Cisco Webex has rolled out a package of AI-based features that brings together recently acquired technologies it says will make business meetings more efficient and intuitive.

The Webex conferencing tool enhancements, which include faster meeting startup, a better way to know the people attending a meeting and facial-recognition improvements will help customers more effectively collaborate from any location, the company said.

Cisco bought Webex in 2007 for about $3.2 billion with an eye toward competing more effectively with Microsoft and other collaboration software vendors. Today Webex conferencing tools are used by over 130 million customers a month, Cisco says.

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With the introduction of cloud, BYOD, IoT and virtual offices scattered around the globe, the traditional architectures not only hold us back in terms of productivity but also create security flaws that leave gaps for compromise.

The network and security architectures that are commonly deployed today are not fit for today's digital world. They were designed for another time, a time of the past. This could sound daunting...and it indeed is.

What we had in the past?

Traditionally, we have had a static network and security perimeter with clear network and security demarcation points. In terms of security, the perimeter-based approach never worked. It did, however, create a multi-billion-dollar industry. But the fact is, it neither did, not will it provide competent security.

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Industry trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and content distribution networks (CDNs) are driving the need for edge computing. That’s because these solutions often require low latency, high bandwidth, greater reliability, and strong security.

It’s a tall order meant for Micro Data Centers (MDCs) to fulfill. An MDC is a self-contained data center architecture that offers complete IT infrastructure within a stand-alone, secure enclosure.

MDCs offer a number of key advantages beyond today’s server rooms and traditional data centers. First, because they’re distributed closer to bandwidth-intensive content, MDCs can significantly reduce latency and lower costs. Secondly, it’s easy and cost-effective to add data center capacity to them anywhere and anytime it is needed – in both IT room and non-climate-controlled environments. And because MDC IT equipment is pre-installed before shipment in a self-contained and secure enclosure, it can provide physical security and protection of critical business applications.

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The U.S. Department of Energy says it is working on a supercomputer that will break the target of exaFLOP computation – a quintillion (10¹⁸)  floating-point computations per second – in order to handle high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.

Being built in conjunction with Intel and Cray Computing,  the Aurora supercomputer will  cost more than half a billion dollars and be turned over to Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in 2021, according to a statement by the DoE. [Click here to see the current top 10 fastest supercomputers.]

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Earlier this month, I wrote that “even as smartwatch shipments continue to grow, significant industrial and business use cases for these internet-connected devices have yet to appear.”

And then a few days later, as if on cue, International Data Corporation (IDC) put out a press release about the latest edition of the Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker. The release quoted Ramon T. Llamas, research director for IDC's Wearables team, saying, "Two major drivers for the wearables market are healthcare and enterprise adoption.”

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SD-WAN vs. WAN Optimization

Optimization of applications and data traffic has been an integral part of the WAN since its inception. WAN optimization accelerates application traffic by overcoming latency and reducing the amount of data traversing the WAN by applying techniques like protocol acceleration, deduplication, compression, reduced latency and caching to dramatically increase the amount of available bandwidth.

Today, enterprises are rapidly adopting SD-WAN as a preferred solution when rearchitecting their WANs. SD-WAN is transforming the way networks support enterprise applications, dramatically increasing application performance by intelligently controlling and more efficiently utilizing all available WAN transport resources.

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The Mercury retrograde kicked in big time on Wednesday as Facebook suffered an eight hour-outage that also affected Instagram and Facebook Messenger.

No one was believed to be harmed; a few might have even had offline interactions with other human beings.

Facebook said it wasn’t an attack, like a Denial of Service attack, and has since issued a statement attributing it to a configuration error.

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Recent breakthroughs in technology have expanded the possibilities for where data is gathered, processed, stored and analyzed. IT staffs and their business counterparts now have the flexibility of deciding whether their applications are more efficient residing in the cloud, within a traditional data center, or on the network edge. In fact, for the first time, the nature of the applications themselves is determining where they best should run. Over the last several months, micro data centers have emerged as a technology of choice for helping to manage the growing computing needs across edge environments.

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The IEEE's latest standard, 802.11ax, has been designed inside and out for high efficiency. Also known as Wi-Fi 6, 11ax promises real-world performance improvements that will keep today’s mobile users and IoT devices connected and happy. To achieve that, over 50 features have been proposed as part of the 11ax standard. Once adopted into the standard, they will be rolled out to the market in phases – Wave 1 and Wave 2, just like with 802.11ac.

