At the recent Interop trade show, according to news reports, security was a big topic, including cloud-centric security.

That’s a good thing, and it shows that the market is working as it is supposed to. There’s no doubt that enterprises are interested in taking advantage of what the cloud can offer in terms of hosting data, applications, and infrastructure. But they have to be sure that everything “out there” in the cloud is as safe as it would be if it was under their roof, in that locked room, with people whose job it is to ensure authorized access of the data. More...

When I first started working in technology, the world seemed to move more slowly. Before beepers and cell phones, few users expected network outages to be addressed instantaneously. Besides, I grew up in Minnesota, and when we were buried in four feet of snow, it was understood that we had to dig out before we could worry about things like phones or networks. (Unfortunately, with a per capita ratio of snowplows to people at 10:1, we rarely had “snow days” from school.) More...

When we first saw ABI Research’s latest projection of cloud migration trends, our first thought was that their numbers were a bit conservative. The headline was that 41 percent of all enterprise communications applications users worldwide would migrate to the cloud within five years, by 2016. More...

There’s a school of thought out there that cloud transport can and should be just a commodity. A dumb pipe that gets you to your data or app destination. Then, inside that destination, all the intelligence resides in the software, along with the security and reliability. More...

When it comes to the highway to the cloud, it will be paved with partnerships, between ASPs (and other solutions providers) and carriers. Sprint, preferably, but there’s probably room for other carriers, I suppose.

We’re not the only ones with this partnership perspective. This article from CRN makes the point that while there has been a traditional divide between solution providers and carriers, that divide is no longer practical in a world where enterprises simply want to be cloud-connected in the most effective and reliable way possible. Increasingly, this is what customers want and demand. More...

Despite growing usage of, and interest in, the cloud, enterprises and even providers are still feeling their way around in this relatively new technology environment. Like explorers in a new and largely unexplored frontier territory, we’re learning as we go, and dispelling mistaken perceptions along the way. More...

In a hot-off the press webinar (“What do CEOs Need Next from Technology and the CIO?”), Gartner asked some provoking questions to assess just how aligned the mindsets of CEOs are with those of their CIOs. These interesting findings shed light on the opportunities for enterprises in the near future. The survey was directed to business leaders, including CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and Chairs. It intentionally excluded CIOs and CTOs. More...

I was chatting recently with Jeff Nossan, a Global Converged Solutions Manager with Sprint, about WAN acceleration. The purpose for deploying WAN acceleration technologies is to give enterprises and organizations fine-grained control over WAN traffic. They can have business-critical applications accelerated, unimportant traffic managed, and malicious traffic mitigated. The result is better application and network responsiveness, not to mention reduced bandwidth utilization. More...

No doubt e-commerce has proven to be a critical channel within the retail industry.  Just look at the overnight sensation of Groupon and Amazon which turned buying behavior upside down.  So it is interesting that the retail industry overall, is lagging behind most other industries when it comes to cloud computing. More...

What will be the attributes of the corporate network? How is it evolving? A current bright spot is that IT budgets are gradually improving; yet enterprises will continue to face pressures to cut costs, equip a mobile and distributed workforce, and compete globally. For enterprises, the network is becoming a hybrid of multiple protocols with elements that are outsourced and, yes, even cheaper. More...