Like the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, Sprint is racking up the titles year after year in the Nemertes Research Pilothouse Award for MPLS Services competition. We may not be able to claim our own Michael Jordan, but we can attribute our success to our skill at three-pointers (in this case, the three points being customer service, technology, and value).

For 2012, Nemertes named us the Top Provider among Market Challengers, thanks to superior scores in the customer service and value categories. This is the fourth year for this award, which is based solely on the judgment of some 1,500 IT decision makers surveyed by Nemertes, and Sprint has now taken the top honor for MPLS services for three of those years. More...

We talked the other day about the cloud and compliance issues, and after writing that, we came across an item that drives that point home.

According to this article at the Bank Info Security website, the Federal Financial Information Examination Council is casting a wary eye at the cloud model, in light of past and potential data breaches. It has produced a four-page resource document designed to help financial institutions "better understand and address (the) unique risks posed by outsourced cloud-based services." More...

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) is one of the few IT technologies with a "multifaceted" value proposition, in that it not only can lower costs, but can help streamline processes and form new ones. You may start out with cost reduction in mind, but along the way, you find ways to change and improve how you do business.

That was a key point made by analyst Zeus Kerravala of ZK Consulting, during a recent webinar on the subject of hosted UC&C. Also participating were Sprint's own Joseph Martin and Mike Velder of Cisco. If you missed it, you can replay it here. More...

Are CIOs and top IT executives hopping on the cloud bandwagon even more enthusiastically than their IT staffs? That appears to be what one of the latest surveys about cloud attitudes reveals.

In the survey, summarized in a CIO.com article, 92 percent of responding top IT decision makers (CIOs and other top IT execs) said they believe cloud technology is good for business. That's an impressive result, but even more so when you see that the same attitude was shared by just 81 percent of IT managers. In our experience, the CIOs usually require convincing by their managers and staffs when it comes to the newest technology approaches, so this is an interesting finding. More...

There’s change, and then there’s progress. One just means that something is new and different, but the other means that something has gotten better. It’s in that second category that Compass, our online portal for IP/MPLS VPN service, fits in the wake of a number of enhancements that will help you monitor your network. More...

Cisco recently announced its Open Network Environment, or Cisco ONE, strategy. The new architecture is the foundation by which Cisco networks will eventually be provisioned entirely through software APIs, otherwise known as cloudbursting, which I have discussed  before. More...

One of the ongoing concerns among certain enterprises is assuring that with their data and apps “out there” in the cloud that they will be fully compliant with regulatory requirements, whether those might be health-related (HIPPA), credit card-related (PCI DSS), or financially related, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Is there an element of control freak there? Probably. As one such freak in our own small way, we can certainly understand why there can be some legitimate concerns about the data an enterprise is handling and how safe it is, in this increasingly cyber-insecure age we’re living in.More...

Investing in network security can seem never-ending.  After all, the threats never cease.  How to direct finite security resources will always be top of mind for enterprises. Sometimes part of the answer lies in going back to the basics, and I am not talking about firewalls, IPS, and DDOS protection.

Recent recommendations have been simple, tried, and true. Revisiting some old school approaches can significantly strengthen the security posture of the enterprise.More...

Some of you may recall when network nodes required 75 ohm terminators on outlets that were not in use. I am talking of course about analog distribution networks using RG-11 or RG-6 coaxial cable. On a typical network, there might be 30 or so drops in a huge building serving 1,200 people. That was a ratio of network nodes to people of about 1 to 40. How times have changed. More...

How much could an enterprise save by implementing a SIP-based Unified Communications system? How about tens of millions of dollars? Sound enticing?

That kind of savings is not only possible, but likely, according to a new Webtorials paper titled Enterprises Stand to Recoup Millions Using UC. The same people behind this paper did a similar report a year ago, but where the original report focused on smaller businesses and projected savings for enterprises based on that, this one is targeted strictly at larger enterprises. More...