Archive of posts with category 'industry insights'

With teams going remote en masse and across industries, network infrastructures are already being put to the test as a wealth of cloud and web applications travel across diverse network environments to keep far-flung teams in sync. That’s why it’s never been more important that the tools IT teams use to manage and monitor network performance aren’t themselves putting added...

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The past year has seen the market for streaming services turn a big corner into the mainstream as a slew of new offerings – both from legacy broadcasters like Disney and first-time content producers like Apple – have gone live, dealing another blow to once-dominant cable TV. While the majority of the new services are designed with the typical home-viewer...

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As many workers adopt work-from-home (WFH) for the first time as part of global social distancing guidance, how many of these positions will remain remote after the pandemic subsides? That’s been the million dollar question of late for many enterprise execs, as employees in positions across the corporate hierarchy are being put to the WFH test for the first time....

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As enterprises worldwide adjust to nearly 100% work from home (WFH) we can all use a bit of humor. Compiled from across our team, AppNeta is offering a few suggestions to liven up the background of your Zoom or blur your background in Microsoft Teams until they release custom backgrounds later this year. If you don’t know about the feature...

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As enterprises lean on communication apps to keep their teams connected amidst “social distancing,” it’s been a busy few weeks for market leaders Slack and Teams, who have seen their daily active users explode while unveiling major solution enhancements. On Wednesday, Mar 18, Slack unveiled the app’s largest platform redesign in nearly five years. Although the update was in the...

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Office workers coast-to-coast are getting their first taste of remote work as COVID-19 (also known as the novel coronavirus) forces many who would normally commute to instead set up work from home (WFH). From March 9 to 15, virtual private network (VPN) vendor Atlas saw usage of VPNs, which enable many companies to safely extend their private networks to remote...

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According to a recent survey, 81 percent of IT professionals believe that the majority of data center and network management tasks performed today will be automated by 2025, driven in large part by the rise of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. What’s more, 66 percent of those polled think the on-premises data center will become a relic of the...

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Remote work in the enterprise has already been on an uptick for quite a while, as more widespread adoption of agile tech and flexible cloud and SaaS applications have made it easier for employers to engage with a far-flung workforce. A recent report shows that between 2007 and 2015, there was a 159 percent jump in remote work across sectors,...

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Enterprises are coming to terms with the fact that digital transformation isn’t a singular project with a deadline but a new way of being for workers across the business (and not just IT). Because technology is increasingly woven into every facet of our day-to-day lives, it will continue to evolve as tech expands and has a greater impact on both...

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Fifty-four percent of office workers say they’d leave their job for one that offers flexible work time, according to a recent Gallup poll. What’s more, Gallup found that those who work remotely 60 percent to 80 percent of the time (ie. three to four days in a five-day work week) feel that they are more fully engaged with their managers...

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In nearly every field imaginable, digital transformation is paving the way for improved efficiencies, from self check-in at hotels to finance apps upending the way we bank. But in healthcare, improving “the business” goes hand-in-hand with saving lives, or at the very least keeping individuals and their data safe and well – areas where digital transformation could theoretically be making...

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It’s no secret that the modern contact or call center is transforming from a facility that occupies physical real estate to an almost entirely virtual environment. LL Bean, J.C. Penny and other major retail brands, for instance, are shuttering many of their brick-and-mortar call centers and offering some employees the option to retain their positions, but in a “work-from-home” capacity....

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Not only are branch offices growing in number as enterprises ramp up decentralization, but so is the data being generated at the branch and where that traffic goes. With IaaS and SaaS transforming how apps are delivered to branch locations, these offices are increasingly connecting to both cloud providers and their corporate data centers (if not retiring their dependency on...

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Shares of Twitter jumped on Thursday when it was announced that the company passed the billion-dollar revenue threshold for the first time last quarter, as the platform’s daily user base jumped from 145 million to 152 million as 2019 wound to a close. This isn’t altogether surprising, as Twitter has been a hotbed of political deliberation during the leadup to...

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Many companies sign on to digital transformation initiatives in the hopes of bringing more efficiency to stakeholders across their organization. Cloud and SaaS apps, for instance, can be more quickly deployed than their legacy, hardware-based counterparts, helping deliver speedy, high-performing services to end users without delay. Networks themselves are transforming from historically hub-and-spoke operations dependent on MPLS connectivity to infrastructures...

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It’s safe to say that the 2020 Democratic primaries have gotten off to a rocky start, as the Iowa Caucuses were plagued by what can only be called an epic app malfunction that delayed results well past closing time Monday night. Developed by Shadow, a company that claims to have been involved in Democrat campaigns dating back to the Obama...

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In our 2020 Enterprise App Report Card, we touched upon the fact that Microsoft’s comprehensive Office 365 suite of enterprise productivity and collaboration tools is relatively unrivaled among AppNeta customers in terms of sheer users. But the software pioneer may soon be facing some stiff competition from another nearly-ubiquitous tech giant, as it was recently announced that Google is looking...

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As more and more enterprise workflows migrate to cloud, so go the enterprise jobs, according to data culled by staffing website Indeed.com. The findings show that over the past half decade, the number of inquiries and postings for jobs related to cloud computing have been on a steady uptick, with some cloud-related salaries rising in tandem. From October 2018 to...

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It’s no secret that cloud and SaaS apps are fundamentally changing the game for enterprise IT. While these teams used to own and control the bulk of their hardware-based, legacy workflows, the move to the cloud has empowered IT to offload a lot of their hardware altogether. Best of all, SaaS apps can be launched “as-a-service” in just a few...

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Digital transformation isn’t just an enterprise phenomenon, as anyone who grew up with a cable subscription and a local Blockbuster Video can attest. Today, consumers take their entertainment with them, watching their favorite movies or TV shows from any wireless device they can connect to – a marked digital transformation from the days of the bunny-ear antenna and CRT television....

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One of the defining characteristics of the modern workforce is the variety of devices employees use to stay connected. Between the rise of BYOD initiatives and the greater availability of mobile-friendly SaaS apps, many workers today split their time between their smartphones, tablets and laptop PCs – while, in some cases, teams have abandoned the PC altogether. At least, that’s...

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A recent report from Synergy Research Group that rounds up the decade’s biggest trends in IT spending was at times both predictable and a bit of a head-scratcher. For starters, in 2010, the amount of budget that IT teams were allocating to cloud infrastructure services was practically non-existent. This isn’t altogether surprising, as the cloud as we know it today...

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In an industry where acronyms and initialisms are a dime a dozen, few tech terms are as ubiquitous in the world of enterprise networking as MPLS and SD-WAN. Sure, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and UCaaS represent buzzworthy new workflows that have changed how enterprise IT teams are managing their tech footprints. But when it comes to the underlying networks that support...

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As 2019 comes to a close, 66 percent of companies embraced remote work, and for good reason: When businesses don’t have to gather all of their staff at HQ every day, bosses can broaden their search for talent beyond who is available locally, while giving employees more control of where and when they work, which has been proven to pay...

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At this rate, the term ‘transformation’ may feel a little tired in the context of enterprise IT and networking, as industry forecasts have been anticipating transformative changes to networking operations for the better part of the last decade. But there are a number of truly transformational initiatives gaining steam across the enterprise space that will be a top priority for...

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Last week, the AppNeta team took to Las Vegas for the 2020 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies (IOCS) Conference, where leaders and learners across the tech landscape converged to discuss where things stand today and get a sense of the future of enterprise networking. As expected, the many flavors of network “transformation” underway across the enterprise space was...

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As expected, early tallies are showing that Americans broke spending records across the board over the Thanksgiving weekend, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales exceeding industry analysts’ best estimates. That said, when digging into the data, it paints a somewhat mixed picture for the industry at large, as where and how consumers spent this past weekend marked an interesting...

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With AWS re:Invent taking place in Las Vegas this week, ‘cloud’ and all of its associated buzzwords will be the talk of the tech industry (not to say that cloud is ever that far from the tech headlines). That’s because event host Amazon is set to unveil a bevy of new products that are aimed squarely at making cloud migration...

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Bargain hunting has become nearly as synonymous with Thanksgiving as turkey and football, thanks in no small part to the rise of omnichannel retail. In fact, a recent study found that consumers who shop both online and in-store over the holiday season are prone to spending twice as much compared to buyers who only leverage a single channel in the...

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While digital transformation is a relatively loose concept as it pertains to the enterprise, software provider MuleSoft characterizes it as “using a combination of new technologies to modernize legacy processes and to identify and implement new business model innovation opportunities.” And according to the company’s 2020 Connectivity Benchmark, 97 percent of IT decision makers are steering such efforts as they...

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At 10:30 PM on October 29, 1969, UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock and his student Charley Kline established an ARPANET link – the first one ever – between their campus and the office of Bill Duval, a programmer at Stanford University. And thus, the seeds of what would become the Internet we know today were planted. And 50 years later, the...

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While SD-WAN has been trending in the enterprise IT space for a few years now, there’s been little official consensus on what these solutions should encompass, let alone what defines a “best-of-breed” SD-WAN. Sure, the label SD-WAN has been marketed publicly by many providers, but in lieu of a standard that defines what exactly these tools should deliver, customers may...

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Election season is in full swing in the United States, and perhaps one of the more unexpected talking points to grab headlines following the latest round of debates is the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — also known commonly in the networking world as Industry 4.0. Politics aside, this “revolution” truly does represent a major shift in the ways we think about...

