Business and industry press always tout how quickly companies are moving to the cloud. While this is true for cloud-first, start-ups, internet 1.0/2.0 companies, it is typically not the case for traditional enterprises, along with the vast number of local, state and federal government agencies and institutions. Over the past several years, ONUG Community members have voiced their concerns about moving workloads into the public cloud. To date, most community members deploy between 10 to 15% of their corporate workloads in the cloud, and those…
In its broadest sense, edge computing involves placing service provisioning, intelligence, and data closer to devices and users. With such a broad definition, it can mean edge services in an on-premise enterprise or in a cloud infrastructure. What the future holds for edge computing is a topic discussed by a recent ONUG panel. On the panel were: Ernest Lefner, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, ONUG / SM – FSO Digital Advisory, Ernst & Young, LLP Preetha Vijayakumar, VP Enterprise Network & Communications Services, FedEx Michael Parks, VP,…
Learn how to transform with confidence using zero trust Zscaler has been pleased to sponsor ONUG conferences in years past, and 2021 is no exception. This week’s ONUG Spring 2021 Virtual Conference promises to cover the key challenges we all faced and the lessons we learned during the past tumultuous year. In ONUG’s words, “We will digest the changes we experienced together and discuss the technologies and strategies critical to our digital transformation business models in 2021 and beyond.” At Zscaler, we’ve been working closely with customers on…
A decade ago, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote a WSJ opinion article that provocatively (at that time) stated that “Software is eating the world”. Today it’s safe to say that almost all enterprises are developing new applications for business processes by integrating in-house development, commercial offerings, and incorporating more SaaS and open-source components. Organizations are migrating applications and services to cloud native design patterns—often based on a combination of open-source and SaaS components—and deploying them on multiple public clouds and cloud-like on-prem or dedicated infrastructure….
The Network: Here, There, and Everywhere A few years ago, if you asked someone on a networking team, “Where is the network?,” they would probably show you a wiring closet or a data center. They might also describe where the wireless access points are located and how remote offices are connected through MPLS or leased lines. This would be an accurate description of the traditional campus, branch, and data center networks that have been the norm for many years. These networks were comprised of specialized…
Enterprises have embarked upon the digital transformation journey for the last decade. We have learned that it’s not just a technological shift, but an organizational change in people, process and technology. The transformation itself is a multi-faceted change of the organization that renders the enterprise nimble, agile and efficient enabling the business to flourish. Figure 1 : Stages Of IT Orchestration Most CIOs are experiencing Digital Transformation Fatigue. Issues with the long-drawn process with consultants creating a slower than expected digital transformation or internal IT…
As more and more companies move to the cloud, the question becomes one of network infrastructure. How do organizations design, deploy and support a cloud-based network? Is it possible to achieve the end-to-end visibility that organizations require? Does the level of complexity make it impossible to securely manage resources? Listen to Matt Hoag, Senior Enterprise Architect for Koch Industries, as he talks about the company’s journey to a cloud network in this session from ONUG Fall 2020. Koch Koch is based in Wichita, Kansas, and…
Across industries, enterprise network architects are adding new agility and flexibility to their network infrastructure stacks through public cloud technologies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings. While the benefits of network elasticity, cost savings, and capex avoidance are relatively well understood, NetOps professionals often struggle with managing and automating the operations and troubleshooting of cloud environments synchronously with the physical environments under their watch. Multi-cloud environments only add to this struggle. Perhaps this sounds surprising as cloud…
The widespread impact of the SolarWinds (Sunburst and Supernova) security hacks sent network teams scrambling to react, assess the impact and mitigate any potential damage. Organizations needed to conduct a forensic assessment phase to determine if they were affected then follow the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) emergency directive 21-01 to take steps to address a possible breach. CISA has released an alert (CISA Alert AA20-352A) that recommends mitigation steps to take for SolarWinds Orion and to address potential vulnerabilities left in the network…
In 2019, Gartner defined a new category, that it said will transform network security as we know it – the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). What is SASE? It is a new architecture to deliver common networking and security capabilities to every user, accessing any application, at any location, in a consistent way. This value proposition is applicable to enterprise of all sizes, yet “the devil is in the details”. SASE has two conflicting attributes: the features are well known; the architecture is brand new….
