Fields of Fiber

I focus a lot on data centers and networks and the IT pros who work directly with them, but the reason digital transformation is such a pervasive topic is that it is applicable to literally every kind of business.

My first two articles today look at Tacoma Power and David’s Bridal – not names you would usually expect to see featured in a data center and networking news roundup! And yet, these two stories illustrate the point of digital transformation – that a successful implementation means the entire organization benefits from improved agility, resilience and efficiency.

Digital Transformation. The concept isn’t new, but it’s gaining traction in the news I read because network infrastructure is at the core of any digital transformation initiative.

From data centers, to cloud services, to retail points of presence, the drive to take advantage of higher bandwidths, big data, deep learning, SDN and virtualization technologies is pushing companies to develop a wide range of ways to overcome the bottleneck of legacy network infrastructures.

Change is inevitable. How is your organization preparing for the new competitive landscape?

One of my colleagues likes to say that “DOWN is a four-letter word.” Delta provided an object lesson of that concept earlier this week, only a month after a similar outage at Southwest Airlines. Ensuring uptime is a multifaceted challenge, including security against intentional threats, policies and procedures to prevent unintentional damage, redundancies to mitigate the impact of equipment failures or programming glitches and disaster recovery planning to get back up and running ASAP when something gets past all of your preventive measures.

Glass Core can be a part of the solution, but since this is my weekly news roundup, I’ll start with sharing a few relevant articles: