Networking: Opinions

If your security model is location-centric and depends on keeping things separate, how do you respond to a disruptive technology like unified communications? This is a pattern that keeps repeating in many different areas: the security paradigm looked good until a technology comes along, changes the assumptions and reveals the inadequacy of the model.

George Peppard said as his character Hannibal Smith on The A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together." Several trends, if not a plan, are coming together in interesting ways in technology for small businesses. Mix equal parts of online applications, netbooks, and constant wireless networking together, and you get new ways to do more work in more places for less money.

In the quest to reduce operational costs and streamline business processes to improve company performance, organisations are increasingly Web-enabling their business critical applications and centralising operations to the data centre. This “virtual proximity” makes a lot of sense, but in making the move, many IT managers are discovering how ill equipped the WAN is to provide the backbone of application delivery. Slow or inaccessible applications mean infrastructure investments are wasted and employee productivity suffers dramatically.

The financial fraud perpetrated by Satyam Computer Services executives could trigger near-term disruptions across the outsourcing and IT industries. Ramalinga Raju, the company's founder and chairman, resigned last week. He has admitted to inflating Satyam's cash balances and the credit amounts it was owed while understating its liabilities. This scandal has many ramifications for Satyam's customers as well as those of other outsourcing companies.

Cisco has won much attention from consumer news sites since the New York Times reported Monday that the networking giant at CES this week is expected to unveil a digital stereo system that can move music wirelessly around a house, among other consumer offerings. But analysts and pundits say there are hurdles that Cisco must overcome in a market where Cisco is an unknown brand. Pundits also point to similar offerings from Sonos, Logitech and Apple.

EMA recently completed a major landscape survey on network management, including updates on technologies, process, and organization affecting the tools and practices used within network operations. One of the more interesting themes that emerged was the overwhelming indication that systems management is now part and parcel of most network operations teams' daily lives.

Probably the single biggest thing that stood out to me as I reviewed our IT consulting guidance on CMDB System deployments, service catalog deployments, and plans for end-to-end application and service management strategies, is how consistent the reasons for failure are.

Questions surrounding Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) have been debated for the past decade, beginning with when and why to deploy. The network address space problem on the Internet, which IPv6 is expected to solve, also has been disquieting for organisations planning ahead for their future network growth.

If you install the beta of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) expecting to see visible changes to your version of Vista, you'll be sorely disappointed. At least in this initial beta, all the changes are under the hood, and even they are far from earth-shaking.

The beginning of a new year normally is a time to reflect; it's all the more so when the network industry is facing (along with the rest of the economy) a major financial crisis. We are of a generation that has taken network growth for granted, that has seen the Internet reshape culture and that has come to believe that "more bits" paves the road to the future. It just might be that this comfortable view is the greatest threat we face, because networking is going to change one way or the other.