A 10-point plan for addressing WFH cybersecurity challenges 

5 ways to avoid cloud waste

BrandPost: Microsoft and VMware Team Up to Offer the Next Evolution of the Azure VMware Solution

Verizon Virtualized 5G End-to-End Network Will Support Slicing, Edge Computing

Colocation Operators Expand Cloud Interconnects to Accommodate Hybrid Adoption

How Azure Synapse Analytics can help you respond, adapt, and save

Security is top concern for enterprises deploying SD-WAN – report

How Comcast overhauled its ops during the pandemic

Verizon to show off 5G in Indy 500

Top 5 Data Center Stories of the Week: August 21, 2020

2021: The year of the great enterprise disconnect

8 tips for avoiding IT staff burnout during a pandemic

Announcing the newest AWS Heroes – August 2020

Segra’s DRaaS Provides Business Continuity During Hurricane Season and Throughout the Year

How Hybrid Cloud and Colocation Can Enable Renewable IT Operations

How to choose a cloud machine learning platform

How COVID accelerated digital transformation at Aflac

Top 5 Backup and DRaaS Considerations To Strengthen Your Multi-Cloud Strategy

Reskilling revolution: Enterprises accelerate remote learning amid pandemic

Leading Lights 2020 Finalists: Most Innovative Security Strategy

Migrate to the cloud with confidence

Windstream Enterprise Adds Concierge-Level Service to Fortinet SD-WAN Offering

Enabling customers for success on Azure

Turning IT on a dime at Perdue Farms as the coronavirus struck

The Edge Computing Model for Storage Is Looking Better All the Time

IBM Revenue Beats Estimates on Boost From Cloud Demand

Introducing the Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework

Deliver hybrid cloud capabilities with the next generation of Azure Stack HCI

How AI is reshaping healthcare during COVID-19 -- and beyond

How Will COVID-19 Impact Security Talent?

The state of services in the cloud for 2020

7 Security and Compliance Considerations for Cloud-Based Business Applications

3 Reasons to Consider a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

COVID-19: What's next for the communications industry

Google Cloud Platform Benefits: How GCP Differs from Azure and AWS

Cox Business adds Work-at-Home focus

Verizon Gets Set to Deploy 5G Nationwide Using Low-Band Spectrum and DSS

CenturyLink and Cisco take aim at the moving target of secure remote access

Effective Governance of Data Requires Understanding of Risk Relevance

Verizon Business expands Virtual Network Services portfolio with Cisco's ENCS

Top 5 Data Center Stories of the Week: June 19, 2020

Comcast extends free access to Wi-Fi hotspots through end of 2020

Verizon Business to sell Cisco's enterprise compute system

The argument for dedicated collaboration hardware

The post-pandemic move to edge computing requires some thought

AT&T's CTO floats post-pandemic use case for 5G, edge computing

Cox Small Business COVID-19 Study: Residents Eager to Support Local Economy

Verizon uses Google's AI and cloud for customer service

CenturyLink hires chief privacy officer

Case Study: How Service Providers Can Deploy a Cloud-Based Security Service at a Low Cost

Hybrid Cloud Definition Is Being Redefined

The state of cloud computing in 2020

Slack moves video and voice calls to AWS

Cloud Security Providers: What to Look for 'Outside the Box’

Top 5 Data Center Stories of the Week: June 5, 2020

3 steps to successful cloud architecture

CenturyLink touts early edge computing customer wins

COVID-19: Five Recommendations for Cloud-Provider IT Leaders

How to Create an Effective Data Archiving Strategy

Equinix to Buy 13 Bell Canada Data Centers for $750 Million

WANdisco Service Enables Petabyte-Scale Data Migration to Azure

Ready or not, we’re on our way to the Windows Virtual Desktop

Verizon: As Lines Between Wireline and Wireless Blur, Home Broadband is Just Another Device

3 cloud security mistakes you’re likely making without knowing

Mobile security forces difficult questions

Microsoft Security Moves Target Azure Cloud Services

5 tips for running a successful virtual meeting

8 video chat apps compared: Which is best for security?

5 top video conferencing services put to the test

Telecommuting in a post-COVID U.S. will be radically different. And that's a very good thing.

Charter Q1 revenues climb 4.8%, to $11.7B, driven by broadband, mobile, SMB, video and advertising

Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: April 2020

5 keys to supporting telework effectively and securely

Amazon's cloud biz crosses a $10B threshold

Microsoft's 5G, edge computing and private wireless ambitions come into focus

Microsoft cloud has a COVID-19 silver lining

Google extends G Suite identity and security device management to Windows 10 PCs

Microsoft reports cloud growth and 'minimal' COVID-19 impact

AT&T, Hughes and Verizon top SD-WAN leaderboard

Review: 5 top videoconferencing services put to the test

Verizon, AT&T, Cisco, others eye telehealth growth

Zoom Selects Oracle as a Cloud Infrastructure Provider for Its Core Online Meeting Service

Equinix expands interconnection services in seven EMEA markets

Shadow IT goes home: How to reduce the risk

Verizon extends COVID-19 connectivity commitment

Comcast extends COVID-19 response policies to June 30

Telehealth booms amid COVID-19 crisis; virtual care is here to stay

Mobile network operations in a 5G world

Verizon's Mobile 5G Goes Live in Boston, Houston & Sioux Falls

Google Acquires VMware Hybrid Cloud Specialist CloudSimple

Salesforce announces new iOS enterprise apps

Top 5 Data Center Stories of the Week: November 11, 2019

Microsoft Security Splash: What It Means for the Tech Giant

Microsoft shows off hybrid cloud management and cloud analytics tools at Ignite

IBM and Bank of America Collaborating to Build a Fintech Public Cloud

Dual-Mode 5G Cloud Core for Best TCO

CenturyLink Pushes Managed Security Services, Cites 49% Shorter Threat Response Times

Apple is changing the world of enterprise IT

Network Virtualization – The Future for DAA

Verizon Adds Self-Service SD-WAN Option

AT&T to Deploy 5G, Edge Computing on University of Miami Campus

29  top cloud certifications

CenturyLink's McBride on Developing Edge Computing Service Alongside Customers

The Importance of 5G & Virtualization

Network Security: Securing the Cloud

Verizon CEO Says Fixed 5G Will Grow in 2020

Verizon Reports Strong Wireless Growth in Q3

Thinking about the security of IoT and the cloud

Microsoft Sales, Profit Top Estimates on Cloud; Azure Slows

Sprint 5G Coverage Expands to Include 16 Million People in Nine Markets

CenturyLink's Anil Simlot: Evolving the Service Provider Edge

Top 5 Data Center Stories of the Week

Slack rolls out new Salesforce integrations, launches Workflow Builder

Network Transformation for 5G Services

Analysts: There are Now More than 500 Hyperscale Data Centers in the World

US 5G Industry to Investigate Supply Chain Security

VMware’s Joe Beda: Enterprise Open Source Is Growing

IBM Touts Cloud & Red Hat Growth

The Evolution of Mobile Backhaul, Edge Computing

Next-Generation Fixed Networks: The Other 5G

Why Fixed Broadband Is More Important Than Ever

Comcast's Virtual Access Network Rolls Into Multiple Markets, Spans 100K+ Customers

Cloud architecture that avoids risk and complexity

Google's Keeping Knative Development Under Its Thumb 'For the Foreseeable Future'

Top 5 Data Center Stories of the Week: September 27, 2019

Can Oracle Catch Up in the Cloud Race?CenturyLink Streamroot Acquisition to Provide Peer-to-Peer Video Delivery

5G Transport & the Edge: From Scarcity to Standalone

5G Transforms Vertical Industries

Wave of Cloud Data Center Growth Forecasted for Emerging Markets

Windstream Enterprise SD-WAN, Managed Network Security Portfolios Achieve Full PCI DSS Compliance

Aryaka Learns to Love SD-WAN Over the Public Internet

Comcast Business, Working with Akamai, Introduces SMB Cybersecurity Solution SecurityEdge

How to Determine the Cloud Services Solutions You Really Need

Google to Invest $3.3 Billion to Grow European Data Centers

The Complexity of Edge Computing

Edge Computing, the Next Great IT Revolution

Cisco Offered $7 Billion-Plus for DataDog as Company Prepared to IPO

Avaya Goes Global With IBM Cloud

Top 10 file-sharing options: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive and more

Masergy's Watson: SD-WAN Is SDN's Killer App

IBM CEO Sees Amazon and Microsoft as Cloud Allies, Not Rivals

Oracle Cloud Puts Data Center Expansion Pedal to the Metal

Verizon Eyes Intersection of Private Networks, CBRS, 5G & Edge Computing

What multicloud really costs

What is phishing? Learn how this attack works

Cloud Security Boom Creates New Crop of Tech Darlings

T-Mobile Pauses 5G Network Construction Due to Sprint Merger Delays – Report

VMworld 2019: New Tools for Multicloud Management, Security

VMware Wants to Be Your Single Platform for All Clouds

8 technologies that will disrupt business in 2020

VMworld: Look at Acquisitions for Virtualization's Cloud Play

How to stop people from causing bad cloud architectures

USTelecom Broadband Map Pilot: Up to 38% of “Served” Rural Locations Actually Lack Broadband

Top 5 Data Center Stories of the Week: August 16, 2019

Dell Flying to 5G Cloud on AT&T-Led 'Airship'

Edge Computing: AT&T Says the Edge Isn’t Where You Think It Is

More reasons to put secure data in the public cloud

5 Tips on Choosing Better Sites for Data Centers

CenturyLink Drops 'Several Hundred Million' Dollars on Edge

Capital One Touted the Cloud’s Safety as Hacker Was Breaching It

GTT Enhances SD-WAN With Universal CPE to Improve Agility & Performance

Masergy Bundles SD-WAN & Security

Private 5G Mobile Networks for Industrial IoT

Cloud Giants’ 2019 Data Center Investment a Mixed Bag for Providers

New AWS Cloud Services Drive Revenue Gains

Former AWS Worker Accused in Capital One Cloud Security Breach

Coming soon: Eco-friendly data centers | TECH(feed)

VMware Expands to Google Cloud

Google Cloud & VMware Partner to Run VMWare Workloads on Google Cloud

Comcast Looks Skyward for Success

Top 5 Data Center Stories of the Week: July 26, 2019

How Mobile 5G Could Affect In-Home Broadband

Fiber, 5G or Cable? The Battle for the Enterprise Branch Office

Google's Cloud Business Hits $8B Annually

Amazon, Facebook & Google Comprise Most of the Whitebox Switch Market

China 5G Plans Put China Tower in the Spotlight

AT&T Says Nationwide Low-Band 5G Will Arrive in 2020

CenturyLink Adds Fiber to Fuel Datacenter, Cloud Growth

Telcos & Enterprises: 5G Friends or Foes?
Ever since 5G became a thing, the enterprise market has been touted as the big telco opportunity.

BrandPost: Three Ways Microsoft 365 Boosts Productivity 
A key element of successful digital transformation is using new technology and platforms to help employees be more productive. Microsoft 365 doubles down on productivity enhancements, specifically as it relates to the modern, mobile workplace.

When should enterprises adopt 5G? | TECH(talk)
5G deployment is a hot topic, especially as many countries race to build next-generation networks.

Podcast: Why Telcos Are Challenged at the Edge
What do telcos need to succeed at edge computing? For one thing, a lot more time.

Google’s Hangouts Chat gets chatbot boost with Dialogflow
Dialogflow should make it easier for developers to create natural language bots for Google’s team collaboration platform.

Fix your cloud security
Cloud security technology is the best it’s ever been, yet enterprises still don't live up to expectations

CenturyLink Delivers Secure, Fast & Easy Self-Provisioning of Network Connections to Microsoft Azure & Azure Government
In a move that enables more customers to connect their locations and data centers to cloud environments on-demand, CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE: CTL) announced it has expanded Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections to support Microsoft Azure and Azure Government.

T-Mobile/Sprint Merger Opposition Grows
The states suing to stop T-Mobile and Sprint from merging agreed to an Oct. 7 trial date. That, of course, could be swayed by any opposition or approval from the Justice Department regarding the proposed $26.5 billion deal.

The human side of cloud migration
People have to change along with the technologies of cloud computing. Here is why leaders need to pay attention

After IPO launch, Slack looks for even faster enterprise growth
With Slack now officially listed on the NYSE, the collaboration software vendor finds itself at a crossroads: after five years of rapid growth, it has to figure out how to build on its success and expand into even more companies and industries.

5G Could Usher in New Era of Mobile Cloud
In a survey carried out earlier this year by Heavy Reading, 57% of communications service providers (CSPs) said that entering new markets to generate additional revenue streams is one of their top three incentives for deploying 5G.

How Blockchain Will Be Used in Telecoms
At the TechXLR8 event in London, Heavy Reading senior analyst James Crawshaw talks about how blockchain can be used to make, and save, money in the telecoms sector and identifies some of the innovative startups in the sector.

Tech Giants Join Linux Foundation's Connected-Cities Efforts
The recently announced Urban Computing Foundation might be a sleeper that will have a big positive impact on data center operators.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins Answers All the Questions
During Cisco's recent corporate trade event, Cisco Live, the company's CEO, Chuck Robbins, devoted roughly half an hour to a Q&A session with reporters, covering everything from Cisco's position on the world's geopolitical stage to the company's latest networking products.

5G's Future Could Literally Be Full of Hot Air... And Drones
Today's initial 5G networks almost exclusively rely on traditional wireless equipment installed on regular old macro cell towers and, in some cases, small cells.

From 5G to Huawei to SD-WAN: A Tour of Cisco Live
Light Reading attended the recent Cisco Live event, where 28,000 people descended on San Diego's convention center to learn everything they could about Cisco's products and business strategy.

Need a Bigger and Badder Network? Try Using Microsoft’s
Cloud networking isn’t just for cloud services. Increasingly you can use the same network connections and services that Microsoft uses to run things like Bing and Office 365 either for your own sites and services or just for connectivity.

5G Standards Group Struggles to Balance Tech With Politics
The 3GPP -- the world's leading standards body when it comes to 5G technology -- recently began work on Release 17, the next major update to the global standard for 5G.

7 Ways to Make IT Operations More Efficient
Chances are your enterprise's IT operations could use some improvement. Here are tips for getting key services on the fast track to higher performance and cost savings.

Fusion Files Bankruptcy 13 Months After Cloud Computing Mergers
Cloud computing provider Fusion Connect Inc. filed bankruptcy after a botched business plan and a pair of mergers piled on more debt than the company could repay.

Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: May 2019
Catch up on the latest in the data center industry with this list top stories that ran on DCK in May.

