My first three months as President and CEO of Ribbon have been a whirlwind by any standard. But also satisfying and invigorating. We have huge potential and expectations for our new company as the merger of Ribbon and ECI accelerates, even while managing the impact from the COVID-19 pandemic. Like everyone, we have quickly adapted to the new normal and in many areas are even more productive than before.

For more than a decade, the face of wireless has been IEEE 802.11 WLANs, your typical Wi-Fi networks prevalent in every home and business. In 2020 and beyond, the line is trending toward RF-based technologies departing from our common WLAN technologies. Tomorrow’s wireless networks will impact every organization and professional, as we work to incorporate, manage, and secure these deviant technologies.

Scaling sort of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? One day, you’re carefree, the next you start to notice something is off… Maybe it’s the crashing, or the frequent dips in performance. Could it be the new hire? It’s not DNS. Is it DNS? Scaling is a natural part of the business process, and your infrastructure will start to change completely as your userbase doubles and triples.

SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Networking) centralizes and automates the configuration of network devices and how they route traffic. This is increasingly important as not all network traffic is created equal; there are specific business-critical applications that are relied on more heavily than others. In addition to intelligent routing benefits, SD-WAN also allows IT managers to deploy internet-connectivity quickly, reliability, and securely.

Across the world, many network operators, fiber network wholesalers, municipalities, and local authorities are in a race to put fiber in the ground. New techniques and specialized tools have reduced the time it takes to deploy optical fiber and increased the amount of fiber held in a single duct, this makes the dream of providing fiber to every premise a cost-effective reality.

Usually, organizations use an internal network to prevent unauthorized people from connecting to their private network. By using their own network infrastructure and connectivity, they can maintain their desirable level of security for their data. But it would be convenient for users to connect to that private network while they are away from the office through their own internet connection.

The military has invested significant time and money implementing edge computing on the battlefield. The Army’s efforts to leverage the tactical cloud to process data on the edge gets information into soldiers’ hands more quickly, allowing them to make decisions in near-real time. But these benefits come with significant challenges, particularly regarding security. The more endpoints, the larger the potential attack surface and the greater the risk.

Let’s be honest: As a network manager, you’re responsible for knowing a little bit about everything when it comes to computer networking. From fundamentals to anticipating future tech changes, there’s a lot of ground to cover. To keep up, you need to keep learning. If you’re wondering where to start, this list of 10 computer networking books can help.

We can’t stress enough on the importance of event correlation in network monitoring. Our customers love correlation! For the love of event correlation we’ve published a blog on why modern organizations rely on event correlation. This is the second blog from the correlation series. You might want to read our previous blog before reading this one.