Saving money is no longer the object in VoIP deployments among colleges and universities — it is the search for converged communications and acceptance of the inevitable, panellists agreed at a recent VoIP summit hosted by ACUTA, the Association for Communications Professionals in Higher Education.
Businesses may unwittingly leave themselves open to application-layer attacks because they don't understand their networks lack defenses to deflect them, according to a study by Forrester Research.
A project to consolidate servers in a central datacentre highlighted the need for global law firm Reed Smith to use traffic-shaping technology to ensure that its most important applications perform well on its WAN.
Sound Transit in Seattle has unclogged WAN links that hindered railway-improvement projects by using WAN-optimisation gear that made traffic run faster and cost much less over time than other options.
With more and more WAN optimisation vendors extending their capabilities to include encrypted traffic, corporate IT executives have a decision to make: Should they trust the security these devices provide?
Network executives planning to deploy network access control should start with very specific goals — not intricate schemes to quarantine and remediate insecure devices and shut down badly behaving machines and record every connection each device attempts to make on the network.
WAN optimisation technology is a sure way to save money. For instance, US custom machinery manufacturer Curt G Joa avoided the cost of adding a server to its German office by installing WAN acceleration gear from Silver Peak.
Despite the growing popularity of telecommuting, regular commuting continues to grow, with a new class of worker - the extreme commuter - traveling more than 90 minutes to get to work.
Businesses need to embrace service-oriented architectures, outsourced services and flexible network infrastructures if they are to respond effectively to uncertain commercial forces, says Juniper chairman and CEO Scott Kriens, who delivered a keynote address at the recent Interop conference, held in New York.
Perhaps that consultant your company hired to implement a VoIP rollout has you wondering: could you break out of the safety of your corporate IT job and succeed as a consultant too?
Citrix is expected to add WAN optimisation to its products with the planned purchase of Orbital Data for US$50 million.
Many network access control specialists have yet to address one of the biggest problems with their security technology: making their products work better with legacy network gear.
Juniper has laid out an 18-month roadmap that includes improving the capabilities, capacity and management support of its WAN acceleration gear while offering custom acceleration for more individual applications.
The latest additions to corporate secure-WAN toolkits are USB tokens that authenticate and encrypt traffic, tighten security and make it simpler for users to make connections versus using standard VPN technology.
The good news is that VoIP equipment among multiple vendors is, finally, pretty interoperable; the bad news is that there are still lots of potholes that can ruin VoIP implementation.