About two years ago the USS John S McCain collided with a chemical tanker in the Singapore Strait, a collision the US National Transportation Safety Board now concludes was a result of a touchscreen fat finger error on the ship's throttles. On the McCain, the steering and throttles were operated on the bridge by touchscreens, [...]
Demand remains high for skilled pros in networking jobs, but these positions require up-to-date skills. Data centers, in particular, are having trouble finding people to design, build and manage data centers. A survey by the Uptime Institute showed 61 percent of data center staffing experts said they have significant difficulty retaining or recruiting staff for [...]
[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] Automation isn't always a good thing. Based on reporting of Facebook's outage on March 13, it sounds like they might have out-automated themselves doing a little network configuration. Initial speculations included the usual suspects: hackers. Facebook soon countered that story line saying that it ruled out a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. [...]
[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] Everyone has one, but it's still not an easy subject for most people. We're talking about the cost of downtime in their network. It's not an easy calculation if you want to be accurate, but one would be hard pressed to find anyone that says network downtime today is LESS expensive than in [...]
[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] Good luck finding a CIO that's not struggling with some aspect of IT modernization. The list of challenges is never ending: the IT skills gap, increasingly sophisticated security threats, IT/business alignment all requiring both tactical and strategic management. And what about innovation? Some days what feels like what was last week's next big [...]
[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] The same (unfounded) concern we've heard for years from network admins that the automation functionality in Uplogix is going to take their job is being applied to AI in the workplace. It can't be further from the truth -- both technologies enable skilled admins to spend less time on routine tasks and augment [...]
[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] Change is difficult for many people, especially in IT where change often means breaking established systems and processes and frustrating users who don't understand why things weren't left well enough alone. But change in IT is a constant, whether it's security changes trying to at least keep up with the bad guys, or [...]
[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] Take the proverb "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush," combine it with the more modern "wine is fine, but whiskey's quicker," (from the sage Ozzy Osbourne), and then throw in a splash of network management. What do you get? Network monitoring is great, but automation gets it done. Automation [...]
[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] The new year always brings predictions. In the federal IT space, it's no different. Predictions almost by a rule include both cool new tech (widespread adoption of biometric authentication methods) and less nerdy, but frightening prognostications like nearly one-third of the current federal workforce being retirement-eligible. The largest employer We'll get back to [...]
[fsn_row][fsn_column width="12"][fsn_text] Several years ago one of the morning talks at CiscoLive was on fog computing. At the time the hype for cloud computing was well entrenched, so fog computing seemed to bring things back to earth with a more realistic promise of local processing of the massive amount of data expected from the ever-increasing [...]