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Enterprise networks are getting faster and more efficient by the day. But while technology seems to evolve and advance at a breakneck pace these days, the humans in charge of managing new tech aren’t always able to keep up. That’s one of the main takeaways of a recent report from the Uptime Institute, which surveyed thousands of IT pros and...

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The days are getting shorter and the nights colder, which means year-end prediction season is upon us again. As 2019 comes to a close, businesses across industries have had to reckon with significant changes driven by digital transformation and a greater reliance on connected technologies to drive business success. But as fast and furious as the rate of change may...

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As network connectivity becomes increasingly critical to business success in the modern enterprise, ensuring IT and network operations teams have proactive visibility into network performance is essential. Yet a recent survey found that fewer than half of network performance degradations today are discovered by IT before they reach employees or, even worse, customers. According to the survey of 400 end...

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Earlier this summer, we unpacked the findings of Accenture’s “Perspective on Cloud Outcomes: Expectation vs. Reality” report, which found that of 200 IT pros polled, hardly one third are satisfied with the results of their cloud migration to date. Now, another report from Accenture is driving the point home that as a new generation of business solutions – namely, cloud...

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Another week, another round of mixed-messages for the retail sector, as a string of recent news continues to paint a fuzzy picture for the future of the industry as it reckons with digital transformation. First up was a report from Best Buy that delivered about as mixed a message as market watchers could imagine. While the brand’s latest earnings report,...

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From funky new approaches to interior design to “thinking green” about plastic toiletries, many established hotel brands are going to great lengths to appeal to a new generation of travelers who put “experiences” (read: Instagrammable moments) ahead of material when it comes to spending. But the biggest and most impactful changes that hotel brands are instituting lately go beyond edgy...

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We recently discussed how educators in Florida are spearheading a revolutionary telehealth initiative to connect students living with the trauma of last year’s Hurricane Michael – the first Category 5 storm to make landfall in almost three decades – with mental health professionals in schools. But as the southeastern US reckons with the fallout of another monster storm in the...

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According to recent data from analyst firm Atos, banks can increase their operating profits by 30 percent through 2020 by embracing more digital workflows. In particular, hybrid cloud is proving to be the preferred avenue for digital transformation in the finance world, as hybrid helps level the playing field between traditional banks and a slew of digital disruptors. When discussing...

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A decade back, before cell phones became “smart” and armed almost every man, woman and child with a full-fledged, pocket-sized PC, network management teams were able to set and enforce fairly predictable use policies for employee devices. After all, it was (and remains) common for IT to supply computers to employees, while intelligent mobile devices (usually Blackberries, which were hardly...

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The start of the school year can be daunting under any circumstances. But for students in Northwest Florida, this fall marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Michael, one of the most damaging hurricanes on record and the first Category 5 to reach the U.S. mainland since 1992. For many in this corner of the state, memories of the Michael are...

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According to a survey of Netflix subscribers conducted back in the summer of 2017, almost 40 percent of respondents admitted to streaming from the platform while on the job. Two years later, streaming in general has never been more popular, and a rash of Netflix competitors are about to launch, flooding workers with distracting content they can binge on the...

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Any major network – especially a highly distributed one – that fails to change with the times is bound to pay a price. And while concepts like digital transformation are generally applied to industry verticals in the quest for greater business outcomes (and ultimately profits), the same principles can be applied to the sphere of education as a means to...

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We’ve said it before and we’ll keep on saying it: Undertaking any changes–big or small–to your network without having a data-driven strategy is a recipe for failure. But the message to date seems to be falling on deaf ears at many mature finance and telecom companies, as fewer than 35 percent of the IT leaders in this sector rely on...

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In Boston and other coastal tech hubs, the booming startup culture has been a boon when it comes to amping up the economy and attracting new residents, but something of a burden where factors like traffic and mass transit are concerned. As a result, leaders in Massachusetts have come up with a potential solution to some of their traffic woes:...

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Consumers are well aware of how connected technologies are speeding up the delivery of goods and services, enabling new and diverse methods for communication and even breaking down the geographical barriers to where and how they work. But when it comes to the production of those goods consumers can order with just a few taps on their smartphone (and even...

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Think remote work is just a passing fad? Take a look at the businesses popping up in support of the concept, and you might be convinced otherwise. Take, for example, Pizzatime, a new service from digital agency Planetary that organizes virtual pizza parties for teams collaborating from multiple branch locations. Leveraging Slack, the tool takes orders from each team member...

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Every sector faces unique roadblocks on their path to the cloud. In life sciences, however, the stakes of executing a successful digital transformation can literally be life or death, and protecting patients and their data has always been a top concern when adopting new technology. In that same vein, however, a reluctance to innovate or deploy technologies that can speed...

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According to a recent Salesforce report, 71 percent of enterprise IT teams are transforming from “a technology-providing cost center to a value-based service brokerage.” What does that mean exactly? For starters, the IT department of the past was very much a reactionary operation. That’s not to say that IT teams were always playing catch up, but actually the opposite: The...

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According to the latest figures from the Commerce Department, online shopping has overtaken grocery stores and restaurants in terms of retail market share to become the second largest category in this sector, trailing only vehicle and auto parts sales in the United States as of this June. As to be expected, a great deal of the surge in popularity for...

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Since the earliest days of Silicon Valley, competing tech companies have always been engaged in a virtual arms race for loyal users. Whether it’s PC versus Mac, or AWS versus Azure, there always seem to be at least two dueling behemoths involved whenever a new technology takes the scene. As we’ve covered in recent posts, communication software seems to be...

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Jealous that you’re missing out on the watercooler chatter surrounding Season 3 of Stranger Things? A new Chrome extension aims to have you covered. Netflix Hangouts is the latest in a long line of programs designed to help workers leverage their office networks for less-than-business-critical activities. The program creates what looks like a standard four-person video conference -- a communication...

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Despite the fact that the United States’ healthcare system is among the world’s most expensive, it ranks at the bottom of developed nations where efficiency and effectiveness are concerned. That’s because not unlike in finance, where customer experience has been the primary benefactor of digital transformation initiatives, healthcare tech has been slow to transform where back-office operations are concerned. At...

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We’ve recently touched upon how digital transformation has been making a serious impact across industries, from the previously cloud-averse financial sector down to the assembly line. Retail, however, is one industry that’s perhaps felt the burn (and the boon, ie. Amazon, WalMart, Wayfair) of digital transformation more than any other. But while retailers have been credited with evolving in response...

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Between The Master’s and The Women’s World Cup, sports fans have had a lot of mid-day distractions lately. And while it’s not a sport in the traditional sense, the impending Democratic presidential debates present yet another heated competition that is likely to have many office workers switching back-and-forth between live streams over the coming months. Mixing work and politics is...

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When it comes to working in tech, being in the “right zipcode” is no longer the barrier to entry that it was in years past, a report from CompTIA suggests. In the company’s Tech on the Move survey, 78 percent of tech workers polled would consider leaving their current city for a new tech job, with affordability (60 percent) and...

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According to our 2019 State of Enterprise IT report, “brand damage” is one of the biggest impacts of poor end-user experience. If you needed an example of what this looks like in action, look no further than Target’s recent string of bad luck and the ensuing social media fallout. On Sunday, June 16th, the company experienced an outage that impacted...

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A recent Accenture survey of enterprise tech pros found that only one third of companies that have undergone cloud migration are reaping the expected results. The report, which received feedback from roughly 200 IT pros, emphasizes a “tale as old as time” about adopting any kind of new technology or workflow: Expectations can quickly get inflated when they aren’t rooted...

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Days 2 and 3 at Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego were jam-packed with activity for the AppNeta team. Look no further than Senior Sales Director Mike Mattei’s viral picture from the show floor for proof: Check out Mike Mattei breaking a sweat at #CLUS 2019 in San Diego! Come visit Mike and the rest of the AppNeta team at...

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The opening keynote from Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins started by pointing out that this was the company’s 30th year hosting a version Cisco Live, emphasizing just how much has changed in the tech world since the conference was born in 1989 as “Networkers.” (Shoutout to our intern @JarrettLee828 for leveraging that bit of knowledge for a prize during the show)...

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Google recently published an eye-opening report that looked at the impact of remote work on large organizations, a topic the behemoth search engine-cum-tech monolith is well suited to explore. After all, according to the company, at least 30 percent of all meetings held between employees involve at least two time zones. That makes sense when you consider that 2 in...

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According to the findings of our 2019 State of Enterprise IT report, only 53.5% of all enterprises are knowingly employing a network performance monitoring solution. That means that despite the fact that enterprises the world over are, by and large, overhauling their legacy networks to embrace enterprise decentralization, only about half of IT teams are even sure they have a...

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When the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went live a year ago, companies across the globe were bracing for the sky to fall. And while there were certainly some headline-grabbing fines for noncompliance (most notably, Google’s almost 50 million Euro hit this past January related to “forced consent”), the mandate’s first year was far less “doom and gloom”...

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According to a recent report from Gartner, anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of enterprise app spending takes place “in the shadows” -- that is, without the knowledge of enterprise IT, and potentially in violation of network policies. Known as “Shadow IT,” the rogue use of apps that leverage WAN capacity has exploded alongside the widespread adoption of SaaS for...

