Ann Bednarz

Assistant Managing Editor, Features

I write feature stories aimed at enterprise IT pros. I’m particularly interested in career-related subjects, such as hiring trends, salary data, in-demand skills and staffing strategies. I can’t resist stories about buildings and architectural design.

The Latest from Ann

What is composable infrastructure?

In a composable infrastructure world, physical compute, storage and network devices are treated as services. The composable aspect refers to the ability to make those resources available on the fly, depending on the needs of different...

Penn State secures building automation, IoT traffic with microsegmentation

Penn State chose microsegmentation technology from Tempered Networks to isolate and cloak traffic from its smart building systems, which rely on the BACnet communications protocol to share data related to HVAC, lighting, access...

Hyperconverged infrastructure gets its own Gartner magic quadrant

Hyperconvergence is winning over enterprises that are drawn to its potential to ease management, streamline the deployment of new workloads, and optimize costs. As much as 20% of business-critical apps will transition to...

VMware tackles complexity of multi-cloud environments

VMware has expanded its portfolio of cloud tools to help enterprises improve the manageability of their public cloud and on-premises environments. At the same time, VMware announced the first global expansion of VMware Cloud on AWS,...

Which data center intrusion prevention systems are worth the investment? NSS Labs tests 5 DCIPS products

NSS Labs tests data center intrusion prevention systems (DCIPS) from Fortinet, Juniper Networks, McAfee and Trend Micro.

What is a SAN and how does it differ from NAS?

A storage area network (SAN) provides a pool of storage resources that can be centrally managed and allocated as needed, but how is a SAN different than NAS and how does how it segregate storage traffic?

What is NAS and how do NAS servers excel at corralling unstructured data?

Network-attached storage (NAS) is a category of file-level storage that’s connected to a network and enables data access and file sharing across a heterogeneous client and server environment. “Ideally, NAS is platform- and...

What is microsegmentation? How getting granular improves network security

Microsegmentation is a way to create secure zones in data centers and cloud deployments that allow you to isolate workloads and protect them individually.

Vexata all-flash systems aim to reduce storage latency

Startup Vexata tackles how to eliminate input-output bottlenecks in storage fabrics without requiring customers to retool their IT infrastructure or rewrite applications.

Top 10 data center predictions: IDC

The global data center market will transform over the next few years as companies modernize their data center facilities, shift to more software-defined infrastructure, and adopt more autonomous IT infrastructure.

Hyperconvergence gathers speed in 2018

Hyperconvergence gained traction in 2017 as enterprises shifted storage spending to software. In 2018, the momentum will continue.