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Today’s networks face a multitude of challenges as they become more complex and distributed. Legacy issues around performance, speed, availability and latency still cause headaches, and outages risk financial and reputational damage — just look at the CrowdStrike outage ramifications, which will no doubt continue for years to come. But AI holds the potential to improve IT networks. The emerging concept of AI networking combines several technologies to

NetBox Labs is expanding its network management platform this week with a pair of new products designed to tackle the growing challenges of infrastructure documentation and configuration management. NetBox Labs is the lead commercial sponsor behind the widely deployed open source NetBox technology, which is used for modeling and documenting networks. The company was spun out of DNS platform provider NS1 in 2023. NS1 was subsequently acquired by IBM. NetBox Labs provides commercially supported services for Net

Network-as-a-service startup Nile has added new zero-trust capabilities and tapped Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks to bolster its enterprise security services. Nile was founded by former Cisco CEO John Chambers and Pankaj Patel, Cisco’s former chief development officer. Its subscription-based NaaS offering, called Nile Access Service, lets customers set up and manage campus network operations without requiring them to purchase and maintain their own networking infrastructure.

As data volumes increase exponentially, the threat of data loss from cyberattacks, human error, or system failure has never been greater — which is why, in 2025, fortifying a data protection strategy has never made more sense. Backups continue to serve as the backbone of any data protection solution. But with a wide variety of software, tools, and services to choose from, how do you know which is right for you? While traditional backup software is well-proven, Backup as a Service (BaaS) solutions are rapidly becoming the cross-industry standard. They each serve distinct roles, and which option has the edge over the other depends on several factors. Let’s dive into their key differen

Amid reports of US regulatory concerns over HPE’s proposed buy of Juniper Networks, the CEOs of both companies talked about the future of the blended entity at this week’s HPE Discover event in Barcelona – and that future includes plenty of AI networking technology. HPE’s acquisition of Juniper has been under regulatory scrutiny ever since HPE announced the $14 billion deal in January. The proposed deal has passed muster with a number o

Networking software provider Aviz Networks today announced a $17 million Series A funding round to accelerate its growth in open networking solutions and artificial intelligence capabilities. Aviz Networks provides support and services to enable organizations to adopt the open source SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) network operating system. In the past year, Aviz Networks has seen solid progress, with the company reporting a 400% i

The five fastest-growing hubs for data center expansion include an interesting mix of urban areas that have one thing in common: lots of available power. Based on projected data-center capacity growth, Las Vegas/Reno is the No. 1 fastest growing data center site in the US, followed by Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas-Fort Worth, according to a new report from cloud security vendor Upwind. Northern Virginia didn’t make the list – but that’s because i

Pressure to implement AI plans is on the rise, but the readiness of enterprise networks to handle AI workloads has actually declined over the past year, according to new research from Cisco. Cisco’s second annual AI Readiness Index notes a “huge chasm” between the urgency companies feel to deploy AI and their ability to actually do it. Some 8,000 global companies were surveyed for the AI Readiness Index, which aims to mea

Network and infrastructure roles continue to shift as enterprises adopt technologies such as AI-driven network operations, multicloud networking, zero trust network access (ZTNA), and SD-WAN. Here’s a recap of some of the latest industry research, hiring statistics, and certification trends that impact today’s network professionals, infrastructure and operat

A new certification program from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Linux Foundation is aimed at validating the skills needed to utilize OpenTelemetry to gain visibility across distributed systems. The OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) certification is designed for application engineers, DevOps engineers, system reliability engineers, platform engineers, or IT professionals looking to increase their abilities to leverage telemetry data across distributed systems of cloud-native and microservices-based applications. “OpenTelemetry is a transformative o