Multi-user Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) are two of the most significant technical enhancements in 11ax. Both MU-MIMO and OFDMA are multiuser technologies that enable simultaneous bidirectional communication between an access point (AP) and end users. So how are they different?

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The incredible power and automation offered by today’s more advanced SD-WAN platforms is transforming how enterprises are building and managing their networks. Operations that were once massive resource-intensive projects for network teams, have now been reduced to mere minutes of work. Need to change how an application operates across 1000+ locations, modify QoS settings across every site in your network or enforce a common security policy simply? Just point and click.

What’s been missing from this incredible transformation is how the power of automation can be extended to ecosystem partners. Today is the day we’re going to change all of that.

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Increasing the capacity of fiber-optic cables might one day be possible through the exploitation of a part of the signal commonly thought of as substandard. That imperfect element in a carrier, called “noise” is usually something one tries to avoid—it can muddy the accurate reading of the data.

However, scientists now suggest that one could, in fact, embrace the rubbishy, and thus far unusable, part of the signal to hold data and allow it to be decoded. The ordinarily data-obscuring hubbub could potentially be harnessed and used to increase data capacity in light waves.

“Information is encoded in the correlated noise between spatially separated light waves,” writes Oliver Morsch in an article on the website of ETH Zurich, a technical and scientific university. “The new coding technology, developed by ETH researchers, makes it possible to make better use of the transmission capacity of optical fibers.”

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Take a glance at the wrists of your co-workers, and you’re likely to see more and more of them adorned with smartwatches, fitness trackers, and other wearable technology. In meetings, you increasingly see colleagues surreptitiously glancing at their tiny screens, hoping in vain that no one is noticing.

It isn’t just you. The latest smartwatch numbers all say that smartwatch shipments are growing fast, and the internet-connected devices are beginning to achieve mainstream acceptance: Last month, The NPD Group's new Smartwatch Total Market Report noted that smartwatch unit sales jumped 61 percent in 2018, while dollar volume rose 51 percent to approach $5 billion in sales. Some 16 percent of U.S. adults now own a smartwatch, the report said, up from 12 percent at the end of 2017.

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IT professionals have been honing their data center management expertise for decades. However, migrating these best practices to an edge computing environment can be challenging.

That’s because many workers located in edge environments, such as retail store clerks, lack the necessary data center expertise to ensure edge sites are properly maintained. Complicating matters is the fact that edge data centers can be expensive and complex to run.

Clearly, organizations need a new way forward. Fortunately, cloud-based platforms are designed for the edge, and can simplify remote monitoring and management. Here’s what every business should look for in a solution:

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A group of big names in the data center space have linked arms to develop yet another high-speed interconnect, this one designed to connect processor chips.

It's called Compute Express Link, or CXL, which is aimed at plugging data-center CPUs into accelerator chips. Members of the alliance that developed the spec are Intel, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, HPE, Cisco, and Dell-EMC, plus Huawei and Alibaba.

Where are IBM, AMD, Nvidia, Xilinx, or any of the ARM server vendors such as Marvell/Cavium? They have their own PCIe-nased spec, called CCIX. The group consists of AMD, Arm, Mellanox, Qualcomm, Xilinx, and Huawei.

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Content delivery networks have been around for more than a decade, but many enterprises are taking a new look at the perks and specialization that today’s CDN services have to offer.

Why the renewed interest? The cloud-first movement, all-things-video, IoT and edge computing are all bringing sexy back to CDNs. The content delivery network market was valued at $7.3 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $29.5 billion by 2023, a compound annual growth rate of 26 percent, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com.

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After months of speculation, Mellanox found a suitor -- and it was a surprise, to say the least. GPU leader Nvidia snatched up the networking vendor for $6.9 billion, topping a rumored previous offer of $6 billion from Nvidia’s nemesis, Intel.

The acquisition ends months of rumors of a suitor for Mellanox. Intel, Microsoft, and Xilinix were all reportedly bidding for the Israeli company, which specializes in high-speed networking.

Mellanox Technology was formed in 1999 by a former Intel executive and was a pioneer in the early adoption of InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many leading hyperscale data centers.