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The financial sector has been notoriously averse to embracing the scale of digital transformation that has transformed other industries from the top-down (think Industry 4.0, IoT in Healthcare, virtual dressing rooms, etc.). While banks of all sizes have adopted cloud computing for non-core functions, many still rely on legacy, hardware-defined workflows when it comes to business-critical operations and customer transactions....

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Fostering a happy and effective work culture isn’t about following fads. In the 8-plus years since AppNeta was founded, tech companies like ours have been known to deploy lots of gimmicks to attract the best talent, which may be a flashy-enough sell to get interested workers through the door, but not enough to build a team for the long haul....

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Last week, the AppNeta team traveled down to Dallas for ONUG Spring 2019, where we met with other leaders in the enterprise networking space to discuss the challenges and solutions organizations face as they put connected technologies front-and-center. The agenda for the event zeroed in on Digital Transformation in particular, which, as a concept, can be loaded. As we’ve discussed...

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Remote work is by no means a new concept, but recent high-profile announcements suggest that this model is fast graduating from “a novel approach” to an operational standard across industries. At Facebook’s recent F8 2019 developer conference, for instance, Stripe, a tech platform that builds economic infrastructure for web companies, announced that the company would be opening up a fifth...

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ECMP is a routing technique that allows traffic sharing the same source and destination to be distributed through multiple network paths of equal cost. This involves leveraging routing metric calculations with hash algorithms to determine which available “next-hop” routers can be leveraged at the same price point to deliver traffic from one flow to its destination. In simplest terms, ECMP...

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While consensus over what digital transformation actually means still appears to elude many members of the C-Suite, enterprise investment into the concept has never been higher, according to a recent report from IDC. Across virtually every industry and sector, total spending on digital transformation will jump roughly 18 percent in 2019 to a new high-water mark of $1.18 trillion. Gearing...

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Cloud-based call centers have gone from risky experiments to a business standard over the course of the last decade. According to research from IDG, 62.4 percent of global enterprises now use cloud (or virtual) contact centers to facilitate their customer service and outreach operations, and for good reason. For starters, this reflects an overall trend of enterprise decentralization, where companies...

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In an age when “appointment television” is a nearly-dead concept (outside of Game of Thrones at least), people still go out of their way to make sure they catch their favorite team or player live. We’ve seen it firsthand here at AppNeta. Take the latest Masters Tournament: Ahead of Tiger Woods taking home his first title trophy in over a...

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What is digital transformation, exactly? If you ask senior enterprise leaders who took part in a recent report from CompleteSpectrum, you’ll be hard pressed to get a straight answer. According to the study, which polled 300 members of leadership teams at companies with between $15 million and $200 million in annual revenue, 94 percent said that digital transformation was a...

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According to the Cloud Adoption and Risk Report 2019 from McAfee, cloud usage grew 15 percent last year, establishing a new high-water mark for enterprise adoption. The average enterprise now employs roughly 1,935 cloud apps, with business applications (ie. Google Drive, Office 365 or Salesforce) accounting for 70 percent of total cloud services. (This may seem high, but McAfee likely...

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Last week, the AppNeta team took to the Great White North to host an industry luncheon and panel in Toronto, looking at the challenges of network management as cloud takes on a bigger role in the enterprise space. Moderated by our own Chief Customer Officer Adam Edwards, the panel also included John Menezes, President & CEO of Stratejm, Alfred Ng,...

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For years, the center of gravity within the tech sector has been squarely located in Silicon Valley, the storied West Coast home of Apple, Alphabet, and pretty much every other tech behemoth you can imagine (with a few notable exceptions like Amazon). As a result, tech workers have notoriously fled competing job markets in the hopes of landing gigs in...

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When monitoring an enterprise network, teams often think that they need to focus squarely on the apps that are deemed “business critical,” and little else. While the logic here isn’t flawed, per se, this approach robs IT of the holistic picture of network conditions they need to truly understand where their network capacity is being spent. Without this full picture...

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The Facebook outage that impacted the company’s globally-popular suite of social media apps last week certainly caused lots of headaches. But reports that the interruptions were due to issues on the network level proved premature. Facebook operates its own collection of 15 data centers globally, which serve as a redundant, internal backbone network. As a result, the public doesn’t readily...

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The World Wide Web turned 30 years old this month, and like any Millennial entering their third decade, there were plenty of cringeworthy moments along the way. While the growth of widespread connectivity has undoubtedly helped change our day-to-day reality since it was invented in 1989, even the Web’s “parents” are uneasy about some of the changes. In an open...

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The rate of change in the hospitality sector over the past decade has been staggering. While booking apps, AirBnB, and ratings websites have certainly been disruptors, it’s really the changing demands of travelers that have put technology at the center of the lodging experience. And hoteliers are taking note. A recent study from Forrester Research found that of all the...

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Hot on the heels of the 2019 Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) comes Gartner’s Critical Capabilities Report for NPMD, and more great news for AppNeta! Not only did we advance to a Visionary placement in the MQ -- even as the field of qualified competitors narrowed to 16 vendors from 22 in 2018 -- but...

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Delivering visibility is central to everything we do at AppNeta. Not only does our platform allow enterprise IT to see into all corners of their network, but transparency and clarity is central to how we operate as a company, too. It’s fitting, therefore, that AppNeta was named a Visionary in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and...

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This week there are two pieces of news in the DNS world which remind us that DNS is not simply “it just works” technology that can be forgotten about. Like many things, DNS requires a little ongoing care and attention! First is the US-CERT DNS Infrastructure Hijacking Campaign bulletin. It warns of an organized campaign to use compromised credentials to...

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Enterprise IT and end users alike tend to take the Domain Name System (DNS) for granted. While those who don’t work in network operations might not even know what DNS is -- let alone the central role it plays in making the Internet a space humans can navigate -- even IT often just expects the system to always perform. DNS...

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Before the days of personal computing -- and well before the dawn of smart devices -- it was easier for the relatively few users leveraging the Internet to recognize familiar IP addresses, like memorizing a home phone number in the pre-caller ID days. While we may type URLs into search bars and click “Send” on email, computers don’t actually read...

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It was a busy week for the AppNeta team at the 2018 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference, where we chatted with dozens of IT pros on the show floor. This is a new combination for Gartner, bringing IT Operations and Data Center disciplines together, which made for some very interesting discussions around migration and the pain associated...

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IN PRACTICE | This article is part of a series of posts sharing examples of how AppNeta users have leveraged the service to solve performance problems. Problem A civil engineering firm uses Skype for Business heavily in their day-to-day operations, for both internal and external calls. Since migrating to the cloud last year, it has been their primary VoIP application....

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Today AppNeta announced a number of exciting product enhancements that we’ve been working on over the past few months. This includes some major milestones in the software that our development teams have been pushing towards over the past few bi-weekly releases and a whole new line of hardware and virtual monitoring points to enable AppNeta to deliver industry-leading flexibility for...

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IN PRACTICE | This article is part of a series of posts sharing examples of how AppNeta users have leveraged the service to solve performance problems. Introduction Transient issues can be a huge problem on large network infrastructures. Not only are they hard to catch, but it is even harder to isolate root cause. A large US telecommunications customer continuously...

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IN PRACTICE | This article is part of a series of posts sharing examples of how AppNeta users have leveraged the service to solve performance problems. What Problem Was the Customer Attempting to Solve? In retail, slow performance in Point of Sale (POS) applications has an immediate impact. When numerous complaints came in regarding overall performance slowdowns for a large...

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With the upcoming enforcement of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we here at AppNeta want to share the steps we have taken to protect our customers and their data. In general, GDPR wants you to: Collect as little information as is necessary, keep it for as short amount of time as is necessary and share it with...

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The day security and monitoring appliances were added to network infrastructure was the day that visibility became a major IT concern. However, IT complexity has grown exponentially in recent years, making network visibility a bit of a buzzword. Perhaps the biggest reason is the widespread shift to cloud computing. Cisco research found that by 2019, 89% of workloads will be...

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Imagine an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled smart shoe that has the capability for workers to send or receive alerts while working in dangerous areas. The possibilities are just incredible. What we once dreamed of as future technology is now at our fingertips to create opportunities across workplaces and at home. As we see a proliferation of IoT devices, it’s time...

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“Cloud-native” technology has likely come across your radar screen at some point in the last few years, but what does it mean, exactly? There’s a good explainer here on cloud-native computing, a concept that runs through any cloud service. Any applications, architectures, platforms and processes that work toward increasing IT’s ability to change and reduce unpredictability can be described as...

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Like just about any other technology, WebRTC has followed the hype cycle pretty closely. (Were you surprised to see a headline on this topic in 2018?) WebRTC, an open source project, aims to boost mobile apps and browsers to real-time speed using APIs. After reaching peak hype around 2013, we slipped down into the trough of disillusionment. However, at times...

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In a recent blog post on the modern networking technologies of 2018, we discussed one of the newest IT buzzwords—intent-based networking (IBN). Like any nascent concept, it can take a couple of mentions before it piques interest. It’s been appearing more regularly in networking conversations, though. While IBN could easily be dismissed as just another name for software-defined network-based workflow...

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As the GDPR go-live date approaches in late May, we’ve heard some buzz as companies examine their data to see if they’ll be in line with the new EU requirements. It’s such an interconnected global world now that most businesses, even American ones, need to be ready for any GDPR fallout. Fines will be stiff for noncompliance. For most companies,...

