Paul Rubens

Ransomware has become a huge problem for businesses, as victims face a choice between paying sizable ransoms or losing control of their data. Ransomware attacks are costing companies of all sizes more than $75 billion per year in recovery costs, according to Datto. One reason that the problem has become so acute is that it can […]

Security through obscurity is widely frowned upon by cyber security experts. So you might assume that using blockchain technology — the system that underpins crypto currencies such as Bitcoin and which allows people to hold the currencies and make transactions with them anonymously — would be equally frowned upon. In fact, nothing could be further from […]

Network and infrastructure management has always been a complicated business and keeping everything running smoothly sometimes takes up far too much of everyone’s time. But in the last few years things have come to a head. That’s because there are now multiple levels of complexity thanks to cloud, hybrid, and data center-bound systems, software-defined and […]

IoT, SD-WAN, and AI: three IT buzzwords from the recent past, the present, and the near future which, it turns out, are all inextricably linked. SD-WAN technology is going to be key to the continued success and expansion of IoT projects, while managing SD-WANs is going to be one of the key use cases for […]

Reports of the imminent death of the data center have been greatly exaggerated. That’s not to say that data centers can remain static, resembling the ones of ten or even five years ago. Thanks to the explosive growth in cloud computing, and the increasing numbers of enterprises adopting a “cloud first” strategy, many organizations are […]

Amazon, Netflix, eBay, and many of the world’s most innovative corporations all have one thing in common: they have gone in big on microservice architectures. In fact, it’s not just these internet leviathans who have embraced microservices: a survey by NGINX found that 63% of enterprises where using or adopting microservice architectures by the end […]

Networking professionals have absorbed and adopted wave after wave of new technologies over the last few years — most recently software-defined networking and its closely related cousin network virtualization. But there’s no time to rest up because network cloudification is set to explode in popularity.  Software-defined networking involves the separation of the control and data […]

Corporate decisions made by gut instinct are rapidly going out of fashion as business leaders can now turn to increasingly vast amounts of data to help them make data-driven decisions. And make no mistake: the amounts of data that enterprises have at their disposal really are vast. From 2020 to 2022, enterprises’ data stores will […]

Cellular networks have come a long way since the first 1G network was launched by Japan’s NTT in 1979. In fact, the current 5G cellular networking technology is so fast and so flexible that, in some cases, it provides a better alternative to Wi-Fi for enterprise wireless networks.  That may sound odd at first glance, […]

Counterfeit hardware and software costs IT vendors an estimated $100 billion in lost revenue every year, at least according to Al Palladin, network hardware maker and Cisco’s head of Global Brand Protection. You have to treat such claims with some caution, especially when it comes to software. That’s because an illegal copy of Microsoft Office […]

Pluggable optics is not a technology that’s talked about much, but in the networking world it’s definitely sexy right now.  That’s because pluggable coherent optics modules are a key technology for cloud operators and service providers in Data Center Interconnect (DCI), Metro, and Long Haul networks. It allows them to increase the capacity of legacy […]

5G wireless networks are getting plenty of publicity these days, thanks to the blisteringly fast speeds they offer as well as the controversy over banning Huawei’s involvement in many countries’ 5G infrastructure projects. But sneaking under the radar is another type of “5G” network that will be of much more direct relevance to network professionals: […]