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Many companies today have a hybrid approach to their networking and IT infrastructure. Some elements remain in an on-premise data center, while other portions have gone to the cloud and even to multi-cloud. As a result, the network perimeter is permeable and elastic. This complicates access requirements at a time when it’s more important than ever to enable accessibility while preventing unauthorized access to applications and data.

To reduce risk, some organizations are applying a zero-trust strategy of “verification before trust” by incorporating stronger, stateful user and device authentication; granular access control; and enhanced segmentation no matter where the applications and resources reside.

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When you think of Facebook services, high-speed connectivity is not the first thing that comes to mind. But the social media giant is doing just that, offering high-capacity fiber-optic routes to sell unused capacity between its data centers for third parties.

Facebook has created a subsidiary called Middle Mile Infrastructure to sell excess capacity on its fiber, starting with new fiber routes between its data center campuses in Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina. The company made the announcement in a blog post by Kevin Salvadori, director of network investments.

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IPsec is a critical element in building a scalable and secure SD-WAN fabric. The right IPsec is key to making it happen.

Robert Sturt published an article title “SD-WAN vs. VPN: How do they compare?” While Robert tried to illustrate when and how to use SD-WAN vs. VPN, the objective of this blog is to look deeper into existing IPsec approaches and challenges in building and securing an SD-WAN fabric, and how IPsec UDP can help address these challenges. At the end of this blog, I have included a link to a Silver Peak white paper that provides a detailed explanation of IPsec options.

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VMware has taken the wraps off a firewall it says protects enterprise applications and data inside data centers or clouds.

Unlike perimeter firewalls that filter traffic from an unlimited number of unknown hosts, VMware says its new Service-defined Firewall gains deep visibility into the hosts and services that generate network traffic by tapping into into its NSX network management software, vSphere hypervisors and AppDefense threat-detection system.

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There’s a lot of hype around the next Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ax, more commonly known as Wi-Fi 6. Often new technologies are built up by the vendors as being the “next big thing” and then flop because they don’t live up to expectations. In the case of Wi-Fi 6, however, the fervor is warranted because it is the first Wi-Fi standard that has been designed with the premise that Wi-Fi is the primary connection for devices rather than a network of convenience.

Wi-Fi 6 is a different kind of Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi 6 is loaded with new features, such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), 1024-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) encoding and target wake time (TWT), that make Wi-Fi faster and less congested. Many of these enhancements came from the world of LTE and 4G, which solved many of these challenges long ago. These new features will lead to a better mobile experience and longer client battery life, and they will open the door to a wide range of new applications that could not have been done on Wi-Fi before. For example, an architect could now use virtual reality (VR) over Wi-Fi to showcase a house.

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As edge computing deployments get under way, organizations need to make their edge computing sites resilient. As the saying goes, “you’re only as good as your weakest link,” so if edge computing locations are allowed to be the weakest link in a multi-location environment, the entire network surely will suffer.

You can’t have a truly resilient IT deployment without resilience at these edge computing sites. So organizations have to harden these sites with best-in-class technology as they do at centralized and regional data centers. Organizations need redundancy, security and management controls designed to prevent downtime.

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Ethernet networking technology is flawed, say some engineers. The problem is it doesn’t have any inherent security built in to it. Ethernet also hard to manage because it's centralized. It’s out-of-date, and it needs revamping, researchers say.

One attempt to address the issue is the Marconi protocol, which is a strategy to shift network and packet management over to a smart-contract, decentralized chain-based system. Smart contracts are trackable, verifiable transactions. They’re performed through encrypted blockchains and are self-enforcing.

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Cisco has bundled 25 security advisories that describe 26 vulnerabilities in Cisco NX-OS switch and Firepower FXOS firewall software.

While the 26 alerts describe vulnerabilities that have a Security Impact Rating of “High,” most –23 – affect Cisco NX-OS software, and the remaining three involve both software packages.

The vulnerabilities span a number of problems that would let an attacker gain unauthorized access, gain elevated privileges, execute arbitrary commands, escape the restricted shell, bypass the system image verification checks or cause denial of service (DoS) conditions, Cisco said.

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This week Juniper Networks plunked down $405 million to acquire Wi-Fi vendor Mist Systems. As always, Network World's Michael Cooney did a fine job covering the news, so I won’t rehash that. What I want to look at is something specific that Cooney wrote — that “Mist touts itself as having developed an artificial-intelligence-based wireless platform.” Why does Wi-Fi need artificial intelligence (AI)?

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