What are the risks of a network-device exploit? The flap about Huawei has raised the question of a deliberate, even state-sponsored, built-in vulnerability, but of course network devices have the potential for a hack/exploit created by a failure in testing and quality control. Cisco recently had to patch one in an SD-WAN product. We hear…
ATT has been a leader in what we could call transformation, and we recently had a number of stories about its adoption of Airship, via a deal with Mirantis. This follows on an AT&T blog on the topic last May. There are a lot of things about this deal to like, but there’s not been…
“White boxes in the network” sounds like a bit like “Red Sails in the Sunset” (at least to my generation), but it’s not just about a nice appearance. White-box switching and routing are critical for network operators, and increasingly so for enterprises. I blogged about some initiatives in the space last week, and today I…
Everyone accepts that network operators would love to eliminate proprietary network devices. NFV was aimed at eliminating at least some of them, but using a cloud to host a data-plane function has its issues. AT&T recognized this and decided to frame an open (later released as open-source) operating system to run in an appliance and…
One of the things I learned in the past was that “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions were worlds apart. Another thing I learned was that “pent-up demand” reflects in how realization of opportunity bunches up until released. It’s pretty clear that 5G supporters haven’t learned that lesson, as an article in Light Reading reflects. A “necessary”…
Light Reading did a nice piece on Google and their new hire to head the telecom, media, and entertainment piece of Google Cloud. John Honeycutt came from the TV side, the Discovery Channel specifically, and so he’s much more a content guy than a cloud service guy. Specifically, he was in charge of IT, media…
Ciena is now spinning out its Blue Planet orchestration, a move first referenced in their earnings call and now reported by SDxCentral. Ciena offered a blog of its own on the topic recently. Both these sources are long on the “new division” piece, but short of details on the mission, the architectural model, and the…
Some recent stories on cloud provider growth and total revenue show Amazon well out in front of everyone else, Microsoft in a comfortable second place with faster-than-average growth, and Google and IBM locked in third place. I’ve noted that a part of the total cloud dynamic is the market segments each provider is addressing. Amazon…
I had a really interesting talk with a senior operator technology planner about a term we hear all the time, “cloud-native”. She suggested that we substitute another term for it, “cloud-naïve” because she believed that there was “zero realism” in how the cloud in general and cloud-native in particular were being considered. If that’s true,…
Test equipment was a mainstay in networking when I first got into it 40 years ago or so, but the role of testing in modern networking has been increasingly hard to define. Part of that is that a lot of “testing” was never about networks at all, and part is because what a network is…