Does SASE equal SSE plus SD-WAN? This question, arising from a recent email I got, shows to me how far we’ve diverted from reality here. Only one of these acronyms actually has a fairly firm definition, and even it has significant variations in implementation. The other two are media/analyst inventions, so what do we gain…
What, exactly, is the relationship between AI and security? We hear a lot about AI these days, and though my own data doesn’t come close to the level of AI adoption some surveys claim to find, it does show that the number of enterprises with actual AI applications has tripled since 2021, which represents pretty…
Everyone who’s read my blogs knows that I believe that “metro” is the value bastion of the future for network operators. Juniper did a “Cloud Metro” announcement over a year ago, the first and most significant such announcement by a network vendor, and I’ve been waiting to see how they developed the theme. That question…
Given that there’s an essential relationship between features and functions hosted…well…wherever and the connection network, it’s important to talk about the connection relationships involved, and in particular the service composition and federation relationships to the data plane. This is an issue that most cloud and network discussions have dodged, perhaps conveniently, and that has to…
Whether we accept the concept of the semantic web, or Web3, or the metaverse, or even fall back on lower-level things like cable’s Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), the signs are pointing toward an expansion of what we believe makes up networks in general, and the Internet in particular. That’s already been going on behind the…
Just where is the cloud, as an element of IT? We hear a lot of stuff about it, but it’s hard these days to rely much on what we hear. Is the cloud really dominating IT, is it really going to eat the data center? What can we expect from cloud providers? All this stuff…
The metaverse took a step (in some direction or another) with the formation of a standards body called “The Metaverse Standards Forum” (a more technical view can be found HERE). Meta is unsurprisingly initiating the move, with Microsoft support, and other tech giants like Adobe and Nvidia have joined. The body offers the potential benefit…
Most of you know that I’ve been an advocate of intent-modeled, model-driven, networking for almost two decades. This approach would divide a service into functional/deployable elements, each represented by a “black box” intent model responsible for meeting an SLA. This approach has some major advantages, in my view, and also a few complications. Operators generally…
Crypto has surely had its problems recently, even major problems. Meta has been under pressure too, and there are signs that the Web3 hype wave has already crested. Is there a connection between these events, either in the sense that there’s a common underlying issue, or in the sense that one problem area might feed…
Google is entering the private 5G space, so the story goes, but what it’s likely doing is a bit more profound than that. Does it mean that “private 5G” is going to take off? Does that mean that public 5G is in even more trouble than some have said? Is something even more potentially disruptive…