From my perspective, if you have fiber primary, broadband secondary and LEO tertiary connectivity. You better have a generator as well, because if all three of those go down at the same time your connectivity is probably the least of your concerns at that point.

Today, your applications aren’t in the Data Center; they’re in the Cloud (Salesforce, AWS, Azure). Your users aren’t at their desks; they’re at Starbucks, in airports, or working from their kitchen tables. The Castle is empty, but we’re still spending millions of dollars guarding the drawbridge.

If I had a nickel for every time a vendor told me their shiny new appliance would “solve Zero Trust,” I’d be retired on a beach somewhere. Here is the hard truth I keep coming back to in conversations about the future of the edge: Zero Trust is not a product. It’s a mindset. You…

For the last twenty years, the relationship between Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps) has been… let’s call it “tense.” The Network guy’s job is to get the train moving out of the station as fast as possible. The Security guy’s job is to throw boulders on the tracks to make sure nobody hijacks…

Let’s be honest: nobody starts with a blank sheet of paper. I was recently discussing the state of edge connectivity, and it struck me how often the industry ignores the reality on the ground. If you’re reading this, your network diagram probably looks less like a clean blueprint and more like a plate of spaghetti.…

…However, the timing of that journey shouldn’t be dictated by a hardware refresh cycle or a vendor’s sales quota. It must be dictated by your business reality.

This “utility mindset” ignores a fundamental reality of the digital age: The network is the only system in your organization that touches every single application, user, and data point.

Let’s be honest: the marketing folks in our industry have done a spectacular job selling the dream of “Software-Defined” everything. If you read the brochures, you’d think SD-WAN is magic pixie dust. You sprinkle it over any cheap, commodity broadband connection, and suddenly you have a carrier-grade network that never fails. The narrative is that…