The network is designed to connect the organization’s users, partners, customers and visitors, but those connections are useless without software. While applications run on internal servers, end points and the cloud, the performance of the network in large measure defines the performance of the application, and this performance is what user experience and application experience (AX) is based on.

Migrating to a cloud-based phone system is compelling because it eliminates the costs and time associated with deploying and managing legacy phone system/PBX hardware and proprietary business phones. However, moving 100% of an organization’s communications infrastructure off-site can present new challenges. If the connection to the cloud is lost, a site could lose both external communications and intra-site communications.

In the early years of the internet, it was common to simply use a spreadsheet to manually assign and track IP addresses. We’d be given a generous pool of IP addresses that were not so widely distributed, and most network devices were desktops and not mobile. But this soon got out of hand as networks grew and mobile devices became the norm.

Curious about Microsoft Azure and the best ways to connect? Azure is a hybrid Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with customized, scalable, cloud-based packages. These encompass Software as a Service (SaaS), based on subscription-based software licensing and delivery, Platform as a Service (PaaS), allowing companies to develop, deploy, manage, and update applications, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), providing high-level application programming interfaces (APIs).

Recent, high-profile cybersecurity exploits, such as Sun Burst and Log4j, demonstrate that every enterprise is only a stone’s throw from a software vulnerability. This becomes especially critical when security is breached in a network monitoring component that has privileged access to core enterprise systems. In the case of Sun Burst, a well-known monitoring software provider made international headlines.

In retail, the cloud changes everything because it offers flexibility and the opportunity to do things better, or to do things that were previously impossible, for a lower cost. This is especially true in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment, where retailers can connect their legacy private data centres with public clouds to enhance their offering and make it more competitive.

With HTTP REST APIs serving as the backbone of modern web applications, securing those APIs presents a critical challenge for organizations. APIs are typically designed to be discoverable, self-documenting, and easily consumed by a range of programming languages, and that makes them appetizing for hackers.

Technologies like virtualization and containerization have gained significant traction over the last decade as foundational tools for modern application development. As companies like Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (Google Cloud) started to invest in the hardware and software infrastructure required to support access to these virtualized resources, “the cloud” was born.

When talking about managing web applications and the services they provide, the term “API gateway” is often thrown around, but what does it mean? In order to unpack how a gateway functions, we first need to understand what an API is.