SD-WAN

Even though business has shifted from brick-and-mortar to online, many retail stores are beginning to realize that optimizing the in-store shopping experience is just as important as the online experience. Providing a pleasant and unique in-store visit could mean a direct increase in online sales. T…

We spend a lot of time talking about Wi-Fi coverage, SD-WAN tunneling, switching redundancy, etc., but the true measure of quality isn’t a perfectly deployed network… it’s an excellent user experience. As with all things, it’s often more difficult to diagnose the problem than to fix it. With more an…

As WAN network administrators, we have all run into that situation where a business group wants to roll out a new service, and we realize there is not enough bandwidth available in many of our locations. It then typically will take 90 – 120 days to add new bandwidth and then hours of dealing w…

How often does IT receive the complaint “the network is slow?” End users complaining about application problems can be frustrating, especially when it is not always the network that is the cause. When those complaints come from remote sites, eliminating the WAN as the cause of the proble…

You might not always think of the network as a source of implicit funding, but when it comes to digital transformation projects, consider taking a closer look. It’s no surprise that digital transformation remains top of mind for CEOs. As a recent Gartner CEO survey reported, 42 percent of CEOs are n…

Cisco’s Innovation Strategy In this episode of #TheGrubbCast, I set the stage by talking about Cisco’s Five-Way Strategy for innovation – Build, Buy, Partner, Invest, Co-Develop. Build refers to Cisco’s 19,000+ engineers and $6.3B investment in Research & Development – but of course no on…

Today’s network was devised decades ago. Over the years, it has been stretched to meet the ever-growing needs of enterprises – tinkered, tweaked and extended. It is time for a major reset. To take on this major shift in networking, we at Cisco introduced the Network Intuitive earlier this year…

SD-WAN has blown past all of our 2017 expectations. It has become one of the hottest trends in networking, and forecasts are increasing every quarter with IDC predicting the size of the SD-WAN market to be $8.05B by 2021. My colleagues keep asking me, “Where do we go from here?” Will the forecasts c…

Simultaneously, IT operations are becoming more centralized while business operations and company employees are becoming more decentralized, changing the role of WAN to take on an even greater importance.  That importance is hampered by the rising costs of traditional (MPLS) connectivity, the breadt…