Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Most network engineers have a love/hate relationship with the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Ok, maybe it’s more like tolerate/hate. It’s been the de facto standard for most network-connected devices since the late 80s, so we’ve all used it at some point. But despite the name, SNMP isn’t always simple to use.

“What’s data sovereignty? Is it the same thing as data privacy? What about data sovereignty vs data residency?” These are questions that plague many business owners, especially when you consider the cost of non-compliance. But achieving compliance can be challenging when you aren’t sure what rules you should be complying with.

IoT devices seem to be ubiquitous, but the truth is we’re not nearly there yet. In fact, IoT Analytics continues to predict steady growth as the future for IoT for years to come, with more than 27 billion devices online by 2025. They’re not alone in their bullish IoT predictions either. MarketsAndMarkets projects the global IoT market will more than double from 2021 to 2026, growing from just over $300 billion to over $650 billion.

Asymmetric routing is a situation in which packets take one path to go from source to destination, but replies take a different path to return. Notice I called it a “situation” and not an “issue”? That’s because it’s not always a problem. It only becomes a problem where there’s something stateful in the path, like a NAT device or a firewall.

Digital demands from students and staff to keep pace with modern education methods has put a lot of pressure on IT operations. Consistently delivering quality service for all is a tall order. Technology advancements, IoT proliferation, device demand, lower cost, and ease of wireless access means supporting all the things is the job facing education network administrators.

From smart lighting, to waste management, to air quality, IoT devices and other “smart city technologies” are rapidly changing life in urban areas. And with a recent MarketsandMarkets research report projecting spending in the market for smart city solutions will nearly double to over $873 billion by 2026, the trend is only set to accelerate.

In IT, we tend to think of threats as external. Hackers, scammers, bots, and DDoS attacks are all external in origin. But surprisingly, insider risk is often one of the biggest network security challenges facing IT. As they say, sometimes it’s the ones closest to you that can hurt you the most.

Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is a software overlay that decouples WAN configuration and management from the underlying network transport medium (5G/LTE, MPLS, xDSL, etc) and dynamically routes WAN traffic. To the uninitiated, that’s a mouthful. But it’s one of the most interesting trends of the last few years. Let’s jump on the bandwagon! Time for a primer on SD-WAN, why it matters, and where it’s heading now and into the future.

News over the last few years has been thick with reports of major data breaches on corporate network infrastructure. In the cases of the Panama Papers, the OPM leak, and the Hacking Team leak, the results were catastrophic leaks of extremely confidential information. In truth, a determined and well-resourced attacker can always find a way in.

Unplanned downtime carries a hefty price tag for enterprises. In 2020, critical server outages cost enterprises on average at least $10,000 per hour, with 95% of respondents stating that the cost was $200,000 per hour or more. 40% said that the average cost was closer to $1 million per hour, and 17% lost $5 million or more for every hour offline. Those are some sobering statistics that demonstrate the importance of being prepared for the worst. But you’re thinking, “We back up everything!