AT&T Executive Confirms AT&T Nationwide 5G Plans
AT&T president of operations, Scott Mair, confirmed AT&T nationwide 5G plans today at the Cowen Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in New York City. Mair said by this time next year, AT&T will have nationwide coverage for 5G, albeit with a somewhat liberal view of what nationwide means.

Big 5G Event Keynote: From Cloud to Edge – The End to End NFV Infrastructure

Enterprise alert: Microsoft slates next Windows 10 long-term release for 2021
The three-year gap between the current version – Windows 10 Enterprise LSTC 2019 – and the next will be the longest yet for Windows 10's most constant edition.

AT&T becomes first big mobile carrier to accept Bitcoin payments
AT&T joins a small list of e-commerce businesses who now accept cryptocurrency, a form of payment growing in popularity – especially among younger customers.

Google sees Gmail as key to its collaboration plans
‘We are not going to live in a world where everyone abandons email and moves all of their communication to chat,’ says Google’s Jacob Bank, director of product management at G Suite.

Data Center Provider TierPoint Seeks $500 Million Investor
TierPoint LLC, a provider of data centers and other technology services to clients including the National Hockey League and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is exploring strategic options including raising new equity, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

5G Scores a US Win & an EU Loss in Connected Cars
The global battle over the connected car shifted into high gear during the past few weeks as the European Parliament voted against using 5G technology for connected cars. However, across the Atlantic, US officials voiced new support for 5G for connected cars.

AT&T Taking Broadband Nationwide in 3-5 Years via Fiber & 5G
AT&T's CEO said that the operator expects to be able to offer a "true, high-speed Internet network throughout the United States" in the next three to five years via a combination of fiber and 5G.

5G Was Rushed to Market – It Shows
Roughly five years ago, the global wireless industry touted 5G as something that we wouldn't see until around 2020. And then everyone got 5G fever.

Light Reading Hall of Fame 2019

Here Are Verizon's 5 Most Congested Markets
Cities in California, Alabama and Florida are clearly giving Verizon's engineers some headaches.

Verizon Eyes 80%+ Latency Reduction on Edge Platform
Verizon has recorded latency of just 10 milliseconds during trials of its edge computing platform in New York City as it targets a commercial launch of services by the end of this year.

'Fractured' US 5G Market Thirsts for Mid-Band Spectrum
Heavy US reliance on millimeter wave spectrum could make the 5G coverage map look as spotty as a pimple-faced teen unless authorities can free up some of the mid-band airwaves that are spurring 5G deployments elsewhere.

Do we need to care about cloud performance?
Many think performance problems don’t exist in the cloud, but they do. Deal with them the same way you did before cloud

Leading Lights 2019 Finalists: Most Innovative Mobile/Wireless Product or Service
5G is everywhere these days, but there's more to the wireless industry than just 5G.

Cloud Bursts: Arista Stumbles, Equinix Flies High, OpenStack Goes Ghostbusters
Arista delivered bad news to investors this week, the OpenStack Foundation turned to Ghostbusters for inspiration, while Mirantis went all Clockwork Orange, Plus more recent telco cloud headlines.

Leading Lights 2019 Finalists: Most Innovative 5G Strategy
Amid all the noise around initial 5G launches, players across the industry continue to argue that 5G isn't just a better version of 4G. Instead, as the argument goes, 5G will enable all kinds of new and innovative business models.

Facebook’s Workplace gets updated UL, more emphasis on chat and groups

Dell Has a New Cloud Strategy, but It’s Still an Infrastructure Vendor
In Las Vegas, the giant laid out a new hybrid cloud vision and products to support it. But is it transformative?

Leading Lights 2019 Finalists: Most Innovative AI/Analytics Strategy
Data is rapidly becoming the most valuable commodity of the digital age as organizations try to figure out customer preferences, predict when equipment will malfunction and even discern an individual's propensity for crime (yes, that Minority Report movie starring Tom Cruise doesn't seem quite so far-fetched 17 years on).

How to use Google Drive for collaboration
Sharing Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files from G Drive is an easy and effective way to collaborate with others. Here’s how to do it.

VMware and Microsoft Partner of Azure Hybrid Cloud
Three years after striking a similar deal with AWS, VMware says it’ll soon run on Azure.

AT&T Flies ‘Airship’ to 5G Cloud
AT&T's new, fully cloudified 5G network relies on an open source provisioning tool called "Airship," which hits a milestone Monday with the availability of Version 1, the first production version.

Why workload-migration metrics get it wrong
Fancy algorithms predict time and costs to migrate data and applications to the public cloud. Sadly, they're rarely right

Trillion dollar Azure Microsoft vs. Windows Microsoft: Finding a Better Path
Conventional wisdom dictates that, to be successful, companies need to aggressively focus on competitors and investors. That ethos certainly defined the Windows-era Microsoft. But today’s Azure-focused Microsoft is far more customer-centric…and yet it’s this Microsoft, not the old one, that reached a trillion dollars in valuation this week. In this ever more hostile world, it’s good to remind folks that peaceful paths can also be far more lucrative.

The Ideal Data Center Access Control Device May Be in Your Pocket
You already use your phone to pay for groceries, so why not also use it to access your server room?

Microsoft Joins Tech Race to Clean Up Shipping With Big Data
At noon every day -- when the sun is directly overhead -- the world’s fleet of commercial maritime ships report their position, speed and weather conditions.

Sungard Availability to Prepare Bankruptcy filing, Sources Say
Private equity-owned Sungard Availability Services Capital Inc. is preparing a pre-arranged bankruptcy filing that would reduce its nearly $1.3 billion debt load and hand control to existing lenders in what could be the fastest court restructuring on record.

Amazon Cloud Storage Dilemma Exposed in Facebook’s Latest Leak
After security researcher Chris Vickery discovered millions of records from Facebook Inc. users sitting unsecured on a public database, he tried for weeks to get Amazon.com Inc., owner of the servers where the data were stored, to take it down.

Outlook vs. Gmail: Which works better for business
When it comes to email, calendar and contacts, Microsoft Outlook has long ruled the roost, but Google's G Suite combo of Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts is worth a second look.

Verizon’s First 5G Mobile Service Goes Live in Two U.S. Cities
Verizon Communications Inc., in a tight race with AT&T Inc. and Sprint Corp., has claimed bragging rights as the first U.S. carrier to offer fifth-generation mobile-phone service.

Intel Unveils New Server Chips Aimed at Keeping its Lead
Intel Corp. the largest maker of computer processors, announced a new range of server chips aimed at maintaining its dominance over one of the most profitable segments of the semiconductor industry.

Broadband Affordability Report: Nearly Half of U.S. Population Lacks Access to a Low-Price Offering
Nearly half of the U.S. population (45%) lacks access to a low-price wired broadband offering, according to a new broadband affordability report from BroadbandNow, the organization that maintains a detailed database of broadband offerings throughout the U.S. The research also showed that people in rural areas pay higher prices and that, ironically, people in areas with higher average income pay less for service.

What Microsoft’s ‘full-Chromium’ edge browser brings to the table
Microsoft hasn't yet officially launched a preview of its upcoming Chromium-based Edge browser. But a functional early version has already leaked, making this a good time to see what's coming.

Oracle trims Staff Amid Difficult Transition to Cloud Services
Oracle Corp. will dismiss several hundred workers in May as the world’s second-largest software maker tries to rejigger its faltering cloud-computing strategy.

CIA Gives Tech Rivals Change to Take on Amazon in Cloud Services
The CIA is preparing to significantly increase its reliance on cloud-computing services, with plans to solicit tens of billions of dollars of work divided among multiple tech companies.

Data Center World: The Unintended Consequences of the Data Revolution
Anybody who spends time in data centers, surrounded by hundreds or thousands of servers, understands that data technology has changed the world, with more changes coming daily.

Data Center World: Survey Shows Enterprises are Building New Data Centers
It’s no secret that while some enterprises have either replaced most of their computing infrastructure with public cloud services or are currently in progress of doing so, most companies aren’t going that route. Some haven’t done much in this area at all, while others are increasingly opting for a mix of infrastructure types: running some services in the cloud, some in colocation facilities, and keeping some on-premises.

7 steps to a well-architected cloud
Creating a strong and reliable cloud architecture is essential for long-term IT and enterprise success. Unfortunately, many cloud architectures are constructed haphazardly over several years, failing to meet the demands imposed by rapidly evolving technologies and business requirements.

Data Center Provider Cologix Said to Seek $500 Million Investor
Cologix Inc., the data-center company backed by Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners, is seeking a $500 million equity injection from a new institutional investor, according to people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft delays Windows 7's update-signing deadline to July
The company's plans to move away from SHA-1 to SHA-2 for digital signatures for OS updates has been pushed back to mid-year.

Cox Business Adds Dubber's Call Recording Services
Cox, based in Atlanta, Georgia, is the largest privately held telecommunications carrier in the US and a recognised leader in Unified Communications (UC) and cloud telephony. The addressable market for the service will include Cox Business’ UC Hosted Voice platform, SIP Trunking and Business Phone services.

3 ways the cloud and data centers work well together
Both private data centers and public clouds continue to grow, and getting them to work and play well together will be a challenge

What cloud computing can learn from good BBQ
The process and ingredients that it takes to make your cloud computing project work are directly related to how you get a perfectly smoked piece of meat

AT&T, Verizon Expand Fixed Wireless (Both LTE & 5G) to Small Biz Market
AT&T is doing so today with a new nationwide offering using its LTE network, and plans to expand that into 5G at some point in the future, while Verizon is currently testing a version of its fixed wireless 5G Home service that's intended for business users, called 5G Office.

Google to Spend $13B on US Data Center and Office Construction This Year
The company said it will build four new data center facilities this year, with major expansion at three other locations, giving its platform physical footprint in 24 states.

Amazon May Get a Tax Break for the Poor With a Project in America’s Richest Country
Amazon.com Inc. walked away from billions of dollars of public subsidies when it announced Thursday it was abandoning plans for an office complex in New York. But it can still qualify for federal tax breaks intended to help distressed communities by building a new Virginia data center in America’s wealthiest county.

Microsoft shows some Windows 10 testers into next year with early look at 2020 feature upgrade
The company pointed to a 'longer lead time' for some of the features in the far-off upgrade, which isn't expected to arrive until the spring of 2020.

What happens when an Office 365 subscription expires?
If you're using Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 and the subscription lapses, here's how much time you have to renew — or back up your data and move on.

Google's New Cloud Boss Targets Old Issue: Selling to Big Firms
Google’s cloud boss wants to fix a problem that’s hampered the business for its entire existence. The internet giant has great technology but doesn’t sell it well to large companies.

Does Slack’s move to go public make it an acquisition target?
The popular team chat software firm is aiming for a public listing, which could make this an attractive time for a quick buyout by another big tech vendor.

AT&T Inks '8-Figure' Kubernetes & OpenStack 5G Deal With Mirantis
AT&T is building on a foundation of Kubernetes and OpenStack for its ambitious 5G rollout plans. As part of that deployment, it's signed an "eight-figure," multi-year deal with Mirantis to provide Kubernetes and OpenStack, the vendor said Thursday.

Microsoft Invests in ‘Boring AI’ Startup Valued at $2.75 Billion
Databricks Inc., which says it makes software to help companies satisfy their “boring AI” needs, raised a new round of funding that values the business at $2.75 billion.

Cloud-Computing Giants Keep Growing Despite Slowdown Fears
Cloud-computing companies have a message for skittish investors: demand is still booming.

The Chilly Fingers of 5G Reality Arrive
After more than a year of 5G, this chilly week in the US has brought a cold blast of reality to the early deployments of the next-generation of high-band wireless by AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ)

How Recent AWS Acquisitions Help (and Harm) Enterprise Cloud Users
In a matter of months, AWS acquisitions have included TSO Logic and CloudEndure, raising the question: How can third-party tools acquired by one vendor still be useful to a broad range of enterprises?

Embracing the Digital Data Center
How Environmental Monitoring and Visibility Lead to Operational Insights

Microsoft Azure Revenues Climb 76%
The cloud continues to bring sunshine for Microsoft. The company reported $32.5 billion in quarterly revenue on Wednesday, up 12%, with Azure revenue growth up 76%.

Microsoft Sales Meet Estimates; Cloud Concerns Hit Shares
Microsoft Corp. reported second-quarter sales that met projections, though weakness in the personal-computer market and broader concern about slowing cloud-services growth sent the shares lower in late trading.

Microsoft: Cloud Lifts 2Q To $32.5B, Up 12%
Microsoft today announced the results for the quarter ended December 31, 2018, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year.

Microsoft Expands Azure PostgreSQL Moxy through Citus Data Purchase
Microsoft's purchase of Citus Data is about more than just the software. It's also about talent.

AT&T CEO: mmWave 5G Will be Fixed Broadband Alternative in '3 to 5 Years'
AT&T's CEO said on the operator's Q4 earnings call Wednesday that he expects 5G to be a suitable wireless replacement for fixed broadband in three to five years.

AT&T's Cloud Outlook Evolves Amid 5G Buildout
AT&T's new mobile 5G network "is our first deployment where we can really say that 5G was born in the cloud," explained Alicia Abella, AT&T's VP of integrated planning and program management, in a recent interview with Light Reading.

Gartner: Cloud, enterprise software to drive global IT spending increase
Spending on enterprise software, particularly cloud services and applications, is expected to grow faster than any other category of IT this year, fueling an overall increase in global spending on technology.

AWS Designs New Backup Service to Place Nice with Third-Party Tools
The service offers an API for easy integration with partners, simplified management, and “compliance-ready” backups.

Verizon Quietly Builds a Completely Cloud-Based Wireless Service
Roughly three years ago Verizon management decided to enter the prepaid, BYOD market with a new stealth brand.

Verizon CEO Expects Standard 5G Phones First, '5G Home' CPE to Follow in 2019
Verizon expects that its first 5G devices available supporting the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) 5G NR standard will be a pair of smartphones on the market by mid-2019, but doesn't expect standards-based "5G Home" customer premises equipment to become available until the second half of 2019.

Cisco Extends ACI, Its Data Center SDN, to AWS and Azure
ACI integration with the two biggest IaaS clouds is its latest step in pursuing a platform-agnostic strategy.

Top 5 Data Center Stories of the Week
Here are some of DCK's most popular stories this week...

Verizon, Using AT&T’s 5G Definition, Stakes a Bold Coverage Claim
If the industry goes by AT&T's definition of 5G, Verizon is already offering 5G service on a grand scale.

AT&T Plans to Test 5G with AirGig, Seeks AirGig Manufacturers
AT&T plans to test 5G in combination with the AirGig fixed broadband technology that the carrier developed in house.

