Digital demands from students and staff to keep pace with modern education methods has put a lot of pressure on IT operations. Consistently delivering quality service for all is a tall order. Technology advancements, IoT proliferation, device demand, lower cost, and ease of wireless access means supporting all the things is the job facing education network administrators.

From smart lighting, to waste management, to air quality, IoT devices and other “smart city technologies” are rapidly changing life in urban areas. And with a recent MarketsandMarkets research report projecting spending in the market for smart city solutions will nearly double to over $873 billion by 2026, the trend is only set to accelerate.

In IT, we tend to think of threats as external. Hackers, scammers, bots, and DDoS attacks are all external in origin. But surprisingly, insider risk is often one of the biggest network security challenges facing IT. As they say, sometimes it’s the ones closest to you that can hurt you the most.

The EdTech space is evolving at a rapid pace. In addition to a drastic increase in remote learning, a wide range of new technologies and platforms are making their way into physical and virtual classrooms across the globe. However, discussions about trends in educational technology tend to overlook how they affect (and are affected by) the network. We’re here to do something about that.

Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is a software overlay that decouples WAN configuration and management from the underlying network transport medium (5G/LTE, MPLS, xDSL, etc) and dynamically routes WAN traffic. To the uninitiated, that’s a mouthful. But it’s one of the most interesting trends of the last few years. Let’s jump on the bandwagon! Time for a primer on SD-WAN, why it matters, and where it’s heading now and into the future.

News over the last few years has been thick with reports of major data breaches on corporate network infrastructure. In the cases of the Panama Papers, the OPM leak, and the Hacking Team leak, the results were catastrophic leaks of extremely confidential information. In truth, a determined and well-resourced attacker can always find a way in.

Unplanned downtime carries a hefty price tag for enterprises. In 2020, critical server outages cost enterprises on average at least $10,000 per hour, with 95% of respondents stating that the cost was $200,000 per hour or more. 40% said that the average cost was closer to $1 million per hour, and 17% lost $5 million or more for every hour offline. Those are some sobering statistics that demonstrate the importance of being prepared for the worst. But you’re thinking, “We back up everything!

Any cybersecurity breach is damaging to individual companies. But when it becomes a supply chain attack, the results can be chaotic and widespread. While most businesses overlook the dangers of supply chain cyber attacks, hackers have not. Malicious actors are continuously looking for, and finding, new ways to invade company networks. With these looming threats, companies must know how to prevent supply chain attacks and find new means of securing against cybersecurity breaches.

A cynical network engineer might say, “configuration drift happens when you take the day off.” Someone changed something they shouldn’t have, and didn’t tell anyone. As a result, the network gets just a little less secure, and a little harder to troubleshoot. And then it happens again. And again. And over time, all those little changes that people thought would never mean anything suddenly add up to a network looking a lot different from what it’s supposed to be.

When I’m speaking to any IT solution provider or managed service provider (MSP), one of the most common questions I’m asked is, “What’s the one mistake you’d recommend any IT businesses avoid?” My answer is always this: Not documenting your business. The reason is simple. If you don’t document your business, you’ll inevitably find your business is prone to an SPF—a single point of failure.