Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this edition of Beyond Their Intended Scope, we take a look at last week’s BGP leak by a DDoS mitigation company which impacted networks around the world. We look at the impacts in both BGP and traffic data, and discuss how RFC 9234’s “Only to Customer” BGP Path Attribute could have helped.

If your network feels sluggish, you're not alone. After years of battling slow connections, dropped calls, and frustrated end-users, I’ve learned one thing: network performance issues always have a root cause. Maybe your VoIP calls keep cutting out. Maybe cloud apps take forever to load. Or maybe your team complains about "the network being slow" — again. The problem? Networks don’t slow down for no reason.

The shift toward remote work has made reliable and secure access to company resources more important than ever. As organizations explore different solutions to address these needs, two popular technologies stand out: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Virtual Private Networks, or VDI and VPN. Both offer distinct benefits for connecting employees to critical systems, but the differences between them can significantly impact your business operations.

Compare these two leading networking technologies so you can decide which is best for your organization. In 2025, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is considered an essential part of many organizations’ network fabric. But what about Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)? Has this trusty routing technique been made redundant by the increasing uptake of SD-WAN? What are the differences and similarities between SD-WAN and MPLS? And are there valid reasons to use both?

Each link type has its strengths and weaknesses. Still, without proper monitoring, even the most expensive connections can fail at crucial junctures, like when a customer is trying a UPI transaction and lead to a loss of revenue and trust.

If you need to monitor your application’s health, troubleshoot issues quickly, and ensure compliance with various security policies, application logging is compulsory. Without proper logging, identifying the root cause of failures, tracking suspicious activity, or optimizing application performance will become significantly more challenging, if not impossible.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, network automation has become a vital tool for service providers seeking to enhance efficiency, reduce operational costs, and improve customer satisfaction. Muse, a platform developed by Ribbon Communications, stands at the forefront of this transformation. This blog post summarizes how Muse leverages low-code platforms to streamline and automate network operations to drive profitability in IP Optical Networks.

Finances, strategy, and market expansion are all common CEO concerns. However, CEOs also need to focus on automatic advanced observability across highly dynamic environments. Network observability has become a boardroom discussion point because downtime directly impacts business performance. Observability helps reduce costs and enhance service quality. But what is network observability? Is observability truly necessary if you have a monitoring solution in place?