Windstream CEO Eyes Gigabit Fixed Wireless, Sees Copper Becoming “Irrelevant”
Windstream is deploying 5G fixed wireless broadband, “probably at a larger scale than a lot of the larger wireless companies,” said Windstream President and CEO Tony Thomas today. Windstream fixed wireless broadband has seen particularly strong performance in states such as Nebraska and Iowa that have a “fairly flat topology” and where signals go “a long way,” Thomas said.

Microsoft spins off security, compliance bits from Microsoft 365's priciest plan for E3 customers
Microsoft is adding two new M365 add-on plans for corporate customers already subscribing to the Enterprise E3 version.

Verizon, AT&T Spar Over 5G Service Names, Marketing
Verizon took out full-page ads in The Washington Post, The New York Times and several other major newspapers on Tuesday to outline its 5G marketing message and attack competitors, though not by name.

Data Center Power and Cooling Trends to Watch in 2019
Vendors expect rising densities and increasingly distributed infrastructure to shape the space this year.

Apple has a chance to transform enterprise communications
Why Apple must make its communications tools platform agnostic

Hyperscale Cloud Platforms Dominated the Data Center Conversation in 2018
The year’s most read articles on Data Center Knowledge illustrate the remaking of the industry by hyperscalers.

Windstream Gigabit to Get a Boost from Commercial Kinetic Expansion
Windstream will expand its Kinetic services to about 100,000 commercial locations across 16 states early this year, offering speeds up to 1 Gbps and boosting Windstream gigabit availability.

Microsoft is yanking patches already. Make sure automatic update is disabled.
The year is yet young, and Microsoft has already issued, then plucked, four bad patches. Do yourself a favor and let the cannon fodder test the patches before you put them on your machine.

Top 4 enterprise tech trends to watch in 2019
Security, AI, cloud computing and blockchain are all expected to see significant advances this year.

5G-Oriented Minimalist Core Network
We are on the path to a 5G era. 5G enables new service experiences. It defines a new network architecture, an architecture that enables new 5G services. To help carriers to evolve their networks to use this new architecture and to enable new services, but while still protecting investments into inventory networks, Huawei has been developing, and has deployed, a Minimalist Core Network solution.

AT&T Closes Sale of Data Center Colocation Operations and Assets to Brookfield Infrastructure
AT&T Inc. announced that it has completed the sale of its data center colocation operations and assets to Brookfield Infrastructure and its institutional partners (“Brookfield”). The company previously announced a strategic alliance with Brookfield that included the transfer of these operations and assets.

How IT can regain ownership of cloud computing
CIOs are often finding themselves on the sidelines as business leaders take over the cloud strategy. Here's how IT can take it back

15 IT resolutions for 2019
Tech teams need to lose the grunt work, go on a dev diet, and exercise more strategic thinking.

5G Will (Almost) Make Smart Cities Possible
The smart city movement may someday be the most transformative step in the history of urbanization. According to the Global Commission on Economy & Climate, smart cities may save the world as much as $22 trillion by 2050. With traffic congestion, deteriorating infrastructure, crime and other challenges impacting cities the world over, smart city innovations cannot come too quickly.

AT&T's Nighthawk 5G: Potential Download Could Cover a Wide Range of Speeds
As reported on December 18, the network will initially be available in parts of 12 cities in the US. At first, AT&T is offering its Netgear Inc. (Nasdaq: NTGR) Nighthawk 5G hotspot, for free with 90 days of free data, but only for select businesses in the 5G coverage areas.

Making sense of IBM-Red Hat in the multi-cloud eraTITLE
IBM’s bid to buy Red Hat will see it integrating rivals’ cloud infrastructures, luring new clients to the cloud, and potentially kicking off an industry-wide series of cloud mergers.

IBM to move Watson Health to a hybrid cloud
IBM is moving its Watson Cognitive Health services to a hybrid cloud model that it said will give customers greater access to a larger pool of payer and health record information for data analytics.

OPINION AT&T leads 5G race with Millimeter Wave mobile browsing
5G wireless milestone has been reached last week by AT&T with their successful Millimeter Wave mobile browsing test. Their 5G services are now ready to roll out. That means we can expect them in the marketplace with their fast 5G services during the next month or two.

12 ways Azure beats AWS
From Visual Studio integration to Ethereum blockchain support, you have at least a dozen reasons to choose Azure over AWS

Don’t make your cloud migration a house of cards
If you have a cruddy applications design or overall architecture and relocate it the cloud, you end up with cruddy IT assets that are now in the cloud

How to get your company to handle the cloud truth
Technology is easy, culture is hard. That’s why culture change is often the most significant barrier to cloud adoption

How to deal with big cloud acquisitions
More big cloud computing deals are coming, so enterprises need to understand how to think about them when picking technology

Microsoft Beats Amazon & Google for Network Reliability – Research
Microsoft Azure provides more predictable network performance than Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, according to research released Thursday by network monitoring company ThousandEyes.DESC

AT&T's Goodell: SD-WAN Explodes as Killer App
SD-WAN is the first killer app for digital transformation at the edge and is exploding as a service, but still requires a great deal of deployment complexity that the industry needs to address, AT&T's Josh Goodell, vice president of edge solutions, said here today.DESC

AT&T Reveals First Commercial 5G Device
AT&T announced that its first available commercial 5G device will be the Netgear Nighthawk mobile hotspot, as the operator prepares to launch its initial next-generation market in the coming weeks.

SD-WAN Puts a Doctor in a Backpack
First-responders need to be able to transmit clinical data and get medical advice to treat patients in remote locations, sometimes places that are only accessible on foot. In those situations, connectivity is literally a matter of life and death.

Telecom CenturyLink adds Cisco's Viptela technology for managed SD-WAN service
While CenturyLink announced last month that its SD-WAN service was available in more than 36 countries across the globe, the managed Viptela SD-WAN version is currently available only in the U.S. The solution was designed for CenturyLink customers that prefer Cisco's networking gear.DESC

Comcast Business Exec Evangelizes SD-WAN, Gigabit
Gigabit connectivity will be “transformational,” said Kevin O’Toole, senior vice president of project management for Comcast Business today, noting that Comcast gigabit is now available across 96% of the company’s footprint. O’Toole was equally enthusiastic about SD-WAN technology, commenting that “We see SD-WAN as key to unlocking what [new technologies] bring to market.”

SD-WAN Adoption Study: 33% of Enterprises Have Completed Deployments at Most Locations
SD-WAN technology is seeing substantial growth, according to a new SD-WAN adoption study commissioned by IT security vendor Barracuda Networks, Inc. One third of enterprise IT professionals surveyed said they had deployed SD-WAN at most of their locations. Nearly half of respondents (49%) are in the process of doing so or will in the next year.

Satellite company partners with Bezos' AWS to bring internet connectivity to the 'whole planet'
Iridium Communications announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services this week, to develop a satellite-based network called CloudConnect for Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

CenturyLink SD-WAN Now Available in More than 30 Countries
CenturyLink SD-WAN service, which makes networking more flexible and reduces costs, is now available in more than 30 countries.

Q&A—Comcast Business' SD-WAN customers want more 'nerd knobs' to better track their networks
Comcast Business' SD-WAN service recently celebrated its first birthday, but there's plenty of room for it to grow, according to two executives.

5G Speeds Can't Match DOCSIS 3.1, Charter CFO Says
Fixed 5G is being billed as an alternative and potentially significant threat to wired broadband services, but this emerging wireless option won't be able to catch up to the capabilities of cable's fixed-line platform, a top exec at Charter Communications said.

Apple: It's the End of the SIM as We Know It
Apple's recent product launches have increasingly appeared like a cynical attempt to extract more cash from devotees without really offering much in return. In many respects, its latest sermon on the mount was no different.

Windstream Adds PCI Compliance to SD-WAN
Windstream today announced PCI compliance for its SD-WAN service that company officials believe is a marketplace first. It's a significant step because many of the distributed locations and branch offices attracted to SD-WAN for its cost effectiveness want the kind of security for use of credit cards that PCI compliance assures.

The Mobile Network Is Becoming a Cloud Service
At Mobile World Congress Americas, the cloud and 5G loomed large and, frequently, were part of the same story.

How Viasat Keeps Its Satellites Flying After Others Crashed
Few industry executives fit the description of veteran as well as Mark Dankberg. He co-founded satellite company Viasat way back in the landline days of 1986, and has been its chairman and CEO ever since.

The Network's Edge Is Being Redefined
As virtualization continues to alter traditional wide area network architectures, the edge of the network is becoming harder to define.

Where Is the Elon Musk of Telecom?
Combine that unforgettable name with some off-the-rails behavior and a Trumpian proclivity for hot-headed, mendacious tweets and you have a hissing cocktail. It finally exploded in this year's frenzy of Twitter messages and bizarre public appearances.

Verizon Offers 44,000 Employees a Buyout Deal
Verizon is offering 44,000 of its management employees a buyout deal as part of a four-year, $10 billion cost-cutting scheme.

When Making SD-WAN Plans, Don't Shirk Security
If you embark on SD-WAN plans and don't factor security requirements into the early stages of the process, you do so at your own peril.

The 3 reasons CIOs have become cloud-first
The move to a cloud-first strategy is being shaped by drivers that we did not originally anticipate—certainly not for cost reasons

Cloud complexity management is the next big thing
Cloud computing actually makes things much more complex, not simpler. That requires a new discipline around managing that complexity.

4 hidden cloud computing costs that will get you fired
Lack of proper monitoring and management results in these common mistakes that will cost you real money

5G will bring cloud computing to everyone
Those who don’t have broadband will discover the whole new world of cloud computing with 5G that can take their businesses to the next level

How to deal with data in a multicloud environment
Follow these three best practices to keep the use of multiple databases across multiple clouds from confounding your deployments.

12 Siri Shortcuts to make you more productive
A short collection of Siri Shortcuts for iOS 12, iPhone, and iPad that may make you more productive.

Why 5G will disappoint everyone
Wireless connections that are 20 times faster? What could be disappointing about that?

5 common but erroneous assumptions about digital transformation
Digital transformation is worth its weight because of its high impact on optimizing business performance, unleashing collective potential and driving the business’s long-term prosperity.

August

7 secrets to a successful multi-cloud strategy
Deploying a multi-cloud strategy can lead to substantial benefits, while avoiding vendor lock-in.

The consumerization of the workplace is changing collaboration
The consumerization of the workplace is here to stay, and it is transforming the way your teams work together.

How Microsoft became tech’s good guy
Even if it’s doing so out of self-interest, the company has been acting as a force for good.

QTS opens space in new Ashburn facility
Customers move in early to Ashburn’s first three-story data center

Bolster your cloud understanding with this AWS certification training.
It’s never too late to be prepared and learn the fundamentals of AWS cloud computing.

Google Cloud growth continues as company increases data center spend
And Domino’s Pizza, SoundCloud and Target all join Google’s service

Going multicloud? Avoid these 3 pitfalls
Everyone is moving to multicloud these days, and for good reason. But you can get into big trouble if you don’t be careful

Cox Business Bulks Up With RapidScale Buy
Cox Business is courting the cloud and looking to amp up growth opportunities with its acquisition of RapidScale.

Windstream Claims US SD-WAN Leadership
Windstream is claiming to be the largest SD-WAN provider in the US, with more than 1,000 customers and 12,000 locations for its software-defined wide area network business, CEO Tony Thomas told analysts.

America Is Losing the 5G Race, Says Deloitte
For anyone who wants the US and China to find a way around their current trade impasse, the last thing American hawks needed was another reason to eye Beijing warily.

Rising Sea Levels Could Destroy Key Internet Infrastructure
Thousands of miles of buried fiber optic cable in densely populated coastal regions of the United States may soon be inundated by rising seas, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Oregon.

3 Surprise Cloud Trends for 2019
Most people predict the obvious. Here are three critical trends that most "cloud experts" won’t see coming.

CenturyLink Partners With Oracle to Offer Cloud Connectivity
CenturyLink will offer dedicated and private access to the Oracle Cloud through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect.

CenturyLink IBM Deal is Cloud-Focused
A new CenturyLink IBM deal calls for customers to connect via CenturyLink Cloud Connection solutions to the IBM Cloud.

Windstream SD-WAN Passes 1,000 Customer Mark
Windstream SD-WAN installations cumulatively serve tens of thousands of sites in banking, healthcare, retail, hospitality and other vertical markets.

July

3 major cloud migration mistakes to avoid
These three mistakes are costly, but they are also easily avoidable if you know what to look for...

Cloud backup is not the same as standard datacenter backup
You need to implement some sort of cloud-based system recovery. You have two routes you can take, with varying costs and risks.

Microsoft to tighten screws on traditional Office, Gartner predicts
The software developer is expected to push companies to switch to Office 365 by tightening access to that software's online services.

Why do we even bother paying these IT guys, anyway?
It's the late 1990s, and this pilot fish is working as a tech-for-hire for small businesses when he's sent to help out at a local tax preparer's office...

It’s not easy to move from a private cloud to a hybrid cloud
IT is often told that starting with a private cloud and then going hybrid is a straightforward, sensible strategy. But it’s not as easy as you’ve likely been told.

Why SD-WAN Is Taking Off Now
For many years, software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) was thought of as a niche market for a bunch of startups. That's no longer the case...

6 most-dreaded IT projects
Patching old systems, migrating email to the cloud, unsupported compliance mandates, and ERP upgrades are some of the jobs IT pros dread most.

Google Cloud tees up new cloud region, NAS service and file transfer application
Google Cloud will launch a new region in Los Angeles next month to better serve the media and entertainment industries located there.

CenturyLink banks on machine learning, artificial intelligence for better security
CenturyLink has boosted its Security Log Monitoring platform by blending in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Why accounting matters to your cloud computing plans
New accounting rules may not be on the cloud deployer’s Top 10 list these days, but they mean more than you think.

FCC Poised to Gut '96 Telecom Act
The FCC may be poised to basically gut many of the provisions of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the landmark legislation that unleashed competition in the telecom space more than two decades ago, now that large incumbents are pushing a compromise plan that delays the action.

The changing role of colocation
Energy costs, reliability and air conditioning are all important criteria for choosing an external data center. But today’s key considerations also include efficient process implementation and, above all, fast and secure access to global cloud and application providers.

The key to proactive multicloud cost management
Resource tagging can be useful, but it’s hardly an effective way to control cloud costs. Here’s how to do better...

June

7 risk mitigation strategies for the cloud
Cloud services - and the risks associated with them - will only become more critical over time. Here’s how to manage those risks without missing out on the benefits of the cloud.

Don’t believe the hype: We’re a long way from 5G
There’s a host of reasons why we won’t see 5G roll out in production anytime soon.

The Uberization of telcos
For the past decade, telecommunications companies around the globe have been grappling with falling average revenues per user equaling stagnant growth rates...

