What frustrates you the most about network support? Nothing feels better than playing detective on an obscure network issue and being the IT hero who resolves it. But too much time in network operations is about addressing all-too-common, repeat incidents … manually. Network support tickets we’ve resolved over and over again in the exact same way. Feels like maybe not the best use of our time. And it’s not! In business, efficiency is key. Manually handling every support ticket just does not sync with modern practices. What’s more is that lengthy network disruptions are not great for business ..read more

Downtime is expensive. More than half (54%) of the respondents to the 2023 Uptime Institute data center survey say their most recent significant, serious, or severe outage cost more than $100,000, with 16% saying that their most recent outage cost more than $1 million.  The phrase from the movie, Apollo 13, “Failure is not an option,” is one of the most recognizable movie taglines of all time. In network operations, it’s the same mindset. Money and reputation are on the line. Failure is not an option. Uptime Institute data suggests that each year there are, on average, 10 to 20 high-prof ..read more

Let’s face it – manually troubleshooting hybrid networks is painful and time-consuming. Often escalation engineers must repeat initial investigation steps because either nothing was documented, or they don’t trust what was done. Case in point: a well-known electric vehicle manufacturer was drowning in service requests for specific networking data from other IT departments. For example, the security and IT infrastructure teams often needed to know the switch port that a specific device like a camera was plugged into or wanted to find ports that were not being utilized where they could deploy ad ..read more

In November of 2022, the European Union adopted the Digital Operations Resilience Act or DORA, a set of all-encompassing digital finance regulations aimed at strengthening the financial industry’s resilience to information and communication technology (ICT)-related incidents. Critically, both financial firms and the third-party ICT providers that support them must be compliant with the technical standards established by DORA by January 2025. If your organization operates within the EU financial sector or conducts business with EU financial entities, it is imperative to fully implement a compre ..read more

Network assessment has always been a hot topic. At first glance, it sounds amazing. It provides insight into what you have and how it operates. The assessment idea is simple: as networks grow and morph over time, it would be highly desirable to have an accurate representation of the entire structure from a documentation point of view to assist in all subsequent operations, including remediation, migration, and growth. That said, realizing that has always been a lofty goal. Anyone who has spent their career in IT knows that network assessments have always been a huge and labor-intensive chore ..read more

Network security is an critical exercise in continuous vigilance. Threats evolve and new vulnerabilities are discovered every day. Case in point, on October 16th, 2023, Cisco revealed the existence of a previous unknown vulnerability, CVE-2023-20198 (Cisco Bug ID: CSCwh87343), affecting all of Cisco’s IOS XE products. This exploit takes advantage of IOS XE’s web-UI functionality, regardless of whether it is configured for HTTPS or not. Per the Cisco website: This vulnerability allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to create an account on an affected system with privilege level 15 access. T ..read more

About a year ago, I was a member of the Advanced Networking team at a regional ISP (Internet service provider)—a glamorous name for an elite strike force of networking rock stars known to troubleshoot first and ask questions later. And yet, I remember one of my last tasks before an opportunity with NetBrain presented itself was to work with our reseller on our Cisco SmartNet renewal—a decidedly unglamorous job. And it’s not like I was the rookie member of the team left with the grunt work while our veterans chased glory: I was the Director ..read more

In every digital connected business, managed service provider, and governmental agency, IT professionals typically focus on the specific technologies that are being put in place and the amazing innovation possible based on leading-edge hardware, software, and cloud-based products. While the chosen technologies are paramount to providing an organization’s desired IT services, it may not be intuitively obvious that the prowess of the operational side of the equation has more bottom-line effect than anything on the technology side. These operational plans define the processes and overhead require ..read more

If you’ve worked in and around enterprise IT for any length of time, you’ve likely been part of a project to move data center resources from one location to another. Whether it’s a corporate relocation, an acquisition, a merger, or divestiture, very few network engineers avoid the dreaded data center migration. When it comes to planning a data center migration, there are several important factors to consider. In this article, we will explore the key considerations and best practices for optimizing your data center move ..read more

For many of us IT professionals, we have spent our entire lives thinking about what it takes to deliver IT services in a reliable, predictable fashion. Sometimes it’s a tech discussion, sometimes it’s a process discussion, and it always ends up as just one of many ongoing discussions needed to support the service delivery goal, which changes over time to be sure. Lots of people are involved as our infrastructures get bigger and more complex. And in most cases, an infrastructure contains dozens of vendors supplying hundreds of different models over the lifespan of every infrastructure. And then ..read more