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There are plenty of shiny new technologies available to enterprise IT teams today. The network underpins business infrastructure, and it’s key to making all these new applications and tools work smoothly. But most businesses don’t have the luxury of starting over with an entirely cloud-driven, SaaS-based infrastructure. In some way or another, they’re stuck with legacy tools. IT teams have...

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The next internet-crashing botnet is slowly starting to wake up. Since late December, a botnet known as Satori has been infecting new endpoints and generally showing the signs of a disaster waiting to happen. How should you brace yourself for the next large-scale DDoS attack? A Dormant Botnet Reawakens The last time we saw the Satori botnet was in 2016—back...

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As new, exciting technologies become reality, IT teams are updating systems and considering the best technology options to support new tools. IoT, for example, needs a strong networking foundation. It’s more than just a reliable network that’s needed, but a complex network design that allows for real-time data analysis between and among all the dispersed IoT sensors. That data today...

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If you’re keeping up with application development trends lately, you may have heard the term “progressive web apps” come up. This concept of progressive apps is a new type of web app standard that aims to make web apps more like native applications. These aren’t entirely brand-new, written-from-scratch applications, but are instead improved over time—progressively—with modern features. The result is...

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For some time, there’s been a quiet war going on between the top three providers of enterprise ERP software—SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. Lately, that war has been taking place on a new front: the cloud. All three major players have pushed out cloud versions of their flagship ERP software within the last few years, with varying degrees of success. Let’s...

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IT Role: Raj Avinish, Senior Network Engineer Company: ATS Automation Needs: Network and application monitoring to improve performance for users at 35+ remote locations Results: Better user experience, improved root cause identification ATS Automation is a tool manufacturing industry leader, with a data center each in the U.S. and Germany. Network engineer Raj Avinish is responsible for the performance of...

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By the end of 2019, 60% of business will have moved their operations primarily to a SaaS model and away from on-premises, according to a recent 451 Research survey. Amazon and Microsoft have traction in the cloud market for these businesses, of course. 35% say that Microsoft will become their most strategic cloud partner, while 17% name Amazon. That’s a...

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As networking hardware gets cheaper, it’s having an effect on how data centers are connecting to each other. As big providers like Amazon, Google and the rest start using SDN and SD-WAN more widely, the hardware costs are coming down. Those hardware costs used to be the biggest consideration when building and provisioning data centers, but that’s not the case...

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The cloud changes things, and not always in a good way. A recent survey from the security vendor AlgoSec shows that 30% of companies find that their applications don't work as expected after a cloud migration. ERP is no exception to that rule. Those using cloud ERP solutions increasingly find that once their vendors finish porting their applications to the...

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If you take a peek at the telecom world, you see a couple of big networking trends that are making waves there. However, changes are still slow to come, since network managers have a lot of legacy networks and infrastructure in place now. Ripping and replacing is expensive, time-consuming and risky. This expert thinks 2020 will be the year of...

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Happy New Year! Do you have a resolution to declutter this year? If you’re hoping to declutter the SaaS application sprawl in your organization, try to stay realistic on that front. Most companies, according to these cloud experts, know they’re spending too much on disparate SaaS and web apps, but don’t have the time or know how to fix the...

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Not enough American companies are ready for the GDPR—the General Data Protection Regulation, adopted last year in the European Union and set to go into effect in May of 2018. According to research from Spiceworks, only 5% of US companies are currently preparing for these data protection regulations. On the face of it, this seems like a reasonable thing not...

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Embracing the digital workplace is top priority for any tech-driven organization—and in a world dominated by smartphones, social media and always-on connected devices, “tech-driven” covers almost any company looking to stay competitive. The challenge is creating an end-user experience that leads to digital solutions. According to CMS Wire, “the heart of every successful digital workplace is a great, engaging experience,...

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Is SaaS sprawl creeping in to your enterprise environment? Orchestration might be a good goal for 2018. Building an orchestration environment means that IT’s resources, services and workflows are available to users in a self-service way. So for cloud deployments, a cloud orchestration system means that there’s a specific workflow to follow when a business user requests a common task,...

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Here’s a philosophical question for network engineers everywhere: What does stability mean, anyway? The inimitable Ethan Banks offers some time-tested, practical tips on what makes for lasting network stability today. One important piece of advice is to control your impulses to play around with network features and functionality. Don’t experiment in a production environment, and don’t go rogue just for...

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From the earliest days of online-dating services, “love algorithms” searched almost exclusively on what clients deemed to be their ideal characteristics in a partner. Singles would check boxes on hair color, religion, location, and interests, and wait for the results. Undoubtedly, what came out didn’t really align with the kind of partner they were actually attracted to. Algorithms had to...

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The annual AWS re:invent conference wrapped up this week, with more than 43,000 attendees gathering. Some hot topics included AI and machine learning, but the bigger picture revolved around Amazon’s work to continue its public cloud dominance, according to this account. Microsoft and Google continue to work to take market share away, though AWS had a lot of announcements to...

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Happy December! First up, a recent survey finds that IaaS use nearly doubled from 2014 to 2016, and that enterprises are continuing to charge ahead with all kinds of cloud use. Multicloud use is already pretty well-established, with 72% of companies using between two and five cloud providers. We predict that staying on top of all these cloud instances and...

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On the road toward software-defined everything, WAN virtualization could play an important part. SDN is useful for a lot of data center networking tasks, like switching. But SDN across existing IP networks doesn’t necessarily bring a lot of value, and many businesses wouldn’t be able to afford to invest in entirely new software-defined networks. SD-WAN, though, has emerged as a...

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The fall ONUG conference a few weeks back explored lots of emerging networking technology and trends. Here’s a good look into some of those, including network infrastructure consolidation, where SD-WAN functionality is packaged into a larger product that also offers routing, security and other features. Then there’s automation, which one expert argues is the only way for businesses to get...

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You know what happens this time of year, as Halloween is approaching: It’s time for next year’s technology predictions to arrive. Here, there's a look at some potential 2018 networking trends around SD-WAN in particular. One that caught our attention was the addition of security features like firewall functionality, and the expectation that antivirus and flexible security feature deployment will...

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With ONUG Fall 2017 coming up next week, we’re taking a moment to reflect on some of the big network changes and trends of the year. So many parts of IT infrastructure are now overlapping, and networking technology is the glue that holds it all together. New demands on the network, with SaaS, cloud and now IoT in the picture,...

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The promise of cloud and SaaS was supposed to be that it’s hands-off for IT and won’t take up internal resources. But for Office 365 at least, that’s not the case. One study found that 70% of enterprises using Office 365 report latency issues on a weekly basis, and 33% report them daily. This story has more details about the...

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Here’s a great recent look at the top challenges that IT teams are facing, courtesy of a survey done at VMworld. We’re not surprised to see that performance was named as the top challenge, with 38% of respondents choosing it. We hear daily about the pressures on IT to provide good performance, and the obstacles they have to clear to...

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Apple’s latest OS—iOS 11—launches tomorrow. With half to two-thirds of device users running iOS 10, reflecting the huge base of iPhone users, this is no small event for corporate networks. Users bring their devices to work as a matter of course, whether they use them a little or a lot for actual work. So while users are eager for new...

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Is it time yet to acknowledge that unified communications (UC) is more of a buzzword than a real business solution? We’ve been hearing about the promises of UC applications for upwards of 20 years—ever since messaging and real-time communication started coming together. But the real temptation of UC was that all of your communications needs—voice, video, instant messaging—would come together...

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We always like to hear the stories of those IT early adopters for a new technology. In this story, it’s several heads of IT who’ve adopted SD-WAN. For both, their companies needed a better way to provision and manage branch office infrastructure. For one, the Bay Club Company, using SD-WAN is actually helping IT drive revenue. Provisioning new locations is...

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The adoption curve for technology (what Gartner calls the Hype Cycle) is interesting to watch for various products. As SD-WAN matures, we start to see differentiation between products and types of deployment. This story has a useful breakdown of the SD-WAN choices IT teams can make, whether they install it on-premises only, in a cloud-enabled way, or a cloud-enabled way...

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The partnership between VMware and AWS is good for both VMware and AWS—but it’s also good for IT. Any IT team managing a virtualized environment with VMware, which is a solid majority of IT teams, can move those virtual workloads to the AWS cloud without reengineering anything. Previously, VMware-heavy IT shops were locked into their complex virtualized environments, and locked...

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Who doesn’t love data these days? For business leaders, the more data you can collect, the better. Some might resist certain technologies in digital transformation, but it seems everyone can agree that big data analytics makes business life easier. Everyone except IT leaders, that is. While business leaders add ever-increasing data inputs with IoT sensors, IT teams are left to...

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SD-WAN is gaining traction quickly with a lot of businesses. If SD-WAN technology is on your radar, you likely want to improve the performance of networks and applications at remote offices. You may have jumped off the SD-WAN adoption cliff already, or are at least researching and considering it. With SD-WAN’s popularity, it has gained a silver bullet quality. It does...

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Team members are not always in the same office, or they may be on the road at customer or supplier sites. Companies are dealing with a shortage of critical skills, so they hire people regardless of their location. Businesses overall are increasing their number of remote offices and locations, taking advantage of modern technology that makes it easier to be...

