The data center is central to IT strategy and houses the computational power, storage resources, and applications necessary to support an enterprise business. A flexible data center infrastructure than can support and quickly deploy new applications can result in significant competitive advantage, but designing such a data center requires solid initial planning and thoughtful consideration ...

Today’s branch office requires the same level of rich application services as the company headquarters to ensure business innovation and employee productivity. Why are these services needed? What impact do they have on the network, IT staff, and service provider? What is the best way to boost the branch-office network to optimum levels – both ...

The worldwide enterprise videoconferencing equipment market has been experiencing some downs lately — with consecutive quarters and two years of declining revenue growth in 2013 (-13.1%) and 2012 (-5.0%). This is mostly attributed to the impact of delayed customer buying decisions, lower-cost systems, more software-centric solutions, and the rise of cloud-based video services offerings for ...

In Forrester’s 24-criteria evaluation of videoconferencing infrastructure and cloud services vendors, we identified the 10 most significant OEMs — Acano, AGT, Avaya, Blue Jeans Network, Cisco Systems, Lifesize, Pexip, Polycom, Videxio, and Vidyo — in the category and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report details our findings about how well each vendor fulfills our ...

There are numerous ways to enable a BYOD solution based on the unique business requirements of a specific organization. While some organizations may take a more open approach and rely on basic authentication, other organizations will prefer more secure ways to identify, authenticate, and authorize devices. A robust network infrastructure with the capabilities to manage ...

Most large organizations address network security with an army of tactical point tools like firewalls, VPN gateways, IDSs/IPSs, network proxies, malware sandboxes, web and e-mail gateways, etc. This messy array of independent technologies was adequate ten years ago, but now presents a plethora of operational, policy enforcement, and monitoring challenges. Worse yet, network security defenses ...

Today’s adversaries continue to increase their capabilities faster than the defenses deployed to stop them. Whether they are obfuscating their attacks or hiding malicious code within webpages and other files, they are making it more and more difficult to profile and identify legitimate network traffic. This is especially true in firstgeneration network security devices that ...

Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) present systems that are based on common use cases or engineering priorities. CVDs incorporate a broad set of technologies, features, and applications that address customer needs. Cisco engineers have comprehensively tested and documented each design in order to ensure faster, more reliable, and fully predictable deployment. Subscribe to the Developer Insider ...

The data center has gone through many major evolutionary changes over the past several decades, and each change has been defined by major shifts in architectures. The industry moved from the mainframe era to client/server computing and then to Internet computing. In 2011, another major shift began: the shift to a virtual data center. This ...

More than ever, the data center is a gateway to opportunity, responsible for bringing together the data, applications, and IT resources needed to support growth and innovation. At Cisco we have the opportunity to observe how data center infrastructure is evolving in response to market and technology trends. In no particular order, here are five ...