The world has become much smaller in the past few decades thanks to globalization. Globalization has long been a core driver for digital transformation for enterprises. Connecting offices, factories, and supply chains needs a digital-first mindset and infrastructure. With the pandemic’s end officially declared by the WHO [1] and the reopening of China, recent data […]

Role of WAN in delivering App Performance In my previous blog, I argued that Overlay SD-WAN solutions have failed to deliver on their intended promise of providing a reliable application performance. Overlay SD-WAN’s approach to keep the transportation network at arm’s length fails to ensure application performance. The simple reason is that application performance depends […]

You don’t have to be a big automobile afficionado to know that every major auto brand has a luxury line with its own distinct branding. For instance, Toyota has Lexus; Honda has Acura; Nissan has Infinity; Volkswagen has Audi and so on. The reasoning behind the separate brand strategy is simple. It helps differentiate the […]

Expectations from WAN solutions and their ability to deliver application performance has evolved over the last decade as the application landscape and WAN solutions themselves have gone through a sea change. A Brief Look At Past and Present During the early 2010s, MPLS became the preferred solution to deliver WAN connectivity between branch offices, headquarters, […]

An increasing number of businesses are relying on mission-critical applications for better efficiency, collaboration, cost savings, and revenue generation. The ugly side of dependence on such applications is the negative impact they can have on the business when there are outages or severe performance degradations. With mission-critical time-sensitive applications rapidly migrating to the cloud and […]

Clunky, unreliable, and slow remote access options, like VPN, are the necessary evil that IT administrators love to hate. This vital piece of the corporate puzzle helps keep your information secure and your global remote and mobile workforce in sync. However, it also creates headaches – and high costs – for teams that want to […]

With even the most basic smartphones boasting a 30GB storage capacity and a whopping 500GB for the top-of-the-range Phones, have you ever pondered upon the question — how much data there is in the world? Heads up – Do not proceed if numbers make you dizzy. In 2018, a total of 33 zettabytes (ZB) of […]

Did you know that 98% of the 100 most valued brands are SAP customers? Or that SAP systems touch almost 77% of the world’s transaction revenue? Serving well over four and a half million active customers across 180 countries, there is barely any vertical that the SAP Suite doesn’t tap into. Manufacturing, logistics, finance, sales, […]

Recently, Gartner published a foundational document on optimizing internet performance (How to Architect Your Network to Optimize Internet Performance and Reliability, Published 29 December 2020 – ID G00731192).  Many of you may have access to this.  Why I say foundational is that it ties together many of the themes that are top-of-mind for CIOs and […]

If you’re in charge of delivering and maintaining a global WAN, then you know the headache that this chart can induce. Why? Because legacy WAN connectivity approaches like MPLS do not address performance challenges for cloud and SaaS applications. This was not the case 20 years ago. In the past, these types of applications lived […]

Latency, packet loss, distance, and application performance. What do all these terms have to do with each other? If you manage IT networks for a global enterprise, it’s important to step back and look at big picture, so you can more clearly see how they all impact one another. This may sound like “Networking 101” […]

When it comes to productivity in today’s global business environment, every second counts. If your employees can check Twitter, order lunch, and buy something from Amazon in the time it takes to run a report, then slow cloud or SaaS application is hurting your business. A recent study on mobile and data management found that […]

Industry experts believe that old legacy systems are unable to handle the exponential surge in passenger volume, fleet sizes, along with increasing customer expectations and global expansion of airline companies. For the airlines industry, the importance of global network connectivity ranges from business- to mission-critical. When network connectivity is lost or application performance is impacted, […]

City & Guilds Group’s CIO Alan Crawford had a global problem on his hands. Employees in a newly acquired company in New Zealand were having difficulty using the organization’s Microsoft Office 365 service that employees used to collaborate. Collaboration is central to the $195 million firm, which offers training and skills development to education providers, governments, […]

After an acquisition, IT puts a priority on getting new team members onboard so they can collaborate with peers, but that can be a challenge with international concerns, especially when it comes to sharing cloud resources. That was the hard lesson learned by City & Guilds Group, the global leader in elearning, offering everything from […]

When Marc Benioff first came up with the idea of offering Salesforce.com as a cloud-based application in 1999, little did he know about its ripple effect in the field of enterprise software. The idea was to move applications to the cloud, making them widely available for organizations of all shapes and sizes. The SaaS model […]

We all know that in the world of the cloud-first digital enterprise, key business processes rely on network performance – if the network doesn’t deliver on the expected SLAs, there is direct impact on business results and employee productivity. A typical use case involves remote offices in distant geographies accessing application data that is stored […]

When we announced our Cloud-First WAN a few months ago, we put the market on notice that from now, not only companies that operate globally but also enterprises operating in a region will be able to take advantage of our fully managed SD-WAN as a service offering. To me, Fierce Telecom captured it best with […]

Microsoft enterprise customers are migrating to the company’s Azure cloud computing platform in droves, with the company reporting 98% year-over-year revenue growth in its second fiscal quarter of 2018. The appeal is clear. Enterprise shops want to increase agility by getting out of the capital-intensive infrastructure business and start consuming computing as a service on […]

It wasn’t a comfortable journey; redesigning all your legacy applications for the cloud, identifying the right IaaS architecture, migrating your CRM to the Salesforce cloud and signing up for Office 365. You even augmented capacity on your MPLS backbone to cater to the additional traffic from SaaS and IaaS applications. Cloud applications performed great in […]