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Either WAN optimization is dead, or it’s more important than ever. This story argues that WAN optimization reached its peak in the era of limited bandwidth. Now, though, the technology has lost its usefulness because it can’t improve VoIP or video streaming application performance. On the other hand, this analyst says that WAN optimization should be a no-brainer when using...

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More healthcare organizations are discovering SD-WAN technology for help managing their many remote locations. It makes a lot of sense—in many ways, healthcare businesses like hospitals and home healthcare facilities are the poster children of the challenges of modern networking. Each remote office or location needs high-performing networks and applications, and most don’t have IT teams on site. We’ve heard...

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A recent survey from Dimensional Research found that nearly all respondents are facing multiple WAN security and management challenges. Network complexity is the underlying challenge for most respondents, which they’re aware of, but not addressing. The top three challenges all involve supporting branch offices: Managing devices, mitigating security risks and deploying new solutions at branch offices. It’s not a surprise,...

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“Help, I need somebody!” That refrain from one of the songs that powered the Beatles to long-ago pop music success is the perpetual lament of anyone who’s ever run into a brick wall at work with computer or hardware, WiFi access, or a host of other potentially challenging activities. For years, the IT support help desk has been the answer....

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Networking association MEF started the push toward SD-WAN standards recently. It’s a sign of the maturity of the technology, which is becoming a part of more organizations’ network infrastructures. MEF is developing a lifecycle service orchestration framework and open APIs, with the goal of consistency around communicating among SD-WAN components. Several leading SD-WAN vendors are on board. The Open Networking...

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For every new technology, there’s that initial excitement that makes you think “this is the innovation that will break the Gartner Hype Cycle.” But time and time again, there’s a gap between innovation hype and practical implementation. There’s no better example of this gap than the case of software-defined networking (SDN). The concept has been around since the mid-1990s, but...

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Emerging technologies are making it easier for IT teams to manage the remote offices under their control. SD-WAN deployment is growing quickly, and so are remote locations, which are increasingly a part of many distributed businesses in a whole variety of industries. At its simplest, SD-WAN pairs multiple existing networks and routes their traffic depending on network health or specific...

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Check out this research showing how digital transformation is affecting companies with remote and branch offices. The EMA Research study found that 83% of enterprises are increasing their number of WAN-connected sites, and in 84% of enterprises, the number of network-connected devices is also increasing at remote sites. A majority of businesses surveyed—74%—are also making changes around using the internet...

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One of our favorite topics around here is obviously network performance. This take on upgrading network performance looks at the big picture of networking today to see where improvements might happen. Throughput and security have traditionally been the two big considerations in network performance, but others now include policy-based approaches, flexible infrastructure and capacity. The general outlook here is that...

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The cloud offers many attractive alternatives for businesses and their IT teams looking for flexibility and quick deployment of all kinds of applications, large and small. But existing budget patterns—with a strong bias toward ownership (capex) rather than consumption-as-needed (opex)—means IT is stuck shopping for tools in an old-school way. Old habits and work styles have left organizations with enlarged...

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Are you using multicloud in your enterprise? No? Are you sure about that? This look at multicloud notes that many businesses are actually using multicloud without knowing it, citing an IDC study that 95% of businesses are using multiple public and private clouds. This unknown use of multicloud is a sort of outgrowth of shadow IT, which isn’t so harmless...

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It may have seemed for a moment there that MPLS was on its way out as SD-WAN came onto the scene and businesses with remote locations used more public internet. That’s probably not the case, though. A recent Nemertes Research survey found that about 21% of organizations are deploying some kind of SD-WAN technology. Notably, though, they aren’t getting rid...

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 “The edge will eat the cloud. And this is perhaps as important as the cloud computing trend ever was.”—Tom Bittman, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research If you’re one of the many IT pros still finding your footing with cloud computing, this statement from Tom Bittman might sting a little. It sounds like you might be spending time...

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Are you ever tired of all the so-called disruptive technologies that business leaders keep asking you to implement? It’s great to see so much innovation that can impact your business—but sometimes you just want the IT infrastructure to remain stable for a little while. So, when you hear Microsoft’s Harry Shum, executive vice president of AI and research, say “We...

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This week, Cisco announced products built using intent-based networking for the end-to-end network. Intent-based networking takes the decision-making of how a network will do a task away from administrators, who only need to tell the network what needs to be done. This type of network is also more flexible and predictive to respond quickly to changes. Intent-based networking may come...

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As summertime approaches here on the east coast, we’re dreaming of time away from work to recharge. How much of your daily work in IT can be automated while you’re away from the office? This recent IT Pro piece notes that we all tend toward keeping the status quo, even if it’s clear it’s not working well. IT, still, is...

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Both vendors and cloud users continue to push cloud adoption strategy ever further. This week in Building More Data Centers, Google Cloud Platform announced its third availability zone in its Oregon region. With the new zone, Google Cloud also added new services for users—CloudSQL and regional Managed Instance Groups, which can be used to spread VMs across multiple zones for business...

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When you’re making a cloud move, ask the right questions before you spend the money. This list is a good rundown of what to ask internally, including business function priorities, which applications to move to the cloud and when, and what type of integrations you might choose. Plus, asking the hard questions before moving apps off-site will lead you to...

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 What’s the end goal of digital transformation? You’re updating business processes and internal applications, but for most business leaders, the ultimate focus is becoming more agile to meet the changing demands of customers. Unfortunately, legacy-laden call centers are often lost in the mix, or are low on the digital transformation priority list. The problem is that call centers are seen...

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It’s always nice to hear the stories about a company’s entire IT infrastructure journey, and what may have changed along the way. These stories of shifting cloud adoption trends and plans are useful for anyone on a similar IT path. For the state of Kansas, private cloud initially seemed like the best fit. Costs quickly grew, though, from an estimated...

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With cloud computing, you’ve got a lot to think about when picking providers. Check out this cloud migration checklist that’s along the lines of moving to a new house. It’s a good breakdown of the individual steps of a cloud migration. As an IT person in the modern world, you’ll probably be able to add your own opinions to this...

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For the next few days, AppNeta has set up camp here at the Gartner IOSS show. This summit is a place for us to hear about others’ visions for the IT future. We’re surrounded by analysts, speakers and the attendees who are taking on IT challenges every day at work. We know what our AppNeta vision is: Giving IT back...

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Here’s another cloud adoption survey to add to your market research data, this one conducted late last year by Intel Security. Some new and interesting data points in here are on software-defined data centers: 73% of enterprises surveyed are moving to that model within two years. And while hybrid cloud adoption is growing rapidly, almost half of respondents say they’re...

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Google’s Cloud team this week discussed multicloud integration with their own platform and AWS using Google Cloud Endpoints and AWS’ Lambda. The Cloud Endpoints let you develop open APIs, and you can then call those APIs up from Lambda. This may be the way forward for businesses eager to get their multiple public cloud providers integrated. We’re interested in the...

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Lots of cloud technology predictions and analysis are still dealing with future spending and planning, but there are plenty of real-world cloud use cases and implementations happening now. One approach, taken by stalwart GE, is to use SaaS applications for non-differentiated uses. For them, that means moving functions like HR, finance, taxes and scheduling to SaaS, while spending their software development...

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The IT industry is undergoing a significant evolution to keep up with cloud application demand. We see this happening as a mindset shift, from traditional IT teams to more well-rounded, cloud-focused job roles. The IT industry has become so cloud-minded that Gartner predicts that by 2020, this cloud shift will impact more than $1 trillion of global IT spending. This...

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So, were any of you looking for yet another business SaaS app to support? No? Well, your users might have other ideas. Google announced at its industry event this week that it’s splitting the Hangouts app into two: one application for video, and one for chat. That’s aimed at competing with the popular business chat app Slack, of course, recently...

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So, what did we all take away from this week’s AWS outage? Depends who you ask. Plenty of us in IT think it was a good reminder to consider multicloud and hybrid cloud environments—basically, do not put all your cloud workload eggs in one AWS basket. The S3 storage outage affected about 150,000 websites hosted in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region data...

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This week’s news brings us further reminders that if you’re betting on cloud, you’re headed in the right direction. The cloud is growing seven times faster than the rest of IT, according to IDC, with a 25% spending increase just from 2016 to 2017. Cloud adoption in the form of SaaS still leads the pack, with an estimated two-thirds of...

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When choosing a cloud provider, you can look at brand recognition, security and storage features and other items. But cloud providers depend on networks just like the rest of us, and they’re not all created or configured equal. In general, for those considering the cloud, it’s important to match up the location of your end users and the cloud location...

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SaaS use is growing in enterprises all the time, with the ease of consumer apps meeting the full-featured nature of typical business software. Google added new tools earlier this week to G Suite that are designed for enterprise IT. The announced features include additions to security and archiving capabilities, plus more big data analytics for Gmail. As we transition into...

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For your weekly dose of industry numbers, let’s start with this: Just 1% of cloud survey respondents will use no cloud services at all in the next two years. That’s according to the Interop ITX/InformationWeek survey on the state of cloud computing. We’re curious how even that 1% is managing to avoid the rapid rise of SaaS apps and public...

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Just when you thought you’d heard every cloud-related term out there, here’s a new(ish) one: multicloud. This one, at least, is pretty straightforward. It refers to businesses using more than one public cloud provider at a time. Now that there’s more than one mature public cloud option (sorry, AWS), you can actually take a best-of-breed approach to cloud computing. Multicloud...

