Intelligent WAN

If you have been following Cisco Blogs, attending CiscoLive, or reading industry publications like Network World,  you’ve probably heard about Cisco’s Intelligent WAN or IWAN solution. For those of you that haven’t been in the loop, have more questions, or are just plain curious about the Intelligen…

A few weeks back, Gartner analyst Bjarne Munch stated, “Internet and MPLS play an equally important role for enterprise connectivity. Network planners must establish a unified WAN with strong integration between these two networks to avoid performance problems.”[i] So, why should IT move to a hybrid…

Has this happened to you? The line of business comes to you one day and says they have this great new idea to train the sales teams.  “Let’s use YouTube videos”, they say.  Or the CMO comes to you and says, “digital signage will increase our revenue if we can promote this next new line of prod…

“Location, Location, Location” is what you need to keep in mind for real estate in the physical world.  But in today’s enterprise environment where everything is virtual and many critical apps are in  the data center or cloud, the most important thing is connectivity. So welcome to the era of connec…

For years, many IT organizations have been addressing slow application performance by adding more bandwidth. With broadband speeds available at over 100 Mbps, and the future of Fiber-optic at 1 Gbps, you would think bandwidth would solve all our application problems. However, many organizations are…

The long awaited Cisco Live in San Francisco is only four days away.  There is a lot in store for our customers including hundreds of technical sessions, keynotes from executives and industry guests, product and solutions demos at World of Solutions and more. One of the most important topics, in my…

More people than ever are talking about “shadow IT” nowadays.  As the name implies, it’s mysterious, perhaps even malevolent by some people’s standards.  From a traditional IT vantage point, this negative view may be somewhat justified given the risks it creates around security, compliance, producti…

Imagine that you have several branch offices that are using WAN demanding applications like Salesforce.com, Office 365, Virtual Desktops, Video Teleconferencing and more.  You are using those expensive MPLS/VPN WAN connections as you don’t want to risk it and probably because when you started to wor…

We in IT are faced with many challenges from our end users.  From IT costs to application performance, while always keeping an eye on our network security posture.  This reminds me of a sign on the wall of my auto mechanic’s shop: Good, Fast, Low-cost. I was always told I am allowed to pick only two…