Office 365 is used by more than one million companies around the world. Business employees count on these apps constantly to do their jobs, whether they’re writing documents, updating spreadsheets, building slides, or checking email. While cloud-based apps like Office 365 offer undeniable advantages for enterprises and business users, they also create tough challenges for IT operations and network operations (NetOps) teams.

SDN and NFV are acronyms you hear frequently in discussions of modern networking. In fact, they appear so commonly that they can be easy to confuse or conflate with one another. But that would be a mistake. SDN and NFV are related terms, but they are also distinct. You can use SDN without using NFV, and the benefits of NFV are not the same as the benefits of SDN in general. Keep reading for a breakdown of what SDN and NFV have to do with each other, and what to use when.

When you send an email or load a website, you probably never think about how the data gets from your computer to the server that needs to process it. But something does have to decide how the data will move across the vast expanse of the Internet – and, in particular, which of the virtually infinite number of potential routes your data will take as it moves from your device to a server and back again.

In a perfect world, data would move over the Internet in real time. There would be no delays whatsoever between when one computer sends data out over the network and when it reaches the recipient. In the real world, however, there is always some level of delay when exchanging data over the network. That delay is measured in terms of network latency. Ideally, network latency is so low that no one notices it.

This practitioner blog will show you how to consume telemetry data from your network devices in five easy steps. Telemetry is a monitoring technology used to do high-speed data collection from network devices. According to EMA research on network performance management, “71% of enterprises are interested in collecting streaming network telemetry with their network management tools.” This next-generation approach to monitoring has been expected to replace SNMP for years.

As workload automation environments become more complex and job volumes increase, the need for true observability is becoming an increasingly essential and critical component for optimized automated business process delivery. Most organizations run several automation engines from different vendors in both distributed and mainframe environments, and in the cloud. Sometimes these automation engines operate in a silo, sometimes they have dependencies with each other.

By continuously monitoring network activity and assets, network monitoring plays a key role in identifying cybersecurity threats. The network monitoring process gathers important data that can be used in analytics or in conjunction with cybersecurity applications to rapidly identify and respond to threats.

Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) technology is revolutionizing the way organizations manage their network traffic. With its ability to decouple the data plane from the control plane, SD-WAN provides organizations with a more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution for managing their network traffic. However, understanding and troubleshooting SD-WAN performance can be a challenge, especially when it comes to the underlying physical network, or underlay.

ISP networks are the connective tissue for most business traffic today. Are your network monitoring capabilities aligned with this new reality? This post examines why it’s so critical to establish visibility into ISP networks, and offers key tips for success.

You probably have been hearing a lot about automation and artificial intelligence (AI) these days, with a vision of some kind of AI-driven world that will take all of our jobs away. The reality is that there’s always too much work to do. AI and automation are more likely to help people get their jobs done more efficiently rather than take them away. Basic automation can have large returns for the network – and improve the quality of work.