Banks and financial institutions are more technology-reliant than ever before as they seek to be more customer-centric in their offerings. As such, the branch plays a major role in their quest for customer service excellence, giving customers a place to conduct transactions, receive personalized attention from bank reps and take advantage of next-generation technologies such as video how-to’s or chatbots to further enhance their banking experience. Some banks have taken customer-centricity one step further, opening their branches to act as neighborhood community centers or gathering places for organizations. Some bank branches make their videoconferencing systems available for customers to use,…
Apache’s gaps has been in news for quite a while, and this has led to the massive milestone of Equifax being compromised to the tune of 143 million records. This has been a difficult year for Apache, with so many vulnerabilities being reported. Refer to the link for a list of Apache vulnerabilities reported in 2017. Though previous years also accounted for large chunks of Apache vulnerability, this year it has been in news for two particular vulnerabilities, CVE-2017-5638 (which led to the compromise of user data through the Equifax breach) and CVE-2017-9805 (due to the fact that the public…
Much has changed in the retail space since the electronic cash register came on the scene in the 1970s. What was once a manual process of locations counting their tills and sending the receipt information to the head office became a faster, easier and more precise endeavor, as the machines could transmit the sales information directly without the need for human interaction—besides pressing a few buttons, of course. Today, technology in retail touches the entire process, from inventory ordering and management to sales transactions and even customer satisfaction and retention. It could easily be argued that retailers today are more…
Companies looking to expand their WAN networks are rich in choices: They can stick with a traditional WAN or go with a hybrid or SD-WAN architecture. Given the costs and provisioning delays associated with traditional WANs, a growing number of companies are turning to hybrid or SD-WAN. It only makes sense: Because they facilitate the use of direct internet access (broadband) as an alternative method of branch connectivity. Hybrid and SD-WANs are much lower in cost than MPLS WANs. However, there are distinct differences between hybrid WAN and SD-WAN architectures that are worth noting, especially for companies looking for more…
On Monday, May 15, the telecommunications community will gather at Brazos Hall in Austin, Texas for the 13th annual Leading Lights awards — the telecom industry’s most credible and authoritative awards program. The event will honor companies across 25+ categories for their commitment to innovation, business acumen and diversity in the communications industry. Because we have a strong commitment to our customers and their success, we are very proud that Colt and Tata Communications were announced as finalists in the Most Innovative SDN/SD-WAN Deployment Strategy (Network/Data Center Operator) category. Colt, an on-demand network and communications provider, leverages Versa’s SD-WAN platform…
The channel is known for sometimes adapting to change at a snail’s pace. Their business has, for years, been served well by technology vendors who relied on them as conduits for their hardware sales (and sometimes installation services). And, for those resellers—whose sales can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per transaction—there hasn’t been a good reason to change. The technology landscape is evolving, however, and more resellers are waking up to a new reality. Technology trends such as cloud applications and resources, along with the Internet of Things, are putting intense pressures on traditional networking infrastructure, and…
In our last post, we talked about the benefits of network function virtualization (NFV) for managed service providers. Taking a step further, we’ll now examine how providers that deploy NFV can further benefit from this rapidly growing industry trend of evolving previously hardware-centric networks by leveraging security technologies into software-based services. A core element of NFV is the virtualized network function (VNF), which is a software-based or virtualized version of a specific function such as a next-generation firewall (NGFW). Employing VNFs goes far beyond just converting from point hardware to virtualized software instances such as an NGFW. VNFs, which are…
Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) and network function virtualization (NFV) are among the most talked about technologies in the networking and communications industries, and in this first of a two-part series, we will explore the benefits they bring to service providers. Part two will explain how service providers can leverage software-defined security (SD-Security). Providers understand that to gain market share and deal with the constant evolution of enterprise and consumer demands for new services, they are going to have to re-architect their networks. Interestingly, providers are quickly realizing that, while initial advantages and drivers towards virtualization were reduction in Capex…
WAN optimization technologies have for years been the go-to solutions for improving enterprise application performance across the WAN. The WAN is changing though, and traditional WAN optimization technologies may soon not be enough on their own. The rise of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) provides enterprises with greater control over WAN operations, promising more efficiency and effective application management across the entire corporate WAN infrastructure. Traditional WAN optimization technologies aren’t about to disappear of course, but the challenges presented by the current — and future — state of the WAN beg for more than basic application optimization. That’s where SD-WAN technologies can…
As with any startup, the courage and sacrifices necessary to make an endeavor successful are difficult to justify, because the possibility of success is equally balanced with a likelihood of disappointment– and therein lies the dilemma. As such, it isn’t often that one can see their vision come to fruition. And yet, four years after starting Versa, it has become one of the most formidable companies in the Software Defined WAN and SD-Security landscape. In 2012, Apurva and I began recognizing the macro-trend developing in which the future of networking would be software-based. Expensive and proprietary hardware was going to…
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