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No, that’s not a question for superstitious IT leaders. We’re talking about application performance ghost issues—the bane of IT’s existence. Ghost issues are the ones that come up intermittently to degrade end-user experience, but are often impossible to reproduce, identify and fix. Your IT team might be a great group of problem solvers, but application architectures are getting more complicated,...

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This week, Packet Pushers has some excellent guidance around avoiding short-term networking fixes for application issues—or, as they call them, “stupid network tricks.” The way to avoid those tricks, they say, is to get ahead of the problem by involving IT at the outset of every project. Instead of IT being a place to put blame and fight fires, they...

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Our outlook for the year in technology is pretty rosy. Businesses of all stripes are getting more agile and more cloud-savvy. They’re using SaaS apps and cloud services for all kinds of workloads, discovering new capabilities as cloud technology matures. IT teams are looking at the big picture to help users have better experiences. We hear from customers that they’re...

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Contrary to popular belief (and the exciting buzz of CES), it’s business technology, not consumer, that really drives innovation, says the Aberdeen Group. They name the PC, IoT and early BlackBerry business use as innovative tools that started in data centers and IT departments before moving into wider consumer use. They see the concept of SDN as the next “boring”...

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It’s the holiday season, and one IT wish list item may be cloud control and confidence. There’s a whole new crop of companies offering cloud management and governance services to ease the adoption and maintenance of cloud. There are a lot of challenges to getting the best value out of cloud, like security, multi-cloud management and end-to-end visibility. This time of...

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Your work doesn’t end after you’ve signed the dotted line of a well-negotiated cloud services SLA. Even after you’ve settled on an SLA with your service provider, it’s your job to make sure you’re getting what you pay for. This is why service-level agreements are coming under fire as they’re applied to cloud application services. Because SLAs set a minimum...

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‘Tis the season for technology predictions in 2017. This one goes in-depth on the job skills that will be most important in the year ahead. There’s nothing too extreme (we’re not actually hiring robots yet) but mobile and big data jobs, two trends a few years back, are at the bottom of this top ten list. Programmers and help desk...

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Happy Friday! From InformationWeek, we came across this story on the future of IT investment planning. It’s a great look at the shifts in IT roles that are happening as technology shifts take place in the data center and outside of it. The main takeaways here are that cloud services spending is practically guaranteed for IT going forward, and that...

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How many cloud services SLAs do you have in place today? As cloud services continue to drive your business, the number will grow and you might become numb to SLA fine print. However, it’s important to ensure each SLA has your best interests in mind. Don’t settle for just any cloud services SLA. Know what should be included in the...

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In re:Invent 2016 news this week, Amazon Web Services announced Lightsail, its easy-to-deploy virtual private server service that hides all the underlying complexity from users. Did you think deploying cloud instances was easy already? Now it’s even easier and even more do-it-yourself, and at only $5, may make shadow IT purchases even more prevalent. We’ll look on the bright side,...

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The closer the relationship between an application and your revenue, the easier it is to measure the impact of poor performance. This is why, for example, researchers found that an e-commerce site experiences 7% lower conversion rates for just a 1-second delay in page responses. Companies often invest heavily in performance monitoring for their business-to-customer applications. But it’s much more...

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Acronyms rule the IT world, and the networking field is no exception to this. We've collected a few of the acronyms that we come across often in our performance monitoring world. Do you know what they all mean? If you tweet us or leave a comment with your score, our CMO promises to do a pushup for every correct answer.  ...

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Watch out for lock-in, and consider a cloud broker. These are some tips on using public cloud that came out of discussions with a group of reps from large enterprises who have been working with the Open Networking User Group. There are some concrete tips on negotiating pricing and ensuring security—all very useful advice now that cloud is here to...

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Cloud adoption just keeps increasing, with more to come, according to this recent IDG cloud survey. They found that the average company has 45% of their IT environment in the cloud, and that by the end of 2017, the average company expects it’ll be closer to 59%. With all those numbers in hand and other signs that cloud computing is...

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This week brought a few great stories about IT gaining more respect as a critical part of business success. First, this Forbes story takes a detailed look at IT jobs and the cloud to delve into how IT’s role is becoming more clear. It’s a reminder that we’re moving past the initial “cloud will take my job” fear that came...

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It’s Halloween weekend! Do you have any ghost issues in your IT infrastructure? Those are the ones that are hard or impossible to reproduce, and usually take the most time to find and fix. Performance monitoring will help you sweep those lurkers right out the door, so you won’t be scared to walk the data center aisles alone. IT teams...

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Artificial intelligence has dominated many IT headlines this year. One theory on why AI is taking off now is that its predictive capabilities are becoming popular in this data-driven world. It’s getting better and more business-worthy, too. Salesforce recently announced Einstein, an AI addition to its product that promises customer personalization via machine learning. The financial trend is positive, too:...

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The internet crashed today. It wasn’t the normal WiFi reset, network congestion, single-site outage or even the obscure mouse-ate-the-cable. The east-coast internet was under attack due to a DDoS attack that took down Dyn, a leader in DNS services for much of the east coast of the United States. Dyn’s status page has been kept running to keep the public...

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We’re nearing late October, which means it’s time for… IT conferences and industry predictions! During Gartner’s ITExpo and Symposium this week, analysts forecasted a nearly 3% rise in global IT spending for 2017. That will bring spending to $3.5 trillion, with software and IT services expected to grow the most. That makes sense, as IT organizations grow more distributed and...

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Building from scratch is never easy. A good plan, like anyone who has ever built Legos will know, can make it much simpler. Setting up a new remote office can be an exciting time for a business. New environments can breed creativity and bolster productivity if set up correctly. But what if the marketing department can’t access the internet to...

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It was a rough week for Samsung and its combusting phones. This piece breaks down the supply chain issues facing global manufacturers like Samsung. It comes down to visibility—there are so many moving parts in building a product like a smartphone that it can seem nearly impossible to see every step of the process. We know something about visibility in...

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Salesforce uptime and performance have driven plenty of business success. What today’s users like about Salesforce is that it has a lot of customization capabilities and can integrate with other popular, business-critical apps. It’s possible for a company to connect Salesforce with any number of other tools, including email and marketing automation, financial systems and ERP tools, dashboard creators, cloud...

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This week, we came across some nice hard numbers on cloud infrastructure spending, based on IDC research. They expect that spending on cloud infrastructure will pull even with spending on traditional IT infrastructure within five years. That’s a pretty amazing shift when we look back over the past decade or so in IT. With all the talk and hype about...

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This week brought Elon Musk’s announcement about his plans to build a sustainable city on Mars. Specifics are scarce, but we’re hoping Musk has considered the quality of WiFi service on Mars, or those travelers might be quite disappointed when they arrive after a six-month flight. Maybe Google’s new Station tools will help. The details are still under wraps, but...

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We came across a new IT buzzword this week: immutable infrastructure. The concept is that infrastructure components get replaced wholesale—essentially a new build or deployment whenever a change or fix is needed. So, no patching needed! It’s a way to move toward easier infrastructure automation, and cloud computing can allow it room to really develop. Good thing, since adoption of...

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Welcome to Friday, and may yours be pleasant and relaxed, even in light of this piece of news: IT may need to add User Awareness and Adoption as something to consider along with the rest of its big to-do list, according to a recent Nemertes Research webinar based on its research. The “UAA” acronym refers to the idea of making...

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The latest in mobile operating systems from Apple—iOS 10—hit virtual update shelves today. What it means for consumers is clear: new features as well as updated core apps like Maps and Messaging. What it means for wireless networks in your office is a different story. The Lowdown on the Update Weighing in at over 1GB, the update will send ripples...

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As many of our customers have discovered, constant firefighting of performance issues is not a sustainable plan for growth. It’s a common predicament, though. In many data centers now, older legacy applications are running some business functions, while newer SaaS and web-based apps are running others. They’re on different networks, with entirely different architectures. But the goals of these old...

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It’s the Friday before Labor Day weekend in the U.S., which is a day to specifically not labor at all. But here’s a fun fact: Labor Day was created not as a day of rest for workers but actually as a day to honor the contributions workers have made to the well-being of the U.S. So give yourself a pat...

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Happy Friday! Today we’re thinking about teamwork, after watching all those soccer players and relay teams kicking butt in the Olympics. I came across a recent IT trends survey, sponsored by Dell, that breaks out the views of IT decision makers vs. business decision makers. The survey results found that the two groups aren’t that different in what they find...

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Modern IT metrics encompass a lot of measurements, from throughput and latency to capacity and error rates. In a complicated technology world, the question of which metrics to track has gotten more complicated too. It’s just one more challenge in a challenging IT environment. And businesses and their IT teams can’t spend all their time tracking every metric. A simplified...

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This was a big one in the Wide World of Outages this week: Delta Airlines couldn’t get more than 1,500 planes off the ground because of a power outage in Atlanta. Well, that’s what initial reports said, but the Wall Street Journal went into the details about how some critical systems and equipment didn’t switch over to backups after power went...

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4 Steps to Networking (and Productivity) Gold The Olympics in Rio are in full swing which means the world’s best athletes competing in nail-biting competitions... what’s not to love? For most corporate IT Ops teams it introduces new challenges at work... like your colleagues following their favorite athletes by streaming their favorite events to their corporate laptops over corporate WiFi....