Widespread Comcast Voice Outage Illustrates Risks of Automation, Virtualization
A Comcast voice outage recently illustrates the risks of network automation and virtualization and the move to the cloud.

CenturyLink Helps Connect Customers to Google Cloud Globally
CenturyLink, Inc. announced support for Google Cloud Partner Interconnect, a service from Google Cloud that allows customers to connect to Google Cloud Platform from anywhere.

Windstream CEO: We Are the Leader in SD-WAN
Windstream SD-WAN services have become increasingly strategic to the company in recent months. At an investor conference recently, Windstream CEO Tony Thomas went as far as saying “We are the leader in SD-WAN.”

AT&T: The Business Case for Fixed 5G is Ugly, Verizon Seems to Beg to Differ
Both AT&T and Verizon at one point cited fixed 5G wireless as a path they would both pursue. But AT&T is increasingly getting cold feet and now appears to be backing away, citing, in their view, an unfavorable business case for fixed 5G.

Lumos Data Centers Launches Suite of IaaS Solutions
Lumos Data Centers is pleased to announce the launch of its upgraded Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform.

Microsoft 365 empowers developers to build intelligent apps for where and how the world works
Microsoft’s mission is fundamentally dependent on how well we TOGETHER can harness the power of both Windows and Office in the Microsoft 365 platform.

How to avoid the coming cloud complexity crisis
Piling on to the cloud while also keeping your on-premises systems will mean too many resources under management, too much heterogeneity, and too much complexity

Big Telcos Have Slashed 107K Jobs Since 2015
More than 107,000 jobs have been cut during the past two fiscal years across 20 major telcos tracked by Light Reading, a figure that equals 6% of total jobs at those companies before the period in question.

Telcos Must Go Cloud-Native to Compete
Communications service providers need to adopt cloud-native architectures on their networks to meet customer demands for new services.

May

CenturyLink: Automation Is Glue for Data-Driven Network
In a keynote address, Kevin McBride, principal architect for SDN & NFV Technologies at CenturyLink, details CenturyLink's digital transformation journey and how to prepare for a data-driven network where the "glue" is automation.

How Do You Future-Proof the Last Mile?
In an environment that's changing as fast as the broadband access network, it's difficult for operators to build out upgrades today with any guarantee they'll still meet customer needs tomorrow.

Cloud Is a Strategic Imperative for Telcos
Operators are making the transition into full digital service providers. Their networks are getting faster, and they're connecting and supporting an increasing number of devices, as the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes a reality and a revenue driver.

T-Mobile to Buy Sprint for $26.5B to Create US 5G Powerhouse
T-Mobile and Sprint finally came together Sunday to announce a $26.5 billion merger that company executives repeatedly claimed will create American jobs, increase broadband competition and cement the US as the leader in 5G.

Top 5 Drivers for Multicloud
Most organizations are increasingly using a combination of public clouds, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers and on-premises infrastructure (private clouds) to innovate and support their applications and business models.

FCC Nixes Net Neutrality Rules on June 11
The FCC has announced that the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, a ruling that rolls back net neutrality regulations put in place in 2015, will go into effect on June 11.

5G in the USA: A Post-M&A Update
Sprint and T-Mobile's proposed $26.5 billion merger could change the anticipated 5G map in the US.

What your provider won’t tell you about cloud security
Their self-interest may cause your cloud providers to omit these cloud-security best practices in their advice to you.

What is an API? Application programming interfaces explained
Application programming interfaces hide complexity from developers, extend systems to partners, organize code, and make components reusable.

Rackspace to offer VMware private cloud in customer facilities
Rackspace has extended its VMware private cloud service, offering it in customer data centers and third party colocation facilities.

For IT, Microsoft 365 shows what still matters about Windows
You might think of it as a subscription bundle that gets your users Office and Windows, but for the company, Microsoft 365 is really about simplifying how businesses manage PC software.

Forget Windows; Microsoft is now all about the cloud
The OS is no longer the heart and soul of the company, and Microsoft knows it.

Why CFOs (and CIOs) are finally embracing cloud ERP
By most accounts, spending on cloud computing will grow over the next decade. One estimate holds that cloud-specific budgets will grow six times faster than other tech spending through 2020.

Mastering multi-cloud scenarios
Roughly two-thirds of enterprises plan to have some type of multi-cloud environment by 2019. But getting there is still a challenge.

April 2018

The First 5G Standard Is Complete – So What's Next?
It was right around this time last year, at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2017, when Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM) led a coalition of companies that committed to accelerate the schedule for the global 5G NR standard. As a result, 3GPP agreed to an accelerated work plan for 5G NR Release 15 and, after thousands of meeting hours across the various 3GPP Groups, we successfully completed the first global 5G standard this past December.

How to get real ROI from your move to the cloud
There’s a sunk cost to being in the cloud, and you need a certain percentage of workloads migrated to get the value you actually seek

Serverless in the cloud: AWS vs. Google Cloud vs. Microsoft Azure
With AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Microsoft Azure Functions, a little bit of business logic can go a very long way

Beware these 2 barriers to successful cloud migration
Cloud migration gets harder the farther down you go on the list of applications to migrate, and two issues occur frequently that can lead to failure

Cloud migrations: Don’t settle for just some operational savings
The transformative nature of cloud computing makes it an effective weapon for owning your market

SaaS matters: key caveats for SaaS contracting
Enterprises must ensure their cloud subscription agreements and relationships with SaaS vendors are structured in a way that allow them to leverage the considerable advantages of this 21st-century cloud delivery model.

Multi-cloud is here, and you’re probably already doing it
I wish I could tell you that everyone out there is happily executing a well-crafted multi-cloud strategy, but the truth is that quite often it has happened due to pressure from business units, as well as vendors.

How to make your SLAs meaningful in SaaS cloud subscription agreements
To make certain your SaaS SLAs are meaningful and aligned to your needs, ensure you have considered the following seven aspects of any agreement.

IT’s worst addictions (and how to cure them)
Are you a control freak? A data fiend? An infrastructure junkie? Your tech addictions may be bringing your company down. Here's how to go cold turkey.

Lumos and Spirit to Combine to Form Super-Regional Mid-Atlantic Fiber Operator
European-based investment firm EQT has completed its majority stake investment in Spirit Communications and announced today it will combine the regional fiber operator with Lumos Networks. The combination of Lumos and Spirit will be a super-regional fiber operator spanning from Pennsylvania to Georgia.

Verizon: Percentage of Cyberattacks Involving Ransomware Doubles, Now Exceeds 39%
The percentage of cyberattacks involving ransomware has risen to an alarming level, now exceeding one third for global organizations, according to the newly released Verizon 2018 Data Breach Investigation Report.

March 2018

Former CIO helps IT leaders navigate AWS cloud journeys
CIOs turning to the cloud to fuel digital transformations have an ally advisor in Stephen Orban. The head of enterprise strategy at AWS knows exactly what they’re going through thanks to his cloud-first experience as CIO of Dow Jones.

Digital transformation starts with shifting the contact center to the cloud
Five9's CXSummit highlights how shifting the contact center to the cloud can lead to digital success.

9 IT outsourcing mistakes to avoid
A number of common — and costly — pitfalls persist, when it comes to engaging an IT service provider. Here’s how to ensure your IT outsourcing engagements achieve their intended results.

Hey, Siri: 142 useful voice commands for Siri
Refresh your memory of what Siri can do for you on your iPhone, iPad and HomePod with this list of useful commands.

TierPoint completes fourth data center in Oklahoma
Offering 16,000 square feet of technical space, with expansion potential

GTT is buying Interoute for $2.3 billion
Expanding its European presence with 15 data centers, more than 44,000 miles of fiber

Cloud migration: The pros and cons of a common platform
Heterogeneity in the datacenter can be enormous, so it's tempting to use a cloud migration to standardize on one platform. If only it were that easy

Rethinking cloud ROI: Come for cost savings but stay for agility
An agility-based ROI approach is a much more effective way to look at the value of cloud computing, and thus to gain that value

The evidence is in: The cloud’s advantages are now clear to business
The business community is now seeing directly how the cloud is transformative for business, not something simply for technologists to use

FCC Sets April Funeral for Net Neutrality
Touching off a fresh battle between net neutrality supporters and opponents, the FCC has set April 23 as the end date for the Obama-era Open Internet Order. Now the big question is whether the funeral will take place as scheduled, if at all.

5G: The Density Question
High-band 5G, which Verizon has labeled "true 5G," promises gigabit-plus speeds but at the expense of coverage and signal penetration. Now, we're starting to get some idea of how carriers will have to densify networks to support propagation in 5G millimeter wave networks.

Windstream Bets on SDN for Biz Success
Windstream is primarily known in the US telecom market in a couple of ways: First, as a local service provider in many smaller urban and rural markets and second, as the company that pioneered the notion of selling off physical network assets to be operated separately from services and technology.

AT&T brings SD-WAN service to over 150 countries, territories
AT&T is going global with its SD-WAN service, making its hybrid offering available in the more than 150 countries and territories it operates in today.

CenturyLink steals AT&T’s Ethernet crown following Level 3 acquisition
CenturyLink has overtaken AT&T’s nearly 13-year reign as the top domestic Ethernet provider in the United States, a feat it achieved by completing its acquisition of Level 3 Communications.

February 2018

Comcast says it's starting to ramp up medium, enterprise customer business opportunities
Comcast may be gaining momentum in the business services arena, particularly with small businesses, but the service provider says its real growth opportunity will be with medium and large enterprises.

How likely can terrorists, nuclear attacks, or hackers take down the cloud?
A recent report estimates a huge financial cost to cloud users, which business insurance won’t cover. But is this something you really need to worry about?

One cloud accounting dilemma will soon be fixed
New processes from the Financial Accounting Standards Board propose a reasonable way to deal with cloud computing costs

Capacity alone won't assure good cloud performance
Will your cloud-based workload support 100,000 concurrent users? The only way to find out is through performance testing

Peak 10 + ViaWest becomes Flexential
After Peak 10 acquired ViaWest for $1.7bn in June 2017, the combined company operated under the rather clunky name of Peak 10 + ViaWest. Now, the group has decided on a new title: Flexential.

Flexential to roll out hybrid edge computing platform
Hybrid IT infrastructure provider Flexential is planning to broaden its offering with the introduction of an edge computing platform, HybridEdge.

Microsoft's Azure sees huge revenue growth, again
In its earnings results for the fourth quarter of 2017, Microsoft increased its revenue over the previous year by 11 percent to $28.9bn, beating analyst expectations of $28.4bn.

Google to open five US data centers in 2018, as cloud division brings in $4bn
Google’s parent Alphabet reported its latest quarterly earnings, primarily focusing on its search and advertising business, but also revealing new details about its infrastructure plans.

What is blockchain? The most disruptive tech in decades
The distributed ledger technology, better known as blockchain, has the potential to eliminate huge amounts of record-keeping, save money and disrupt IT in ways not seen since the internet arrived.

What is IFTTT? How to use If This, Then That services
With 11 million users running more than a billion applets a month, IFTTT is on track to become a service that connects pretty much everything — though some users say it has room for improvement.

The future of Windows-as-a-Service
Moving to a cloud- and stream-based service could do amazing things to our security exposure and remove much of the pain of patching.

Key cloud trends for 2018
Some realizations that enterprises are likely to have about how the cloud impacts their business.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service set to outpace in 2018
Overall, IaaS gives businesses greater flexibility to ensure they are not wasting valuable resources. And the benefits of using resources wisely can have a number of positive consequences, including reducing the time it takes businesses to get their product or service to market.

Why (and how) utilities see a future in the cloud
Faced with challenges old and new – the regulatory landscape and new players challenging their monopoly status – utilities see a cloud-driven future. Here’s why.

Hybrid cloud holding you back? Try Microsoft Azure Stack
Supported by the right network and services, enterprises can use a hybrid cloud platform to comply with data regulations, streamline devops and support edge applications. Azure Stack is a case in point.

January 2018

CenturyLink Survey: Bloom Not Yet Off MPLS Rose
A new survey of IT professionals, conducted for CenturyLink, shows businesses are still very interested in using MPLS, even as they add software-defined WANs to the mix.

Data Center M&A Hit $20B in 2017 – Report
New data from Synergy Research Group shows that the total value of significant data center-oriented M&A deals that closed in 2017 reached $20 billion, far surpassing the total for 2015 and 2016 combined.

Cloud migration: How to know if you’re going too fast or too slow
New data shows that fat cloud-focused IT budgets are becoming the norm. Are you moving too fast, too slow, or about right?

How the end of net neutrality will affect enterprise cloud computing
Small companies should check to see if their bandwidth gets throttled under the new FCC rules, but enterprises as a whole are unlikely to be hurt.

4 surprise cloud computing trends for 2018
2018 will be the year of more rapid growth, more data breaches caused by dummies, mega mergers in the cloud computing market, and the rise of “dark horse” cloud providers.

10 software development predictions for 2018
How blockchain, NLP, AI-driven tools, machine learning, serverless computing, and devops innovations will change life for developers in 2018

Peak 10 + ViaWest to expand Oregon data center
The company will add 114,700 square feet (10,655 sq m) to the site in a separate building, set adjacent to the existing facility. The combined footprint of the two buildings will total approximately 220,000 square feet (20,439 sq m).

How Apple users can protect themselves against Spectre and Meltdown
Fire and fury as Apple confirms all Macs, iPhones, iPads and other devices (bar Apple Watch) are vulnerable to the newly revealed Spectre and Meltdown bugs.

Who benefits from the abolishment of net neutrality?
Net neutrality's dismantling by the FCC brings with pros and cons for Internet Service Providers and consumers.

Serverless: The future of cloud computing?
While the cloud lends companies more agility, New York Times CTO Nick Rockwell says event-triggered computing cuts cost and enables more efficient application development. Welcome to the serverless era.

The 12 biggest issues IT faces today
From securing IoT to retraining IT talent to finding new revenue streams, CIOs have more than their share of concerns keeping them up at night.

December 2017

Verizon says virtualization will enable it to reduce costs by $10B
Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam has set a goal to reduce the telco's costs by $10 billion over the next four years, and it is going to leverage one of its biggest investments, network virtualization, to drive that initiative forward.

Lumos completes sale to EQT, sets pace for network, service expansion
Lumos Networks has completed its sale to EQT Infrastructure for $950 million, a deal that ends its fiber network spinout plans with an eye toward expanding its existing fiber business.

DDoS attacks doubled in Q2 2017 due to unsecured IoT devices, says Corero
As more unsecured IoT devices enter and access businesses’ networks, DDoS attacks on organizations continue to rise. A new Corero DDoS Trends and Analysis report revealed that businesses experienced an average of 237 DDoS attack attempts per month during the third quarter of 2017.

CenturyLink’s Storey: Broader on-net fiber footprint saves costs, improves customer experience
Now that it has completed its acquisition of Level 3, CenturyLink has a deeper set of buildings connected with fiber and services, two factors that will enable the service providers to not only control spending, but also give customers more service and access options.

AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink's Q3 business revenues see 'worst result since the recession ended'
AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink business services revenue struggles continued in the third quarter, where these carriers saw softer results in a market that generates $90 billion in annual revenues.

Net Neutrality Is Not a Rational Debate
Discrimination, blocking, throttling. The language itself is that of the civil rights struggle, of intolerance and tyranny. One envisages the oppressor's hand around the citizen's throat. And the street scenes are reminiscent of a demonstration against some unjust war in a far-off land, with placard-waving protestors outraged by the abuses they have witnessed.

You want innovation? You’ll have to go to the cloud
For years, enterprises looked at cloud providers to duplicate what existed on-premises. Now, the public cloud is the default platform for innovation...

Why cloud adoption isn’t slowing datacenter growth
Enterprises can’t yet give up the corporate datacenter, and the cloud providers are using all they can get...

Cloud pricing comparison: AWS vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Google Cloud vs. IBM Cloud
Microsoft Azure generally has the lowest on-demand and discounted instance pricing, while AWS runs in the middle of the pack...

Hybrid cloud is a necessity. Here’s how to start.
Going hybrid is one vendor pitch you should take seriously as you begin moving your infrastructure and apps to the cloud...

AWS and Azure dominate the cloud. Neither should win.
Enterprises must ensure they don’t end up subservient to just one cloud provider by focusing on needs before ecosystem...

AWS takes on colo providers with bare metal instances
Bare metal on the Amazon cloud could make hybrid implementations less compelling...

10 cloud mistakes that can sink your business
The cloud offers a wide range of tangible business benefits, but don't let these common blunders cast a shadow on your company's success.

November 2017

Back up your datacenter to the cloud? Why not?
The traditional method does work, of course, but is there a better way?

It's come down to AWS vs. Microsoft Azure—too bad
The market consolidation will cause many enterprises to miss out on good technologies from smaller providers like Google Cloud Platform. That'd be a shame...

Google can read your corporate data. Are you OK with that?
Some cloud providers reserve the right to scan your data for various violations, but few enterprises know if they or their employees have agreed to such terms of service.

AT&T enhances Amazon Web Services relationship to further cloud bond with enterprise customers
AT&T has expanded its business cloud network solution partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), enhancing its role as an enabler of private connectivity to enterprise cloud services.

CenturyLink gets FCC approval for Level 3 acquisition, paves way to complete deal
CenturyLink has received FCC approval for its acquisition of Level 3, creating a greater competitive threat to AT&T and Verizon in the ever-changing enterprise services arena.

Windstream Joins DDoS Mitigation Effort
Windstream today launched its latest advanced service for the business market, bringing a DDoS Mitigation Service to market in response to growing customer demand.

Google Gears to Scale Cloud
Google's biggest challenge in the cloud space is scaling up Google Cloud fast enough to meet customer demand for its technology, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told industry analysts today in parent company Alphabet's third-quarter earnings call.

QTS announces 140MW data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia
US wholesale data center company QTS Realty Trust has started building a huge data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia

75% of customers are willing to pay a premium for enhanced hosting and cloud services
Cloud users are willing to pay an average 30 percent premium for enhancements such as security, uptime and performance. Still, many providers fail to meet customers’ expectations.

AT&T Cloud Strategy Now Includes Expanded Amazon AWS Relationship, Consulting Services
AT&T announced that it is expanding its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), featuring additional capacity for meeting customers’ cloud, cybersecurity and mobility needs, with many new and upgraded offerings.

Data-center dazzle
Loudoun County is an industry giant when it comes to data centers, and Buddy Rizer has a book to prove it. On a coffee table in his office at Loudoun’s economic development department is a book titled “Goliath” that commemorates a record in data-center construction.

October 2017

Cisco to ax about 310 workers at headquarters, continues software, services shift
As Cisco proceeds with its transition towards a company that is focused on software and services, the company is again streamlining its employee base with plans to cut about 310 workers from its San Jose, California, headquarters.

DOJ Blesses CenturyLink, Level 3 Merger... With Conditions
CenturyLink has moved a step closer to acquiring Level 3 with news that the US Department of Justice has cleared the deal subject to conditions requiring CenturyLink to divest itself of certain metro fiber and dark fiber assets.

How to transfer your datacenter’s data to Azure
Hybrid applications need dedicated connectivity and new ways of getting data from your datacenter to the cloud...

What is multicloud? The next step in cloud computing
You might think “multicloud” and “hybrid cloud” mean the same thing, but they are in fact quite different stages in the evolution of cloud computing...

Level 3 Beefs Up Optical Security
Level 3 Communications today announced an encrypted wave service that adds encryption at the optical layer for more secure connections into the cloud and the data center.

Safer but not immune: Cloud lessons from the Equifax breach
Suddenly, everyone is an expert on enterprise security, and the cloud is claimed to be a silver bullet for security. It’s not that simple...

What is SaaS? The modern way to run software
The era of installing software from a CD or from a datacenter’s server is coming to a close, as internet-delivered software makes applications available anywhere, anytime...

Iron Mountain opens 10.5MW data center in Northern Virginia
American data storage and management specialist Iron Mountain has opened its first facility in Northern Virginia - the largest, fastest growing market for data centers in the US.

Level 3 Cloud Connect Solutions Offer Self-Service Path to AWS
As enterprises find new ways to take advantage of the scale and agility afforded by the cloud, many find they need a network experience that can match the flexibility of the virtual environments to which they are connecting.

CenturyLink Announces Significantly Enhanced Managed Private Cloud Service
CenturyLink, Inc. announced enhancements to its private cloud service enabling businesses to run critical business applications with the agility and simplicity of a public cloud while maintaining the predictability, security and performance of dedicated infrastructure.

Ookla: Northeast is the Slowest U.S. Region for Broadband, West Region is 70% Faster
The average U.S. broadband download speed continued its years-long upward track during the first half of 2017, according to a fixed broadband speed report from Ookla.

AT&T NetBond for Cloud Targets Cloud-to-Cloud Connectivity
AT&T NetBond for Cloud, launched today, gives businesses the ability to establish a direct connection between two cloud services on the fly using a web portal developed by AT&T.

Verizon CEO: Move to 5G Will Make Verizon Network King Again, Leaving Competitors Behind
Under CEO Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s key differentiation strategy has been network quality – a differentiator that has been increasingly difficult to maintain now that competitors have largely completed their LTE network buildouts. That’s set to change soon, however...

September 2017

CenturyLink delays closing of Level 3 acquisition, awaits final state, federal regulatory approvals
CenturyLink has moved the date of closing its pending acquisition of Level 3 to the end of October, giving remaining state and federal regulators more time to complete reviews.

AT&T gives NetBond users multiple cloud-to-cloud connection options
AT&T business customers will soon be able to move workloads between any of their public, private and hybrid cloud platforms, leveraging the telco’s enhanced NetBond for Cloud service.

What to do if your public cloud is hacked
In the unlikely event your cloud provider has a breach, there are several things you should do—and not do—to protect yourself

How long it takes to move a workload to the cloud
Here’s a quick way to figure out how long it will take to move both “lift and shift” and refactored workloads to the public cloud

What is PaaS? Software development in the cloud
The cloud-provided application development platform provides greater flexibility in tools and less overhead so your programmers can focus on code

QTS set to more than double the size of Irving campus
American cloud and colocation provider QTS Realty Trust is set to considerably expand its data center campus in Las Colinas, North Texas.

Maersk Says June Cyberattack Will Cost It up to $300M
A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S said a cyberattack that hit the owner of the world’s biggest container shipping company at the end of June will wipe as much as $300 million off profits in the third quarter.

5 ways you could avoid and prepare for cyberattacks in your organization
Preparing for any potential cyberattack is an increasingly important precautionary steps in every organization. Here's how your team could do it without disrupting existing processes.

Cloud computing and the costs: a love-hate relationship
Rather than advancing their digital strategies, focusing on cost savings is still the top priority for companies using the cloud. Yet, many of them are struggling to garner the desired economic benefits.

August 2017

Top cloud security controls you should be using
Another day, another data breach because of poorly configured cloud-based systems. The latest incident, in which up to 6 million customer details for Verizon’s United States customers was exposed, is yet another reminder both the cloud provider and the organization share the responsibility for cloud security.

Headache for the CIO: Shadow IT is soaring as LoBs seek greater autonomy
Due to the explosive cloud and other third-platform technology adoption, lines of businesses are relying far less on enterprise IT to fund their technology purchases.

Peak 10 acquires ViaWest for $1.7B, scales reach into multiple markets
Peak 10, a portfolio company of GI Partners, is acquiring ViaWest for $1.7 billion in cash from Shaw, creating a large data center provider with access to over 20 domestic and international markets.

CenturyLink, Verizon and Windstream battle over 90-day copper retirement period
CenturyLink, Verizon and Windstream are once again engaged in a battle over the timelines for copper retirement set by the FCC at a time when new Chairman Ajit Pai is looking to reverse rules set in place by his predecessor Tom Wheeler.

AT&T Embracing Software-Defined Access
AT&T's XGS-PON trial, announced last week, is part of its broader software-defined access strategy, an effort that includes a move to white boxes in the access network and interoperability of network and premises-based optical gear that isn't possible today.

Gigabit LTE Comes to China, Going Global
Gigabit LTE is gaining momentum, spreading to more countries around the world. The global race was sparked by the announcement of the Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM) Snapdragon X16 LTE modem in February of last year. It was made real for the first time with the launch of the NETGEAR Nighthawk M1 on Telstra's network. Then, Gigabit LTE arrived in the hands of millions of people through smartphones powered by the Snapdragon 835 mobile platform with X16 LTE, with more operator launches in the US, Europe and Asia.

The Emergence of Private LTE Networks
When a wireless network is responsible for controlling a 400-ton autonomous mining vehicle for keeping an electricity grid operational, or even for packing your groceries, performance and reliability are critical.

AT&T Adds Oracle Cloud to NetBond
AT&T announced that it will add Oracle Network Cloud Service – FastConnect to the AT&T NetBond for Cloud ecosystem. As a result, AT&T customers can now manage and access their Oracle Cloud services using NetBond for Cloud’s highly-secure, dedicated connectivity with high reliability and an enhanced end-user experience.

13 reasons to ditch AWS for another cloud
Amazon beats the other public cloud providers in lots of ways, but not in every way

‘Pick that cloud, lose our business’: What to do
As giant tech companies compete, some are bullying customers to take sides. A multicloud strategy can help you stay out of their politics

The latest cyber attacks show why the cloud is safer
No major cloud provider has fallen victim to all the malware attacks of the last few years. What does that tell you?

12 'hot' technologies not living up to the hype
A dozen technologies that will disappoint you soon, if they aren't disappointing you already

QTS announces 2MW 'HyperBlocks,' installs one at its Irving data center
US wholesale data center company QTS Realty Trust is offering ‘HyperBlocks,’ two megawatt deployments that can be added to any of its larger data center locations across the US in 120 days or less.

TierPoint Now Has a Huge Rival in Secondary Markets
If there was one easy critique to make about Peak 10 before it announced the agreement to acquire ViaWest earlier this month it would be that it didn’t have any data centers west of Kentucky.

Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads
Google is stopping one of the most controversial advertising formats: ads inside Gmail that scan users’ email contents. The decision didn’t come from Google’s ad team, but from its cloud unit, which is angling to sign up more corporate customers.

How to Change Executive Perceptions Around Digital Transformation
We’ve come to a point where almost every organization out there has become a digital entity. To the extent that they realize this will identify just how far along they are in their own digital transformation (DX) journey. Something I’ve learned over the past couple of years is that the digital journey can’t be defined by partners, vendors, or even specific technology solutions.

Cyberattack Fallout Engulfs FedEx, Shuts Terminals and Email
The global cyberattack that has been wending its way across continents since Tuesday started creating real consequences at some businesses even as the virus’s spread seemed to be abating.

The Peculiarities of High-Availability Data Center Design on a Cruise Ship
While watching the sun disappear below the horizon or stargazing at night from the deck are the staples of a cruise experience, vacationers also want to watch movies on-demand or browse the internet while in their cabins.

Azure Stack to Ship in September; Hardware on Sale Starting Today
Azure Stack will finally be ready to ship in September. Microsoft announced that its partners Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo are taking orders.

How to get the most from a managed IT services provider
As the managed services provider market matures, CIOs should resist the urge to go with the lowest-cost provider in favor of partners that understand your business and can help you achieve strategic goals.

April 2017

How AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Windstream and more stacked up in Q4 2016: The top 11 carriers
The fourth-quarter 2016 earnings reporting season has ended, and FierceTelecom is tracking how the top carriers in the wireline telecom industry performed.

CenturyLink, Level 3 have not proven merger will promote facilities-based competition, says Incompas
CenturyLink cleared a large hurdle by getting shareholder approval to proceed with its acquisition of Level 3 Communications, but Incompas is concerned that the marriage will ultimately stifle competition in the fiber-based business services market.

Drones Drive New Revenue Streams for Mobile Ecosystem
Drones, or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), are big business. According to an AUVSI report on the industry's economic impact, in the first three years of UAS integration, more than 70,000 jobs will be created in the US with an economic impact of more than US$13.6 billion.

Verizon Takes IoT Network Nationwide
True to its word, Verizon is launching a nationwide 4G LTE Category M1 (Cat M1) network before the end of Q1. The telco says it will light up the Cat M1 network on March 31, making it the first commercial, LTE-based solution for IoT connectivity available across the US.

IT pros agree: Security is better in the cloud
A survey of 300 IT pros shows that cloud security is preferred over on-prem security for protecting your data and systems.

Verizon to Resell Equinix Data Center Services
Verizon will resell Equinix interconnection and colocation services, bundling them with its own enterprise offerings, the companies announced Thursday. The partnership comes about five months after Equinix agreed to buy a large data center portfolio from Verizon for $3.6 billion.

Seven Big Reasons to Move Backup to the Cloud
Today marks the seventh anniversary of World Backup Day, and much has changed since its inception in 2011. Cloud-based solutions have replaced traditional on-premises solutions to become the gold standard for today’s backup, archiving, governance and disaster recovery (DR). But what exactly makes cloud-based data backup so unique?

More people are using Android to get online than any other operating system, even Windows
The latest report of internet usage by StatCounter shows Google's OS edging Windows for the first time.

Google tries to beat AWS at cloud security
New tools that protect enterprise applications running on Google Cloud Platform may help take the spotlight away from AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Why your cloud strategy should include multiple vendors
Cloud computing has become a staple of most enterprise computing environments, but CIOs are still sweating over whether to use one or more infrastructure-as-a-service provider.

How much can a fiber carry? Facebook and Nokia are pushing it
An experimental technology from Nokia could expand a submarine cable's capacity by 2.5 times.

March 2017

Microsoft Joins Facebook’s Push to Disrupt Telco Infrastructure
Microsoft is one of the latest companies to join the Telecom Infra Project, the group of companies Facebook put together last year to reimagine telecommunications infrastructure technology.

Which cloud will give you the biggest bang for the buck?
After Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Northern Virginia datacenter went casters up, you might think about switching your Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud provider. If that's the case, Cloud Spectator has benchmarked 10 of the biggest public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers based on price and value.

How Much Did The Amazon Web Services Outage Cost Your Business?
Amazon's cloud-computing service, Amazon Web Services, experienced an outage last week on the East Coast, causing widespread problems for thousands of users. The outage, which affected the company's S3 storage for several hours was unprecedented for the world's largest and busiest cloud infrastructure provider.

AWS blames a typo for Tuesday’s outage
Amazon Web Services said today its outage earlier this week that affected major websites and apps was caused by human error.

IT leaders say it's hard to keep the cloud safe
IT managers are finding it difficult to keep their applications and data safe in the cloud, and many are slowing cloud adoption because of it.

N. Virginia Landgrab Continues: Next Amazon Data Center Campus?
The competition for land with entitlements suitable for large campuses in red-hot Northern Virginia data center market continues unabated.

Charitable Computing: Microsoft Donated $465M in Cloud Services in 2016
Microsoft has made significant headway on its goal to provide $1 billion in cloud services for non-profits and researchers over three years, donating $465 million in cloud services to 71,000 organizations so far in its first year of the effort.

Why It’s Time to Make the Leap to the Cloud
No technology trend has more potential to be a game-changer for businesses than the cloud. Start-ups like Airbnb that might not otherwise have been launched due to the prohibitive cost of sophisticated IT systems rely on cloud-based pay-as-you-go services to get their starts and disrupt entire industries.

Verizon Says Its Fixed 5G Will Arrive in 2018, Mobile in 2020
A Verizon executive said Monday that the operator's home-brewed fixed 5G service will get up in running in 2018 but that he doesn't expect true mobile 5G to arrive until 2020.

Google announces ‘no-cost’ cloud migration service
Google is offering free VM migration to the Google Cloud Platform, made possible thanks to a partnership with migration and disaster recovery specialist CloudEndure.

Windstream completes $1.1B EarthLink acquisition, advances business network, services reach
Windstream has wrapped up its $1.1 billion acquisition of EarthLink, creating a larger service provider that will have a broader reach of network assets to better serve an array of small to large business customers.

6 cloud computing savings you may be missing out on
If you are faced with the financial justification of moving some computing to the cloud, be sure to look past the obvious cost-saving measurements.

These super-high-res aerial photos of Apple Park are stunning
Apple's "spaceship" campus is set to open next month, but these nine images give a glimpse at two years of the construction project.

February 2017

Lumos could be a valuable puzzle piece for Zayo, tower companies, says BTIG
Lumos Networks’ fiber network may lack the size of its larger competitors like Zayo and Lightower, but the service provider’s assets could be an attractive tuck-in acquisition for a larger fiber player or a tower provider like Crown Castle.

Windstream Launches SD-WAN With VeloCloud
Windstream (NASDAQ: WIN), a leading provider of advanced network communications, today announced the availability of its software-defined wide area network (SDWAN) solution that will transform how businesses design and manage their networks. Powered by VeloCloud, Windstream’s SD-WAN solution gives customers increased network agility, seamless scalability and optimized performance, all while also reducing costs.

Avaya Files for Bankruptcy Protection
Avaya Inc. (together with certain of its domestic subsidiaries, collectively, the “Company”) today announced that it has commenced a formal proceeding to restructure its balance sheet to better position itself for the future. To facilitate this restructuring, the Company filed voluntary petitions under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York (the “Court”). The Company’s foreign affiliates are not included in the filing and will continue normal operations.

Comcast Kicks A$$, Earns $80B in 2016
Like a rolling snowball gathering mass on a downhill slope, Comcast's success in video and broadband is starting to appear as inevitable and unstoppable as gravity. As part of $80.4 billion in total revenue for 2016, Comcast added 161,000 video subscribers -- 48% of which have the advanced X1 video platform -- and 1.4 million Internet subs on cable revenue of $50 billion.

SD-WAN Trends Underscore MPLS Woes
As the SD-WAN market continues to mature, we can expect to see a couple of interesting trends over the next year: Vendors will beef up their offerings with flexible hosting options that support cloud applications; improved security capabilities will address web, SaaS and encrypted traffic; and increased managed service offerings will encompass security, monitoring and application optimization, to name a few.

AT&T Preps 4.5G Cities, 5G Testbeds
AT&T said Wednesday that it is opening two "5G evolution markets" and building new 5G testbeds, as it pushes to offer 1Gbit/s download speeds on 4G "in some areas" in 2017.

Verizon on Verge of Enterprise Cloud Sale
Less than two months after announcing the sale of its data centers in a $3.6 billion deal with Equinix, Verizon is on the verge of divesting itself of its broader enterprise cloud services business, Light Reading believes.

AWS Growth Slows, But Amazon's Still Killing It in Cloud
Amazon reported slowing growth for its AWS cloud business in its fourth quarter and fiscal 2016 on Thursday. Maybe that's bad news -- but most companies would love the kind of growth it delivered.

Who Leased the Most Data Center Space in 2016?
The short answer is Microsoft. The second-largest cloud service provider signed six of last year’s largest wholesale data center leases with five landlords in five markets, according to the latest market report by the commercial real estate firm North American Data Centers.

How Cloud is Changing the Colocation Data Center Market
Hyperscale cloud providers are sucking more and more customer workloads away from data center providers, while gobbling up more and more data center capacity to host those workloads, changing in a big way the dynamics in the global colocation data center market.

QTS Buys Large Dallas Data Center from Insurer HCSC
QTS Realty Trust has acquired a Dallas data center campus from the insurer Health Care Services Corp. for about $50 million, expanding its capacity in what is expected to be one of the hottest data center market in the US this year.

IPv4 in a World of IoT
If you’ve ever seen the movie “Minority Report,” Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi detective thriller set in a dystopian Washington, D.C., in 2054, you may remember a scene in which Chief of PreCrime-turned fugitive, John Anderton, ducks into a crowded shopping mall to escape the long arm of the law.

The Multi-Cloud Convergence Tipping Point
Cloud adoption has matured to an advanced stage where enterprises are increasingly relying more on cloud infrastructures, and the industry at large is extremely bullish when it comes to cloud futures. Cisco predicts that global cloud IP traffic will almost quadruple between 2015 – 2020, reaching 14.1 zettabytes. By then, global cloud IP traffic will account for more than 92 percent of total data center traffic.

Mother Nature Attacks! Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan Ready?
Between data breaches that steal customer and employee data, or the latest ransomware attack that demands a massive payout, where do natural disasters fit in to your list of worries for losing valuable corporate data?

Cloud services accounted for half of revenue growth at SAP in 2016
SAP's revenue from cloud subscriptions and support grew so quickly in 2016 that the company has raised its forecasts for 2017 and 2020. Full-year cloud revenue grew 31 percent compared to a year earlier, accounting for over half of the company's revenue growth.

Microsoft's OneDrive for Business gets Mac client, shared folder sync
Microsoft gave users and administrators of OneDrive for Business some new features on Tuesday that they’ve requested for a while. The company also launched a new Mac client for its business-focused cloud storage service that can be deployed outside the confines of the Mac App Store.

How to find savings in the cloud, and when to make your move
If you don’t have to re-platform applications, 45% of current instances would run 36% more cost effectively in the cloud.

January 2017

CenturyLink, Level 3 tie-up will enhance on-net fiber reach
CenturyLink’s pending acquisition of Level 3 will give the service provider a greater density of on-net fiber locations, enabling the combined company to control the service experience for its business customers.

Level 3 beefs up APAC security with three new DDoS scrubbing centers
Level 3 is making an appeal to the security concerns of multinational companies (MNCs) located in the Asia-Pacific region by offering a set of new distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation solutions.

Verizon says SD-WAN dawn does not mark the end of MPLS services
Verizon may be an advocate of offering SD-WAN to its business customers, but the service provider is not worried about the new service eroding its well-established MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) revenue base anytime soon.

IaaS, PaaS Drive Cloud Market
The global cloud computing market brought in about $148 billion in revenues for various vendors that are offering public, private and hosted cloud technologies, over a four-quarter time period that ended in September 2016, according to a report from Synergy Research Group Inc.

Comcast Connects to Microsoft Cloud
Comcast Business today announced that it now provides enterprise customers with private links to the Microsoft Cloud, including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Office 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Comcast Business customers can now receive up to 10 Gigabits-per- second (Gbps) of private network service to the Microsoft cloud, supporting the diverse mix of enterprise class cloud services offered by Microsoft.

Here’s What Experts Say about Cloud in 2017
Experts across cloud, security, web hosting and more offer their predictions for what the future holds. Here are the trends in containers, security, compliance and cloud they are keeping an eye on in 2017 and beyond.

Cloud Vendor Revenues Hit $148 Billion in 2016
Though many were eager to say goodbye to 2016, cloud vendors and operators are likely hoping 2017 brings more of the same, at least when it comes to revenue growth.

Secondary Market Specialist Peak 10 Buys Louisville Data Center
The Charlotte, North Carolina-based service provider specializes in colocation and managed services in secondary US markets, and the deal expands its presence in a secondary market with heavy enterprise presence. Louisville is home to headquarters of numerous Fortune 500 companies, including Yum! Brands, KFC, Kindred Healthcare, and Humana.

Managed AWS Cloud ‘Fastest Growing Business Rackspace Has Ever Had’, President Says
Even in 2008, when the recently appointed Rackspace president Jeff Cotten was just starting his career at the company, Amazon Web Services was a leader in the public cloud. It would take years before Rackspace would turn its business model on its head and launch managed cloud services for AWS and Azure.

Here’s What’s Next for CenturyLink’s Data Center Business
The data centers Verizon sold to Equinix for $3.6 billion came into the carrier’s fold in 2011, when it acquired Terremark Worldwide, a company founded and at the time led by Manny Medina, the man who is now at the helm of the company that made the second blockbuster deal, acquiring a $2.3 billion portfolio of data centers from CenturyLink, also a major telco.

Trump’s tariff threat may speed cloud adoption
President-elect Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on goods manufactured in Mexico and offshore may accelerate the movement to cloud computing, analysts said.

December 2016

Amazon will literally truck your data into its cloud
Amazon is aiming to speed that process up with a high-capacity data transfer product: A literal truck. The Snowmobile is a big, white semi-trailer that can hold 100PB of data. It will then get driven to an Amazon endpoint, and the data will be loaded into the company's public cloud storage.

7 reasons cloud migrations fail (free online course)
This course from training provider Logical Operations will prepare your organization for a move to cloud computing. The vendor-neutral class covers common reasons cloud migrations fail — and how to manage those risks — plus offers advice on assembling the cloud project team.

The top 12 overused IT terms
Every part of the corporate world has its share of unusual and even strange jargon. IT is no different, offering us clouds, ecosystems, waterfalls, sprints and scrums, and even cookies and breadcrumbs. Does anyone outside of IT really know what these expressions mean? Here are the top 12 annoying, overused IT terms that we should replace with normal language.

Deploying Your Cloud: Three Real-World Applications and Use-Cases
There are a lot of trends indicating that more organizations are looking at cloud to diversity their offerings and become even more agile. According to Gartner, in 2016 cloud shifted to become the bulk of new IT spending.

Why Equinix is Buying Verizon Data Centers for $3.6B
Wrapping 2016 up with another blockbuster deal for the data center industry, Equinix has agreed to acquire a portion of the data center portfolio Verizon Communications has been attempting to sell since at least last year.

RagingWire to build $160 million Ashburn VA3 data center
NTT Com’s RagingWire Data Centers is to build a new facility in the ‘Data Center Alley’ of Ashburn, Virginia. The company plans to invest $160 million on its 245,000 sq ft (22,761 sq m), 16 MW Ashburn VA3 data center. The first of a potential six buildings on the 76.5 acre site, it is scheduled to be available by the end of 2017.

Cisco Makes a Play for the Next-Gen Central Office
Cisco announced it has extended its Cloud-Scale Networking proposition "beyond the traditional network" (metro, core, data center) to the central office to meet the emerging transformation requirements of service providers that run such access network facilities.

Level 3's Patel: Our merger with CenturyLink will enhance our SMB foothold
Level 3 Communications has become a well-known name in the larger enterprise space, but by becoming a part of CenturyLink next year, the service provider will have opportunities to more effectively battle cable operators in the small to medium-sized business (SMB) space.

Avaya Weighing Bankruptcy Filing, Sale of Call-Center Software Unit
The telecommunications company could file for chapter 11 protection as soon as next month, according to people familiar with the matter. November 2016

Windstream acquires EarthLink for $1.1B, creates 145K fiber route mile network
Windstream made it official that it is acquiring EarthLink for about $1.1 billion, including debt, creating a larger company with a broader set of fiber and network services assets for business customers.

Amazon Bigger in IaaS Cloud Than Microsoft, Google & IBM Combined
Amazon is clobbering the competition in the public IaaS and PaaS markets, but Microsoft and Google are growing faster. And IBM is the leader in managed private cloud, according to Synergy Research Group.

Cloud to be responsible for 92 percent of data center traffic by 2020
The shift to the cloud is accelerating, with the traffic routed through cloud-based data centers expected to quadruple in the next four years, according to the results of the sixth annual Global Cloud Index published by Cisco.

Iron Mountain Entering N. Virginia with Massive Data Center Build
Iron Mountain, the company known for its underground caverns that house everything from classified government documents and Hollywood movie reels to data centers, is expanding into Northern Virginia, the largest and most active data center market in the US.

CenturyLink to Buy Level 3 for $34 Billion in Cash, Stock
CenturyLink Inc. agreed to buy Level 3 Communications Inc. for about $34 billion in cash and stock, creating a more formidable competitor to AT&T Inc. in the market to handle heavy internet traffic for businesses.

CenturyLink Sells Its Colo Business to Fund Level 3 Deal
In a move that was anticipated before, during, and after its $34 billion acquisition deal for Level 3 Communications announced, CenturyLink - America’s third-largest phone service provider - now says it is selling its colocation business, which includes some 57 data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Cloud adoption keeps moving ahead, survey says
Companies continue their migration of both applications and computing infrastructure to the cloud at a steady pace. They have moved 45% of their applications and computing infrastructure to the cloud already, and they expect well over half of their IT environment to be cloud-based by 2018, according to a recent IDG Enterprise survey of 925 IT decision makers.

Comcast Increases Internet Speeds For Majority Of Customers in Northeast
Comcast announced it is significantly increasing the speeds of two of its most popular Internet speed tiers – Blast! and Performance Pro – for both new and existing customers in the Northeast Division, which includes 14 northeastern states from Maine through Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Lumos to Buy Clarity Communications, Mulls Regulated Wireline Divestiture
Lumos Networks, a Virginia based regional carrier, will buy Clarity Communications, a North Carolina based regional fiber network. The Clarity deal was announced the same day that Lumos alerted investors of its intention to explore a regulated wireline divestiture strategy that could potentially sell off its local exchange carrier (LEC) business.

October 2016

Verizon SDN Strategy Includes SBC as a Service, Virtual Probes, SD-WAN
Verizon is looking at offering session border control capability as a service and virtual network probes later this year or early next year.

VMware sells government cloud business to QTS
VMware has sold its government cloud service to data center operator QTS Realty Trust.

Verizon Wants $1B Off Yahoo Bill
Verizon is said to be demanding $1 billion off the $4.8 billion it originally agreed to pay for Yahoo's core assets following recent scandals that have engulfed the Internet company.

Verizon Nearing $3.5B Data Center Sale to Equinix
According to the latest report, from Investor's Business Daily (IBD), Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) is on the verge of striking a deal with data center operator Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) for a total of 14 facilities, mainly comprising assets it picked up with its acquisition of Terremark back in 2011.

Level 3 Launches Adaptive Threat Intelligence
Adaptive Threat Intelligence, the latest security solution from Level 3 Communications, provides customized threat intelligence and alerting for customers. The cloud-based service builds on Level 3's portfolio of flexible, efficient security solutions. It is available in all regions.

Equinix Says It's All About the Network
In a booming and diverse data center market, Equinix still primarily exploits its heritage of rich network connections as its primary differentiator, according to public interviews with two executives.

Comcast Will Go Wireless in 2017
Comcast announced today that it will launch a new wireless service in 2017, taking advantage of an MVNO agreement signed with Verizon in 2012 and the cable company's own footprint of WiFi hotspots around the country.

Power Lines for Data Centers Continue Causing Rifts in N. Virginia
Data center construction projects along a stretch of highway in Loudoun County in Virginia will now face additional public hearings before they can be approved.

Here’s a Map of All Azure and AWS Data Centers
Hosting software company Atomia has released a new version of its cloud hosting software platform that enables partners to resell virtual machines from public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

New CEO Charged With Taking Peak 10 to the Next Level
Chris Downie spent 16 years in C-suite roles at technology infrastructure services companies, but it’s his specific type of experience, rather than its length, that gave Peak 10 ownership confidence that he was the man to take the data center provider to the next level.

Verizon says it's not neglecting its legacy network, despite CWA claims
Verizon is once again fighting claims made by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) that the telco is not performing necessary upkeep on its copper network, this time in Pennsylvania.

Verizon, XO say 96% of the buildings they serve have 2 fiber competitors
Verizon and XO said that their pending marriage will not hinder competition, as the two companies claim that 96 percent of the buildings have at least two fiber providers offering services to businesses.

VMware-AWS deal could push more companies into the cloud
The new service lets companies run VMware on AWS and manage their deployments with vCenter.

September 2016

What Is 'Open Source,' Anyway?
Companies evaluating open source technology need to be careful that they get all the open source benefits. That's sometimes tricky, which is why AT&T has defined "three key characteristics of open source software that we consider paramount," says Greg Stiegler, AT&T assistant vice president of cloud.

AI Paving the Way for 5G, IoT
Creating a network capable of automatically responding to its own issues -- congestion, equipment failure, traffic spikes -- is one of the stated goals of today's virtualization push. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are key elements of this effort today, and they become even more critical going forward.

Evernote gives up on data centers, goes to Google Cloud Platform
Notetaking application Evernote is set to move to Google Cloud Platform by the end of 2016, after using its own servers and infrastructure for the past eight years. With over 200 million users and billions of notes and attachments stored with Evernote, the news marks a major coup for Google, which has tried to catch up to rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Can Space Weather Kill the Cloud?
Last year, when he learned about the potential of a strong electromagnetic pulse from the sky doing real damage to electrical infrastructure, Rich Banta stopped what was then an early-stage data center project his company was doing. The design was complete, and construction was about to commence.

QTS to Provide Managed AWS Cloud Services
QTS Realty Trust is planning to provide managed services for its data center customers who need help using Amazon’s cloud. The data center service provider is planning to launch managed AWS cloud services in the fourth quarter.

Data Center Connectivity: Why Your WAN is More Critical Than Ever
The rapid digitization of business is driving a lot of changes in the way wireless and WAN technologies are utilized. The latest Cisco Cloud Index report estimates that the amount of data center traffic in 2014 was 3.5 ZB, which would will triple to reach 10.4 ZB by 2019, while the amount of global traffic crossing the Internet and IP WAN networks is projected to reach 2.0 ZB by 2019.

Rackspace Going Private in $4.3B Buyout
Rackspace, the company that started as a managed hosting provider and in recent years pivoted to being a “managed cloud” provider, is going private. Investment management company Apollo Global Management has agreed to buy out Rackspace stock at $32 per share – a 38-percent premium over the stock’s closing price on August 3 – in a transaction whose total value is $4.3 billion, according to a statement issued Friday.

Data Center Connectivity: Dare to Bypass New York?
If you want traffic from your data center to reach Europe, you have to get it to one of the submarine cable landing stations along North America’s east coast. There is a couple in Canada, but most of them are in the US, with the highest concentrations in the New York metro and at the southern tip of Florida. Most submarine cable routes to Europe land in the New York metro, while Florida is the primary gateway to Central and South Americas.

Cisco to cut 5,500 workers in refocus on IoT, security and cloud
Cisco Systems plans to lay off about 7 percent of its global workforce in a restructuring that will see it further focus on hot IT areas such as the internet of things, security, collaboration, next-generation data centers, and the cloud.

Gmail outage hits business users for more than 12 hours
Gmail service for users of the Google for Work cloud-based productivity suite was down for over 12 hours on Wednesday, apparently affecting users in a number of countries including the U.S.

Verizon Accelerates 4G LTE Performance, Claims Peak Wireless Speeds of 200+ Mbps
Verizon has turned on their LTE Advanced network in 461 markets across the U.S., leading to peak wireless speeds of 200+ Mbps for mobile broadband, the company announced. LTE Advanced is the next generation of 4G LTE and it is being deployed across the globe.

Google's fiber ambitions may be too expensive as it seeks broadband alternatives
Google Fiber may have ignited a new dialogue about FTTH speeds, but the service provider has found that the build out is more expensive than it initially thought.

August 2016

Seeking wider digital audience, Verizon buys Yahoo for $4.8B
Seeking a wider digital audience, Verizon is buying Yahoo for $4.83 billion in a deal that marks the end of an era for a company that defined much of the early internet but struggled to stay relevant in an online world dominated by Google and Facebook.

IaaS Revenues Forecast to More than Triple to $43.6 Billion by 2020
The public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is booming, according to new market research from IDC. Nearly 2/3 of more than 6,000 IT organizations surveyed are already using or planning to use public cloud IaaS by the end of the year, according to the IDC IaaS revenues forecast.

CenturyLink expects to sell data center business before year's end
After publicly debating the idea of selling off its data center business last year, communications company CenturyLink has said that it hopes to complete a sale by the end of the third quarter or early in the fourth.

Amazon continues to dominate as cloud business jumps 58%
Amazon has had yet another stellar quarter for its market leading cloud business Amazon Web Services, which saw sales increase by 58 percent year-on-year to reach $2.9 billion.

Microsoft's Azure cloud revenue doubles, as phone sales plunge
Azure is going strong, but Microsoft's phone retreat is costing it. Microsoft's cloud push continued to pay off last quarter, with revenue from its Azure services more than doubling from the same period last year.

Cloud Shift to Account for $1 Trillion in Spending by 2020
Surprising no one, Gartner said this week that cloud computing will be one of the “most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.”

RCN, Verizon Top List of Best ISPs for Business
PC Magazine readers rated RCN at the top of the list of the best ISPs for business, followed closely by Verizon Fios. This was the second year PC Magazine ranked the best ISPs for business. Last year Verizon Fios earned top honors.

The Wisdom of Clouds
In the cloud business? Buckle up – things are about to get really interesting.

Delta Data Center Outage Grounds Hundreds of Flights
Delta Airlines hasn’t yet explained what exactly caused its data center outage in Atlanta on August 8, which led the carrier to cancel hundreds of flights scheduled for the day. It said a power outage “impacted Delta computer systems and operations worldwide,” but a spokesman for the utility whose service territory includes the Atlanta site told the Wall Street Journal that there were no power outages in its territory.

Rackspace Expands Multi-Cloud Security to Microsoft Azure
Rackspace Managed Security for Microsoft® Azure® is now available in early access. This means that companies using Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS)™, Rackspace Dedicated Hosting and Rackspace Managed VMware® Cloud can now benefit from the additional security protections provided by Rackspace Managed Security to detect and respond to security threats across leading cloud platforms.

Public Cloud Spending to Reach $195B by 2020: IDC
Global spending on public cloud services will reach $195 billion by 2020, according to the latest forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC). The Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide forecasts $96.5 billion of spending this year, and a 20.4 percent compound annual growth rate from 2015 to 2020.

Verizon Acquires Yahoo for $4.83 Billion
Verizon Communications Inc. agreed to buy Yahoo! Inc.’s web assets for $4.83 billion, ending the company’s two-decade run as an independent business that took it from Stanford University startup at the dawn of the internet age to also-ran behind nimbler online rivals such as Google and Facebook Inc.

July 2016

Comcast expansion to start in Richmond
Comcast Business has announced it will invest more than $9 million over the next year in a major expansion of its fiber-based network across Virginia — with the first concentrated expansion encompassing Richmond’s downtown and near West End.

Windstream Launches Cloud Connect
Windstream, a leading provider of advanced network communications, is making it easier for companies to access the cloud and use it as a foundational element of their IT strategy with its new Cloud Connect solution.

SDN Spending to Grow 47% a Year, Reach $132.9 Billion by 2020
SDN spending is surging higher as carriers and enterprise-scale businesses and governments aim to leverage software defined networking’s prospective benefits.

IT Services Provider Pays $650,000 HIPAA Breach Fine
Catholic Health Care Services of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia (CHCS) has agreed to pay $650,000 to settle “potential violations” of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), after patient data was stolen from a smartphone.

How LinkedIn is Part of Microsoft’s Plan to Build a Cloud for Good
During the keynote on the final day of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith said that one of the reasons he is excited about the LinkedIn acquisition is that it will help people advance their education and connect with their next jobs, a particularly important tool as more and more jobs are replaced with automation.

How to Choose a Colocation Data Center Provider
Whether driven by finances, disaster recovery planning or simply wanting to focus resources on core competencies, more and more companies are making the decision to move a portion or all of their data center operations to a third-party data center colocation provider.

Six Mistakes Hosting, Cloud, Managed, and Colo Providers Make
Regardless of company size, location, and vertical, many CEOs and CIOs find it nearly impossible to scale their IT infrastructure and secure it without help from their IT partners which include hosting providers, cloud service providers, managed service providers, and colocation providers.

FCC sets stage for next generation of wireless services: Super-fast 5G
Federal regulators on Thursday opened the door to the next generation of wireless services, making the U.S. the first nation to allocate a wide swath of airwaves to deliver super-fast 5G access.

June 2016

Level 3 Launches Cloud-Based Security Built on Gateways
Level 3 Communications launches Enterprise Security Gateway (ESG) , a cloud-based network security solution that reduces the cost and complexity of security without sacrificing performance.

Salesforce Inks Strategic Cloud Deal With Amazon
Salesforce.com Inc. will expand its use of Amazon Web Services Inc. 's cloud for a planned international infrastructure expansion, according to a joint statement by the two companies. Amazon already runs many Salesforce services, including Heroku, Marketing Cloud, Social Studio, SalesforceIQ and the recently announced Salesforce IoT cloud. New services moving to AWS include Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud and Analytics Cloud.

New data center coming to Virginia Beach
The Virginia Beach Development Authority has approved the sale of a 3.5-acre site in Corporate Landing to Telefónica International Wholesale Services USA Inc. for a data center. Telefónica paid $735,000 for the land and plans to build a 20,000-square-foot to 23,000-square-foot data center that will house the first transoceanic fiber cable station in the mid-Atlantic.

This site aims to be the Yelp of the SaaS world
Online reviews have already transformed the way people choose everything from restaurants to respiratory therapists, and now SaasGenius wants to do the same for enterprise software in the cloud. The company will launch a beta version of its service, and it invites participants to submit reviews of business software in 12 different categories.

Windstream Expands Metro Fiber Network in Richmond
Windstream (NASDAQ:WIN), a leading provider of advanced network communications, today announced a major expansion of its advanced metro fiber network in the Richmond area. Windstream’s expansion will provide the area’s growing business community with world-class fiber and fixed-wireless infrastructure that connects even more local data centers and commercial buildings with Windstream’s high-speed, highly available nationwide fiber network.

Comcast Business Begins Selling Microsoft Office 365 Through Its Cloud Marketplace
Comcast Business today announced that Microsoft Office 365 is now available through its cloud application marketplace for small- and medium-sized businesses; Comcast Business Cloud Solutions (formerly Upware).

FCC Consumer Complaint Data Center Launched
A new online FCC Consumer Complaint Data Center aims to provide greater, more detailed and more timely public access to consumer complaint records along with tools to customize how records are viewed. The new platform is part and parcel of FCC efforts to enhance transparency, the commission said.

Clouds at the Edge: The New Data Center
A new edge data center and cloud ecosystem opening today in Portland is a clear representation of where the network and cloud are now meeting at the edge and bringing more capability closer to the enterprise than ever before.

Net Neutrality Upheld, Broadband Providers Vow Further Action
With the FCC’s 2015 decision on Net Neutrality upheld by an appeals court today, organizations representing many of the nation’s broadband providers were quick to voice their displeasure. Several suggested that they might pursue further legal action.

Driverless Car Forecast Calls for 3 Million 5G Subscriptions by 2025
Widespread availability of 5G wireless network access will be the key that enables and fuels growth in autonomous vehicle adoption, according to a new driverless car forecast from ABI Research. Autonomous, or driverless, cars will account for 3 million of the 67 million 5G vehicle subscriptions ABI forecasts come 2025.

