Ann Bednarz

Plans call for integrating Robust Intelligence's AI security platform with Cisco Security Cloud to streamline threat protection for AI applications and models and increase visibility into AI traffic.

The severity of data-center outages appears to be falling, while the cost of outages continues to climb. Power failures are “the biggest cause of significant site outages.” Network failures and IT system glitches also bring down data centers, and human error often contributes. Those are some of the problems pinpointed in the most recent Uptime Institute data-center outage report, which analyzes types of outages, their frequency, and what they cost both in money and consequences. Unreliable data…

Fire is to blame for a small but significant number of data-center outages including a March 28 fire that caused severe damage to a data center in France, and an analysis of global incidents highlights ongoing concerns about the safety of lithium-ion batteries and their risk of combustion. The use of lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries in data centers is growing. Now commonly used in uninterruptible power supplies, they are expected to account for 38.5% of the data-center battery market by 2025, up f…

Outages that made Microsoft Azure and multiple Microsoft cloud services widely unavailable for 90 minutes on Jan. 25 can be traced to the cascading effects of repeated, rapid readvertising of BGP router prefixes, according to a ThousandEyes analysis of the incident. The Cisco-owned network intelligence company traced the Microsoft outage to an external BGP change by Microsoft that affected service providers. (Read more about network and infrastructure outages in our top 10 outages of 2022 recap.…

Cutting-edge server chips are turning heads for their potential to boost performance, but next-generation processors also run hotter than older designs, and data-center operators will struggle to figure out what to do with limited guidance from chip makers. At the same time, there’s going to be increased scrutiny on the role that IT equipment can play in energy efficiency efforts. These interrelated trends are among the top predictions Uptime Institute is making for data centers this year. “Oper…

The most significant network and service outages of 2022 had far-reaching consequences. Flights were grounded, virtual meetings cut off, and communications hindered. The culprits that took down major infrastructure and services providers were varied, too, according to analysis from ThousandEyes, a Cisco-owned network intelligence company that tracks internet and cloud traffic. Maintenance-related errors were cited more than once: Canadian carrier Rogers Communications experienced a massive natio…

Oracle is giving cloud control to its partners and customers with the launch of Oracle Alloy, an infrastructure platform that lets organizations build and deploy custom cloud services using their own hardware and data centers. The Alloy platform is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the vendor’s portfolio of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and other cloud services. “Oracle has spent a lot of money and effort to build out OCI. They’re really keen on growing share, and they’re going after programs like…

Beyond the human cost, natural disasters like hurricane Ian can take a high toll on business continuity, causing enterprise-infrastructure damage that takes days or weeks to fix while downtime costs in the six figures per hour. If Ian didn’t impact your operations, now is the time to prepare for a future disaster that might hit your network. Vulnerable areas include cloud providers’ managed services that might require customers to explicitly specify they want their apps, compute, and storage hou…

Cloud expertise dominates the most in-demand tech skills for enterprises today, according to Skillsoft. The digital-learning company released its 2022 list of top-paying IT certifications, and AWS certs accounted for five of the 15 slots. Two Google Cloud Platform (GCP) certs and one Microsoft Azure cert also made the list. The continuing value of cloud certifications isn’t surprising, but what’s noteworthy is a shift toward multi-cloud skills, said Michael Yoo, customer market leader for Skills…

“Twenty-two times a year, we build a data center right down at the edge,” said Ed Green, head of commercial technology at McLaren Racing, a British motor racing team based in Surrey, England. For McLaren, the edge is wherever in the world the company’s Formula 1 racing team is competing. An IT setup at each racing site links the entire team, including mechanics, engineers, crew members, and the drivers of McLaren’s two Formula 1 racecars. “Once these two cars make their way around the track – a…