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The modern IT network encounters a lot of twists and turns on its way to high performance and user satisfaction. The humble network, which for a long time was fairly straightforward, is now a complicated infrastructure component that requires careful management and monitoring. Private and public network topologies are much more diverse these days, so that app delivery takes many...

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When we talk about today’s technology environments, we’re mostly talking about complexity. In the past decade or so, there have been some big changes in the way IT manages its resources and responsibilities. Along with the changes in technology (virtualization, cloud computing and others), IT now has to answer to line-of-business teams in brand-new ways. End users are savvy tech...

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I just had to write an Olympic-themed headline, since today is the first day of the 2016 Summer Games! I love the Olympics. It’s so much fun watching athletes do what they’re best at. Plus, they have the extra challenge this year of swimming or boating in polluted, mucky water—so it’s even more impressive for the winners, I suppose. Technology...

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Happy Friday, all, and thanks for voting on the name of this weekly roundup blog post. The big winner was “Weekly Packet,” so let’s get started on volume two. AWS and other cloud adoption could rise in the wake of the Brexit decision over in Europe, as a Forbes contributor reports. I find this fascinating, since strict data regulations had...

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A service-level agreement sounds suspiciously like paperwork, which, to me anyway, sounds either boring or easy to ignore, or both. But service-level agreements (SLAs) can’t be ignored. This particular form of paperwork comes in many flavors, and affects IT in some important ways. Generally, an SLA stands as a reminder and guarantee of what a customer should receive from a...

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Happy Friday! Here’s a roundup of some of the intriguing IT events and news we came across this week. We'll be posting this every Friday, and could use some help choosing a name. [poll id="4"] Another week, and Pokemon Go is still going strong around the world (except now there are landmines involved? Yikes!). Around here, we wondered how this super-popular new...

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For someone who writes a lot about technology, I am still a Luddite of sorts (Pokemon Go? No thank you. I’ve lost enough of my actual possessions inside my house without adding imaginary floating orb things). So when I read that hybrid cloud spending is on the rise this year, I was surprised when I saw how many huge enterprises...

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As the cloud takes over, enterprise IT Ops teams are losing visibility into the infrastructure and business-critical applications their employees rely on. Here at AppNeta, we are continually seeking to make our platform more flexible because we know how hard it can be for IT Ops teams to manage these cloud challenges quickly. Here’s a look at what we focus...

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Sometime in the past ten or so years, we’ve come to treat the Internet as a revered state of mind, rather than a repository of information. I say “we” knowing I’m not alone here. When I first started using the web, I remember happily tolerating near-daily Hotmail outages and being really delighted when a coworker (the IT guy, of course)...

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Many of our enterprise clients are growing and expanding to more remote locations around the world, especially in areas of high economic growth such as China and India. Accelerated business growth can be exciting and full of potential, but it comes with lots of strategic and tactical challenges for the business. When it comes to remote locations in heavily regulated...

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If you are having network issues, the downstream effects are going to show up in the end-user experience of your business-critical applications. According to an Aberdeen Group survey of 158 organizations,, app performance issues have a direct impact on the business, including declined employee productivity (64%), lost revenue opportunities (41%), decreased customer satisfaction (61%) and damage to brand reputation (39%)....

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For us at AppNeta, Super Bowl 50* carried few emotions. Sure, we wanted to see Peyton sacked a few more times in his career or watch an awkward spiral fly into blue and black gloves, but overall the collective heart rate of New England wasn’t anywhere near what it was last year (in case you don’t recall, there was a...

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With the increasing use of SaaS applications, companies require new performance monitoring strategies. They need solutions that can provide the visibility and insights needed for continuous monitoring focused on the end user experience and immediate, precise troubleshooting of SaaS application performance. At Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft’s largest and most comprehensive technology event, we’ll be exhibiting our SaaS Application Monitoring (SAM) solution,...

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The topic of why APM deployments fail comes up often. APM Digest did an article in 2012 providing 15 reasons offered by industry experts, and Jonah Kowall over at AppDynamics recently revisited the topic. Something’s in the water, apparently. From our point of view as an APM vendor, APM deployments don’t fail. APM is just one part of the monitoring...

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In my last blog, I talked about what to consider as you migrate to Office 365. As we all know, Microsoft Office has always dominated the business and consumer application marketplace with little to no competition. However, in recent years, the use of Google Apps has been growing to the point where it’s capturing a large chunk of the market....

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We’re only six weeks into 2015, yet I’m looking for signs that the “APM Predictions for 2015” which APM Digest published at the end of December are becoming reality. Provided in three parts, the predictions came from various APM industry experts --- analysts, consultants, users and vendors. Three themes emerged from the 45 predictions that I want to highlight and...

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In a recent article in TechRepublic entitled, “Customer loyalty: why application performance management is a CIO concern,” the author, Brian Taylor provides the highlights of an interview with James Harvey, the general manager of application performance management at CA Technologies. The focus of the interview is Harvey’s assessment that APM is a strategic and central driver for customer satisfaction and...

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Application Performance Management (APM) has traditionally focused on monitoring the infrastructure and the internal components of applications a company builds and operates. In the past few years, APM has evolved its focus to take into consideration the end users and how applications are performing for them. However, we’re seeing that there are other types of applications that a business relies...

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Whether you’re traveling for business or pleasure, one of the great wonders of the modern age is hotels that offer Wi-Fi. OK, I’ll grant you it’s not as wondrous as organ transplants or using a crane to lower a robot onto the surface of Mars. But when you get to your room and find that you can log in ok...

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Since performance is our niche, we’re always on the lookout for any articles, reports or blogs on the topic. A recent one that got our attention is “The Expanding Role of Application Performance Management,” written by Sebastian Kruk and published in CRM magazine. The article came with the sub-head, “Understanding and monitoring the end-user experience” – our bailiwick. The article...

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Now that the holiday shopping season has officially started, online retailers are seeing an increased volume of website visitors and transactions. And, since more people are turning to the Internet each year to purchase their goods and services, e-tailers can expect the biggest rush yet of online holiday shoppers. Based on the website crashes of holiday seasons past, e-tailers know...

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An article defining PaaS caught our attention a few months ago. Entitled, “What does PaaS really mean? Let us know if you find out,” the article explains how the technology industry and IT organizations are confused about what PaaS is and use the term “confusingly.” The author, David Linthicum, then offers a definition, however we think his definition isn’t quite...

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A recent survey of IT leaders that was reported in a ZDNet article entitled “PaaS may be a panacea for stressed-out developers,” found that 70% are either already using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions for application development or planning to implement them in the future. Since there is indeed plenty of pressure on developers to develop faster, PaaS can certainly help with...

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As recently reported by Forrester, large enterprise adoption of SaaS will drive its adoption rate to 50% of surveyed companies planning to adopt new SaaS Services within the next year. The reasons for this growth are clear, SaaS services offer low up front costs, fast time to value and are accessible everywhere for a mobile workforce. This transition sounds ideal...

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In theory, since PaaS applications can be built using common standards and tools, it should be the same for building capabilities to monitor those applications. With less customization there should be easier monitoring, right? Well, if the content of the article, “Study: PaaS Market to Top $6.94B by 2018,” written by Chris Talbot in Talkin’ Cloud holds true, companies would...

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We’re always keeping watch for the latest analyst report on the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) market and few have caught our eye more than the report recently released by Gigaom Research entitled “Sector Roadmap: Application-management solutions for distributed and cloud environments.” Written by well-known APM expert, author and analyst, Bernd Harzog, the report delves into the numerous current challenges for...

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Yesterday was Go Slow Day on the Internet. As lawmakers consider the latest arguments on how much control ISPs should be allowed to exert over the networks that support the wider internet, websites like Reddit, Etsy, and Vimeo are staging a protest. Yesterday, they committed to slowing down their main sites, giving users a glimpse into what the internet would...

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One of the main use cases for customers of AppNeta is understanding and ensuring that their critical web applications, including SaaS applications, are working well and users are happy with the performance. There are many challenges in making sure business critical SaaS applications are working well: accurately measuring the user experience, understanding how the local network, the wifi and the...

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It’s Chinese New Year - Year of Horse. This used to be one of the best business time of the year for Telecom operators, in China for example. Traditionally, Chinese people took this time for family gathering, friendship bonding, just like westerners at Christmas. Being a “connection-oriented” society - meaning whom you know and what kind of relationship you have...

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Oh, Cintiqs. When I was attending college they were the gold standard for those of us who worked digitally. Nothing beats the ability to look at what you're drawing while you're drawing it. But I'm not here today to talk about Cintiqs, which for a while ran the risk of being one of those ad hoc product names, like Kleenex...

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Eight-alarm fire guts South Boston building Firefighters battled an early morning blaze on Summer Street in Boston, just two doors down from AppNeta’s Office.  The blaze was discovered around 4:29 a.m., according to the Boston Fire department’s official Twitter account. Wow… that was a little too close to home!  While we didn’t receive any physical damage to our building, we...

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I consider myself fortunate to have now attended the first two AWS re:Invent Conferences. 2012 was notable for its impact as the first event, and 2013 did not disappoint with big crowds and lots of energy --  the show had it all! I attended many great sessions with some true thought leaders in the SaaS services market.  Andy Jassy lead...

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Where Computer Science Meets Biology I’m Frances, a co-op student at AppNeta’s Vancouver office. As a student in a combined biology and computer science degree, I see a lot of overlap between the two areas. With millions of species on the planet and millions or billions of A’s, C’s, T’s and G’s in a genome, there is a lot of...

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I recently had the chance to participate in "The APM Challenge"--a discussion on the present and future of managing the performance of complex applications.  Patrick Lightbody of New Relic and I had a great discussion, moderated by Robin Layland of Network World.  In addition to it being an enjoyable chat, it turned into a paper comparing/contrasting our approaches as well...

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The fine folks over at KissMetrics put together a stunning infographic on just how important this performance stuff is. It's easy to get caught up in shipping features and polishing UX, but sometimes, the low-hanging fruit is the first performance step, not the 50th A/B test. Check it out below (click for a larger version) -- how does your website...

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2013 is poised to be an exciting and innovative year for technical professionals across roles and functions, regardless of their organization size. From emerging Software-Defined Networks, to mobile, BYOD and the solidification of cloud computing and SOA architectures, there are many upcoming trends that should impact your performance monitoring strategy in 2013. Are you ready to arm yourself with the...

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Cloud computing is likely to be the most exciting and transformative revolution in the history of modern IT. To keep pace with the rapid IT developments, companies must transform themselves from inward-facing corporate operators to interconnected, highly agile business network orchestrators running in the cloud. Think about it: Are your sales reps using Salesforce? Do you have an online community/support...

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Surge was my favorite event last year, not only because it’s located in Baltimore (“The Charm City”), but also because it attracts a great crowd of people: hardcore systems practitioners. We were lucky to sponsor Surge this year, and once again it didn’t disappoint! The people you meet at an event like Surge make it worthwhile, but on top of that, there are...

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An increase in cloud services means more remote office-based users than ever. According to studies by Gartner and others, 85% to 90% of the average company’s employees now work away from the main corporate office taking full advantage of our cloud era. Those remote workers still need the same high-quality experience of application access and performance as employees at headquarters, especially...

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There is a lot of good material in the blog-o-sphere about HTML5 vs. Flash and the impending doom of the latter. I’m here to say that HTML5, while still a work in progress, is absolutely ready for prime time and if anyone says you have to wait for it to be ready, they’re either ill-informed or just plain misleading. You’ve probably...

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2011 could be considered the year that network performance management “came of age.” In this past year, IT and network managers in organizations of all sizes and industry segments have become aware — if they weren’t already — that the performance of the network is the foundation of user experience and business success. Why was 2011 such a pivotal year...

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Unified communications, such as VoIP and video conferencing, can be a huge asset to an organization, as it can enhance employee and business productivity. Most modern unified communications systems are at least partially software-based, with more and more businesses depending entirely on SaaS and cloud applications to run video and voice systems. Often times, deploying unified communications is easier said...

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Many managed service providers (MSPs) that once viewed cloud computing as a competitive threat are now building their own cloud services portfolios, often with the support of public cloud services or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Partnering spares MSPs the capital expense of building and maintaining world-class, massively scalable IT infrastructure while minimizing operational and engineering...

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Backup and recovery methods have been around about as long as computers; but, as with everything else computing-related,  the emergence of new paradigms, new vendors and new technologies (e.g. protecting virtualized server environments and very large databases) have introduced new options in the past several years. In particular, tape-based (VTL) backup strategies are increasingly giving way to disk-to-disk or cloud-based...

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Server virtualization and cloud computing are often talked about – even by service providers — as if the terms were interchangeable. This is, in part, because both were developed to solve a similar business problem: more computing with less resources. Virtualization is amongst the technologies used to provide cloud computing services. The core difference is management of the hardware; virtualization...

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You have to admit that we are really good at dreaming up new terms in the world of technology; and every now and then (ok, more often than not), the first time  you hear these new terms it can really make you pause.  I can remember the first time I heard the term “virtual appliance” a couple of years ago...

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The benefits of virtualization are clear cut – massive financial savings in the long run. Virtualization enables organizations to use inexpensive hardware as terminals for multiple desktops which lowers costs in energy, hardware, maintenance and licensing. From a daily user’s standpoint, the convenience of accessing their personal desktops from any device effectively accelerates their time-to-value. However, the transition to virtualization...

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Today, many organizations are contemplating how to harness the power of Cloud Computing in order to streamline their IT processes and make their daily computing lives easier — but how many organizations are actually ready to make the switch from the desktop to the Cloud? The many benefits of cloud computing include: the ability to access your data wherever you are;...

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In today’s business climate, organizations are risk averse and looking for rapid payback on their IT investments. These are key reasons why cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployments have become so popular so quickly – and why time-to-value is now a focal criteria in evaluating IT solutions. Time-to-value is fundamentally a measure of customer experience. How high are the time,...

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One of my concerns about the use of public cloud computing services is the tradeoff that IT organizations typically have had to make. On the positive side of the tradeoff, by using a public cloud service companies lower their cost and gain access to functionality that they normally would not have access to. Those are both compelling reasons to use public...

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Think back to February 3rd, 2011. For most of us, it was a day much like any other.   The headlines were full of news about an Egypt in turmoil as it struggled with its eventual march to Democracy, and there were massive demonstrations and violence in Yemen. One seemingly tiny bit of news that wasn’t picked up by the mainstream...

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Hopefully we have seen some of you at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, FL this week! If you’re not familiar with this event, it is the industry’s premier enterprise communication conference. Enterprise Connect focuses on exploring the latest technology and ROI scenarios to support the ongoing convergence of all forms of business communication onto IP-based networks. But what about “the down...

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Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployments are irresistibly appealing to organizations of all sizes, especially those with multiple sites. From browser-based access, to painless installations and upgrades, to minimal IT overhead, seamless scalability, and lower TCO, SaaS is a smart, cost-effective option. SaaS differs from “cloud” in that SaaS applications can be hosted inside a company’s firewall, as well as remotely. More and...

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Managing remote network sites? Deploying distributed business services that are critically dependent on predictable network performance? Caught up in the finger-pointing crossfire of frustrated end users? For healthcare providers, banks, retailers and many other organizations with remote offices, ensuring the availability of IP-based applications like e-mail, collaboration tools, VoIP, video conferencing, desktop virtualization and remote data storage to distributed sites...

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The siren song of “The Cloud” draws the over-worked and under-appreciated I.T. leaders from around the globe thanks to the phenomenal, inherent benefits of scale (both up and down), cost and flexibility.  Yet, despite the obvious appeal, the practical realities of meshing internal, production-level networks and their related management systems with services offered from the public cloud are daunting to...

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We are all witnessing a dramatic shift from traditional network infrastructures to web-based, cloud based hosted services.  A rapidly growing number of organizations are taking the leap:  to hosted email, disaster recovery, exchange,  and CRM. By leveraging economies of scale, cloud based services can offer significant cost savings, versatile capabilities and low maintenance compared to traditional on -premise solutions. With...

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The cloud is coming, the cloud is coming!!! Well guess what, if it’s not here now, it’s damn close. And if you think you can avoid it or beat it you’re dead wrong. As they say, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em. So what can you do? 1. Accept it. The 90’s economy is gone. No we aren’t in a recession, we’re in...

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As companies turn to the Cloud as a low cost, highly scalable and agile way to save on their infrastructure cost or to host new applications, a number of cloud performance testing and monitoring solutions are appearing. There are applications popping up to perform load testing against your cloud infrastructure, some of which are even developed and hosted by the...

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Our legacy blog entries tell the AppNeta story from the early days…Read on! Software industry has changed; free PathView Cloud tool shows how Not long ago, lots of software companies were focused on developing big solutions and selling them to the biggest customers they could. Board members and senior management wanted deal sizes that were high and trending higher. So...

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Last weekend at a family get together I was filling my role as the in-family IT guy by explaining Cloud-based business services to some family members. They were moderately interested until I pointed out that by using all of these Internet-based services like SalesForce.com and Gmail, they are already “in the cloud”. This begs the question: when the whole point...

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The Internet Engineering Task Force, the body responsible for defining most IP-related standards, has been making a concerted effort of late to promote the transition to IPv6.  They have developed Best Practices, staged IPv6-only events for media profile, and developed subsequent RFCs (standards) that help make IPv6 easier to adopt. The latest RFC to be released takes a bold step...

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If the arrival of IPv6 can be likened to “climate change for networks”, then Google has become the corporate incarnation of “Al Gore for the Internet”.  Not only does the search engine giant have an apparent interest in furthering the adoption of IPv6, but it has taken steps to make sure everyone else does too. Last week, Google held its...

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So IPv6 – now there’s a train wreck in slow motion that has been simultaneously fascinating and utterly boring.  Every six months the media checks back to whoop and holler about how now there are only 32 /8s remaining in the IPv4 address space!  We are running out of Internet!  Transition to IPv6 before it’s too late!  Run for your lives! And then everyone...

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] Our legacy blog entries tell the AppNeta story from the early days…Read on! If you have been around IT or technology in general for more than a couple of years, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “The network is the computer.”  Often this is mistakenly attributed to Sun Microsystems’ founding CEO, Scott McNealy – when actually it was another Sun visionary,...

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Our legacy blog entries tell the AppNeta story from the early days…Read on! Application development and network teams are collaborating more on how to improve application performance, according to survey results recently released by BT in North America. Network World reported on the survey this week. While the collaboration is happening, it’s striking that application performance has not improved, either at...

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