Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Having access to all kinds of digital resources, no matter where you are or what sort of network connection you have, is a necessity in today’s connected world. Businesses need to share data with other businesses, and travelers need to stay in touch at all times. VPN protocols make secure, stable digital connections possible. While applications hosted in the public cloud go a long way towards making location a non-issue, many resources are hosted privately for security and privacy.

Understanding emerging networking trends is increasingly important for IT professionals and companies of all sizes to stay competitive. The global network infrastructure market is expected to reach $197.8 billion by the end of 2024 and increase to $256 billion by 2028 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.67%. This is a projected $58.2 billion increase in just four years. Staying current with developments in the industry, as well as anticipating where these trends may lead, is vital.

Before I go into the well-worn reasons why nobody cares about IPv6, I’ll tell you the one absolutely compelling reason why you should care: IPv6 comes pre-enabled on a lot of devices you have on your network right now. When services are enabled without your knowledge, that’s just dangerous.

Troubleshooting is more art than science. When diagnosing a problem, the most important tool is an intimate understanding of your network: what connects to what, and where everything is both logically and physically. You almost need to visualize the packets going from one device to the next. That includes verifying physical connectivity. That’s where network diagrams, topology mapping, and cabling spreadsheets become extremely important.

“My computer’s not working!” “I can’t connect to the internet!” “My emails aren’t sending!” You’re probably used to hearing common requests and complaints like these from end users. It’s our job to take these issues, troubleshoot them, bring them to root cause, and get the user back up and running as quickly as possible.

Computer networks have become integral to our modern digital world. From browsing the web to sending emails and transferring files, network connectivity enables countless applications and services. However, this would not be possible without network protocols, which provide a common language for devices to exchange information reliably. This article will explore some of the most common network protocols that drive communication and connectivity in networks and the Internet.

Link aggregation is a way of bundling a bunch of individual (Ethernet) links together so they act as a single logical link. A fundamental for effective switch management, if you have a switch with a whole lot of Gigabit Ethernet ports, you can connect all of them to another device that also has a bunch of ports and balance the traffic among these links to improve performance.

If you’ve ever been in charge of IP address assignment, you’ve come across the terms classful and classless addressing. If you haven’t, the main difference between classful and classless addressing is in the subnet length: classful addressing uses fixed-length subnet masks, but classless uses variable length subnet masks (VLSM).

The TCP/IP protocol sometimes shows its age. It was invented in an era when networks were very slow and packet loss was high. So one of the main considerations in early protocol design was reliability. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has built-in mechanisms for reliability that include validating a checksum on every packet, as well as detection and retransmission of dropped or out-of-order packets.

Is that a bird’s nest or is it spaghetti? Have you ever asked that question when looking into a IT wiring closet? At some point in your tenure as a network manager, you’ve likely been asked to inventory a network and create a network topology diagram.