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Digital infrastructure technology is the 'glue' of cohesion
This week, bloggers look into digital infrastructure technology, threat fatigue and virtual appliance optimization for data centers.
Drew Conry-Murray, writing in Packet Pushers, said he sees extensive overuse of the term digital disruption at conferences. Hype cycles have focused on cloud, data growth, internet of things and small-time developers churning out high-value applications. But Conry-Murray said he believes digital infrastructure technology that leads to digital cohesion is the true disruptive force. Through modern digital infrastructure technology, disparate applications and point services may coalesce into what Rami Rahim, CEO at Juniper Networks Inc., calls mega-services.
Conry-Murray expressed his support for Juniper's efforts to shift the conversation from digital disruption to cohesion based on digital infrastructure technology. He said vendors like Juniper will stay focused on automation and fulfilling "grand dreams of SDN [software-defined networking]," particularly in areas such as security and operations. "I'm pleased to hear a technology executive talk about ideas beyond digital disruption, and to move past the fear-mongering to formulate a vision of what comes after we've all been disrupted," Conry-Murray said.
Look more into Conry-Murray's thoughts on digital disruption.
Threat fatigue leads to cybersecurity failure
Earl Perkins, an analyst with Gartner, took a look at a recent U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology study on security fatigue. Although the study's findings relied on a small sample size, the results indicated substantial mutual exclusion between user-friendly operations and security procedures. Security teams often raise the ire of other people in the organization for halting processes or complicating tasks with security procedures.
According to Perkins, the evidence doesn't necessarily support the idea that cyberthreats are greater today. By contrast, he said he sees many groups as gambling and trying to weigh "the calculus of risk, reward and cost." This means some groups stick to less than the minimum acceptable standard for cybersecurity, except in cases where they believe a major incident or data breach could incur high costs.
Read more of Perkins' thoughts on threat fatigue.
Optimizing virtual appliances for data centers
Ivan Pepelnjak produced a video for IPSpace examining virtual appliance optimization for data centers. After virtualizing servers and disks, network services come next. Virtualized routers, firewalls and load balancers are increasingly common from major vendors, such as Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and Brocade. These appliances help to avoid hardware-dependent delays, increase flexibility, ease disaster recovery and reduce time to deploy.
F5 Networks Inc. started charging more for the virtual load balancer, rather than the physical load balancer, because customers usually only buy a single instance and don't buy spares. Some groups have eliminated anything that's not a switch. Pepelnjak said he believes switches and servers are the only hardware systems needed for virtualized data centers. By converting to this model, he said maintenance costs can be dramatically reduced.
Dig deeper into Pepelnjak's thoughts on virtualization.
