providers have more highly trained experts focused on cloud security…
Enterprise Cloud 1.0 has changed the game for top-level computing, but like everything else in the industry, things keep changing – and quickly. To keep up, enterprise customers are looking toward the next wave: the leap that could combine the disparate worlds of cloud and on-premises into Enterprise Cloud 2.0. But what does that mean, exactly? What will digital enterprise look like once it has become the new paradigm? And is it capable of bridging gaps that left Cloud 1.0 wanting? In the ONUG Fall…
Enterprises are used to the idea that the cloud is consumable. After all, cloud consumability is the characteristic that brings the chief cloud benefit: business agility. Why build and maintain your own data center space, power, equipment, etc. when you can simply click or API your way to thousands of servers? For traditional IT teams, cloud consumability has been a revelation. For digital native DevOps and SRE teams, cloud consumability is a given. The bad news is that the WAN as a whole has historically…
For today’s IT operations teams, understanding and solving issues can feel like a nonstop game of whack-a-mole. Managing a diverse, edge-powered infrastructure isn’t easy for increasingly complex, distributed enterprises. Most IT operations teams have organically accumulated multiple legacy tools as their organizations have matured, each with its own distinct interface and training requirements. This tools glut can drag down IT operations and limit their ability to gain visibility. Manual processes make the problem worse, because they make correlating data across massive amounts of data a…
Network performance, security, and scalability are factors that can redefine IT investments as a competitive advantage. The network remains the unifying feature of modern environments despite the increasingly distributed and remote nature of enterprises. The impact of the cloud is such that the dynamics of modern networks are ever-changing while enterprise environments grow more complex and chaotic. The management of these environments – the discovery, analysis, updating, and maintenance – and the ever-growing number of devices, domains, and clouds can constitute major risks to business…
For most ONUG members, your network and security infrastructure is built from “best of breed” products (aka “point solutions”). Dating back to the ‘80s, selecting, piloting, integrating, and deploying every single component of your infrastructure was the common practice. The prevailing notion was, and still is to a certain extent, that point solutions built by a specialist that focuses on a specific set of requirements and capabilities will outperform suites or platforms that address them as part of a broader solution. This common wisdom had…
