Smart devices are everywhere nowadays, from refrigerators and coffee makers to security cameras and thermostats. A significant percentage of these Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are designed for consumers. However, they have also become a mainstay in various other fields, including healthcare, where their use has become prolific. The Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) market has exploded in value, forecasted to reach approximately $158.1 billion by 2022, according to Deloitte.

It’s no surprise that monitoring and managing networks in the financial services industry is a complex task with plenty of challenges. In addition to the “standard” networking requirements, like high availability and traffic capacity planning, IT in the finance industry has to deal with regulatory and industry-specific challenges that create even more issues to deal with.

When the internet was first developed, the IP addressing scheme was IPv4. This addressing scheme worked really well for about 25 years. After all, it had about 4 billion host addresses. But as the internet grew, we started to see that this was just not going to be enough. Now we have an entire infrastructure that was built on IPv4. While IPv5 addresses have been exhausted, we’ve used band-aid solutions to keep the internet growing.

The financial sector is in a constant state of change, and institutions must continually adjust to the evolving needs of their customers and the global marketplace. And with availability requirements like the ones European Banking Authority (EBA) provide—99.5%—financial institutions are driven to remain on the bleeding edge of responsiveness and convenience. Banking outages lead to lost consumer confidence and damaged reputations in a sector where trust is the cornerstone of doing business.

This article was born of necessity. Chatting with my editors at Auvik, I went looking to see what kinds of advice other sites had on SysAdmin tools you should have handy to do your job. Two things immediately struck me: Now don’t get me wrong, software is important to have. But what if you can’t access that device to use the software? What if there’s a (gasp!) physical issue that needs to be addressed, and you have to get some hands-on time with some racks?

As an IT pro, you’re probably used to doing the heavy lifting when it comes to network security. You might even find your team responsible for educating the rest of your company on best practices when it comes to network common security hacks and how to prevent them. Today, we’re here to lighten that load a little.

As an MSP owner or manager, you want your teams to be continually improving and increasing efficiency. To make that happen, you know you need to be tracking MSP KPIs—after all, what gets measured gets improved. But which numbers do you track, how many do you track, and how do you actually use them to get better?

Aches in your back and neck? Clutter eating up your desktop and desk’s top? Feeling so absorbed in your to-do list that you forget to breathe? You could be suffering from IT job stress. And you’re not alone! Let’s look at ways to identify stress before it gets to be too much, and some helpful tips for letting it go.

It’s surprisingly difficult to find information related to monitoring a distributed network. I think this is because, in part, network pros take the term for granted. We all intuitively know what a distributed network is, and the term is pretty common in conversation. But when you start to think about a precise definition, or even search for one online, things get fuzzy. What exactly makes a network distributed? Is a distributed network fundamentally different from a decentralized network?

When I hear QUIC, my immediate reaction is, “The QUICk brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” That sentence has been ingrained in me since my first typing classes decades ago! I doubt the creators of QUIC were going for this type of reaction when they put together the name… but the good news is that this isn’t an article on typing. We’re diving into what the QUIC protocol is, how it works and how it’s used, and how it’s going to impact web traffic in the future.