Apple Creates Energy Company to Sell Renewable Energy it Generates
Apple has created an energy company called Apple Energy LLC so it can sell energy generated by renewable-energy plants it has invested in around the US, including utility-scale solar installations and fuel-cell plants that convert biogas to energy.

Top Cloud Providers Made $11B on IaaS in 2015, but It’s Only the Beginning
The world’s top cloud providers made $11.2 billion in revenue selling raw compute and storage power as virtual services last year, but, according to a recently published market analyst report, it’s only the beginning.

May 2016

Google to Build and Lease Data Centers in Big Cloud Expansion
The big expansion of its cloud footprint Google announced in March, saying it would add 12 new data center locations to support cloud services around the world, will consist of a mix of Google-built and leased facilities, a top company executive said.

Shentel completes acquisition of Ntelos
Shentel, a telecommunications company and Sprint affiliate based in Shenandoah County, announced Monday it has completed its acquisition of Waynesboro-based Ntelos.

RagingWire opens second data center in Ashburn VA
RagingWire Data Centers has opened its second data center in Ashburn Virginia, aimed at wholesale customers.

Public cloud review: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Joyent
The message from the cloud has always been simple: Surrender your cares, IT managers, and we’ll handle everything.

Capital One Builds Tool to Cut Its AWS Usage
Capital One, an Amazon Web Services customer, has released a new open source tool that helps organizations define policies around cloud usage.

Verizon Picketers Encourage Wireless Boycott as Network Facilities Get 'Damaged, Destroyed'
Nearly 40,000 Verizon wireline employees from Massachusetts to Virginia remain on strike with workers now calling for a wireless boycott and Verizon reporting network damage.

AWS Taps Level 3 as Advanced Partner
Level 3 Communications is moving up the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ladder.

Level 3 gains advanced partner status on AWS Partner Network
Level 3 has achieved Advanced Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) status, advancing its standing in the cloud delivery ecosystem for its growing large and medium-sized enterprise customer base.

Lumos Introduces Express Cloud Access Service
WAYNESBORO, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Lumos Networks Corp. ("Lumos Networks" or the "Company") (Nasdaq: LMOS), a leading fiber-based provider of data, voice and IP-based telecommunication services in the mid-Atlantic region, launched Lumos Express Cloud Access, a network service that bypasses the public Internet to provide carrier-class, direct access to multiple cloud service providers.

Lumos Networks Joins Equinix Cloud Exchange
WAYNESBORO, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Lumos Networks Corp. ("Lumos Networks" or the "Company") (Nasdaq: LMOS), a leading fiber-based infrastructure provider in the mid-Atlantic region, announced it has joined the Equinix Cloud Exchange™, an interconnection solution that provides direct, private access to multiple cloud service providers. As a member, Lumos Networks provides Ethernet access to the exchange, where customers can connect with a wide array of cloud service providers.

Verizon launches virtualized cloud backup service, furthers hybrid cloud vision
Verizon (NYSE: VZ) has taken another step forward with its hybrid cloud vision, announcing a new cloud backup service that leverages Actifio's virtualization capabilities.

April 2016

Level 3 offers cloud-based access to Microsoft 365, enhances cloud portfolio
Level 3 Communications is giving enterprise customers that use Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office 365 via Azure ExpressRoute another connectivity option by adding the application to its Cloud Connect Solutions portfolio.

Lumos Networks brings dark fiber to EdgeConneX's data center in Norfolk/Hampton, Va. region
Lumos Networks has brought its dark fiber connectivity into the EdgeConneX Edge Data Center in Norfolk, Va., marking the 35th data center in the region and the first data center Lumos has connected to in its Norfolk/Hampton Roads, Va., expansion market.

Go on a Virtual 360-Degree Google Data Center Tour
Google builds some of the largest, most sophisticated, and energy efficient data centers in the world. Unfortunately for data center professionals who don’t work for the company, Google data centers are closed to them.

Top Five Data Center Migration Challenges
Migrating to a new data center facility presents major challenges that must be addressed to avoid costly mistakes. In particular, moving all or part of your IT operation to a data center colocation provider requires not only a thorough evaluation of the facility, but also of the provider’s stability.

With Strike Impending, Verizon Buildout Commitments Will Be a Key Focus
Verizon buildout commitments will be one of several key focus areas as the company’s union members get set to strike beginning Wednesday morning at 6:00 a.m. Although Verizon has been negotiating with unions representing between 36,000 and 39,000 workers in the eastern U.S. for months, the parties have been unable to reach an agreement on a new labor contract.

Verizon Completes Wireline Sale to Frontier
Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, Nasdaq: VZ) today announced the completion of its sale of local landline assets, operations and businesses in California, Florida and Texas. Frontier Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: FTR) now owns and operates these landline businesses, which include broadband, video, voice and Fios operations in the three states.

Peak 10 Disaster Recovery Solutions Generate 107% Year-Over-Year Growth
Once relegated to the proverbial back burner, disaster recovery (DR) has emerged as one of the leading priorities for IT decision makers at mid-market and enterprise companies. In a recent survey of approximately 400 IT professionals conducted by Peak 10, a national IT infrastructure and cloud services provider, DR was cited as one of their top initiatives for 2016 and beyond.

QTS on schedule to open Chicago data center
With the construction process almost complete, QTS Realty Trust is on schedule with its conversion of the Chicago Sun Times building into a data center, company’s first to be built in the Chicago area.

Colocation to be worth $33bn by 2018
In Q4 2015, the data center colocation market reached a rate of $27.0 billioni in annualized revenue, and this will continue to grow over the next two years, according to the latest release of 451 Research’s quarterly Datacenter Knowledgebase (DCKB) release, which tracks nearly 4,800 datacenters operated by 1,286 companies worldwide.

Level 3 Adds Microsoft Office 365 to its Cloud Connect Solutions Ecosystem
Enterprises seeking to connect to Microsoft Office 365 via Azure ExpressRoute for their productivity, collaboration and storage needs can now do so through Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE: LVLT).

QTS to Launch Huge Chicago Data Center in July
QTS Realty Trust is on the final stretch of the first phase buildout at its first Chicago data center in the former Chicago Sun-Times printing plant. The company bought the 317,000-square foot building in 2014.

Comcast Connects with AWS
Comcast Business today announced that it now provides enterprises with direct links to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with AWS Direct Connect, giving Comcast Business customers private network connectivity to the AWS Cloud services that perform critical processes like production compute and storage, backup, dev/test, collaboration and billing or website hosting.

SDN's Second Act: What It Means for Cable
SDN is evolving out of its classic, capex-saving initial phase into more customer-facing applications and services, and cable operators are figuring out how to best leverage "SDN 2.0."

Iron Mountain establishing 375,000-square-foot data center campus in Northern Virginia
Boston-based Iron Mountain Information Management LLC said Wednesday it plans to open its first data center campus in Virginia. The $350 million project in Prince William County, geared for customers in corporate enterprise, government and technology, is expected to create 25 new jobs.

March 2016

Lumos lays foundation to spin out fiber-centric company in 2017
Lumos Networks is putting together a foundation to potentially create a fiber-centric company by the end of the year that would focus on selling wholesale and retail services to carriers and enterprise customers in its territory.

Level 3 maintains lead over Verizon amid roiling competitive Ethernet segment
Verizon's movement was clearly reflected in its fourth quarter earnings where it reported that core network services (CNS) revenues rose 6 percent year-over-year to $1.94 billion from $1.89 billion. Within the CNS segment Enterprise was the clear star with revenues jumping 6 percent to $1.4 billion.

QTS Managing for Long-Term Growth, Expanding in Seven US Markets
QTS Realty Trust continues to pursue its so-far effective niche strategy targeting network, cloud, and enterprise customers who appreciate the flexibility offered by a one-stop data center shop.

Amazon Will Ship Your Cloud Data to You... on a Truck
It takes a long time and a lot of expensive bandwidth to push 100 terabytes of data across a Wide Area Network. Amazon's answer to moving those kinds of data volumes from customer data centers to its cloud data centers has been to ship its customers high-capacity storage servers. The customer uploads their data to the server, which then gets shipped back to Amazon for upload to the cloud.

Can You Achieve Zero-Downtime Cutover with Data Migrations?
When migrating data for enterprises, not having to upset the 24-7 operation in any way is the most important requirement. All of these systems are only allowed short, annually planned downtimes for maintenance. Data migration involves moving data from an old storage system to a new storage system, then switching all the application servers from the old to the new.

Cloud IaaS One Size Does Not Fit All
"Do more with less." It's an increasingly common phrase heard by CIOs as they watch their budgets remain flat or shrink, and the scope of their IT responsibilities grow. IaaS cloud services is here to the rescue. Well, possibly. Established and new cloud offerings promise to increase productivity, reduce hardware and software costs, and provide scalability.

5 ways to stop malware in the cloud
An analysis of data stored in cloud applications found that 4 out of every 100 files contains malware.

The dirty dozen: 12 cloud security threats
Enterprises are no longer sitting on their hands, wondering if they should risk migrating applications and data to the cloud. They're doing it -- but security remains a serious concern. The first step in minimizing risk in the cloud is to identify the top security threats.

Drones a Growing Threat to Network Security
It's just a matter of time before someone is caught using drones to compromise the security of communications networks. "Caught," because in the past year the technology has become readily available and it's likely people are already doing it.

Technology Won't Save the Telcos
Every time a new network technology looms into view on the horizon, the crew of the good ship telecom breaks out into a rousing shanty, imagining it will be the answer to all the industry's problems. But despite these successive waves of technology transformation, the undercurrents and eddies seem to grow a little more treacherous with each passing year.

Netflix completes move to AWS public cloud
Netflix has completed its move to the public cloud, having shut down its last in-house data center and moved all its back-office services to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

Verizon EVP: 5G Wireless Gigabit Technically Feasible; Could It Compete with Landline?
From a technology standpoint, 5G wireless gigabit technology has the potential to deliver ultra-high-speed broadband service to the home, potentially making it a competitor to landline options, said Verizon Executive Vice President Fran Shammo at an investor conference today.

Verizon To Buy XO Communications' Fiber Business For $1.8B From Billionaire Carl Icahn
Icahn is selling the fiber-optic network business of XO Communications to Verizon for $1.8 billion in a deal he says won't earn a great return but puts the company in good hands.

February 2016

Lumos gains VITA authorized vendor status, deepens Virginia government presence
Lumos Networks continues to advance it status as a business provider to Virginia's state and local government agencies by gaining authorized vendor status from the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (VITA). This means it can now serve bandwidth to the state's government agencies and help its E-Rate efforts.

Average Cloud User Leverages Six Different Clouds: Report
Maturing cloud practices are leading the average cloud user to leverage six different clouds, between running applications and experimenting on public and private clouds, RightScale said in its latest report.

7 elements of cloud SLAs you should focus on
Service-level agreements for cloud services are, at their core, more challenging than other SLAs because many cloud providers are unwilling to modify or adjust them. They want a relationship of “one to many,” with the same SLAs applicable to all of their customers.

Google and Level 3 Interconnect Network Backbones
Network peering is one of the wonkier areas of the internet and data center infrastructure world, but performance of internet services, be they online video or cloud infrastructure, depends greatly on how efficiently companies behind those services and service providers they rely on exchange traffic with others.

Level 3 says dark fiber is part of service set, not the only solution for business, wholesale customers
Level 3 Communications sees dark fiber as a growth engine in the transport and fiber section of its core network services (CNS) business, but only as part of a broader solution set -- not the best or only solution as some wireless operators and content providers suggest.

The Top 3 Cloud Deployment Pitfalls to Avoid (Webinar)
During cloud deployments, enterprises encounter common pitfalls that can prevent them from fully leveraging the benefits of the cloud. This webinar will delve into some of the best practices employed in successful cloud deployments and will also present some actionable tips on how to ensure that your enterprise is best prepared to maximize these benefits.

Telco Central Offices Get Second Life as Cloud Data Centers
Two years ago, AT&T said 75 percent of its entire global network would be virtualized by 2020. What it didn’t say back then was what implications this wholesale network virtualization project would have for the facilities where that network lives – the countless central offices, or exchanges, in cities and rural areas built over the years to deliver the telco’s services.

Cloud Underwater? Microsoft Tests Submarine Data Center
Continuing its long tradition of data center experimentation in the name of efficiency, Microsoft announced it has been testing an unusual new data center concept: placing servers underwater out in the ocean.

Lumos Networks Launches Second Gigabit Network
The Gigabit launch allows broadband internet speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second within the fiber to the premise network. This marks the second gigabit broadband service market for Lumos Networks, following the successful launch in May of 2015 in the Alleghany Highlands (Va).

Cloud adoption soars, but integration challenges remain
The cloud has quickly become a mainstay in IT departments, with recent research from cloud solutions provider RightScale showing 93 percent of businesses using cloud technology in some form or another. But it's not all smooth sailing after the initial migration and integration - many businesses find that the second wave of cloud adoption is just as rough as the first.

Peak 10 opens 27th data center
The new data center is next to Peak 10’s two existing Raleigh data centers and adds 17,000 sq ft (1580 sq m) of raised floor data enter space to the existing 28,000 sq ft (2600 sq m) of raised floor space split in those two facilities. The new building also adds 66,000 sq ft (6100 sq m) of office and customer support space including a new technical assistance center featuring a dedicated disaster recovery workspace. The new facility offers the largest raised floor space in Peak 10’s Raleigh buildings.

7 Biggest Data Center Migration Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
Data center migrations aren’t something most people do every day. They’re typically a once-in-a-career event — twice if you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it). No matter which camp you’re in, moving networks, servers, data and applications from one location to another tends to elicit a string of four-letter words.

Comcast WiFi for Business Goes Live
Comcast's new WiFi Pro service is now live. The managed WiFi service officially launched today with features to support both employee and guest networks at business locations.

How QTS Plans to Keep Momentum After Two Years of High Growth
QTS Realty Trust has been one of the fastest-growing publicly traded data center REITs since its 2013 IPO, and its shares returned more than 80 percent price appreciation to shareholders for the last two years.

Data Center Documentary Explores Places Where Cloud Lives
As bigger and bigger parts of our lives get converted to digital formats, people get increasingly curious about the infrastructure that makes the internet, or the cloud (whatever you want to call it), possible. A lot of the things that may seem obvious to those working in the data center industry are mysteries to people outside of it.

Level 3 and Google Reach Settlement-Free Interconnection Agreement
Level 3 Communications (NYSE: LVLT) and Google announced they have reached a new multi-year, settlement-free interconnection agreement between their global backbone networks that will help both companies meet their customers’ needs into the next decade and beyond.

January 2016

Finding the Right Home for Cloud Apps
Finding the right place for your apps to live is like shopping for real estate, with choices between owning, renting and hybrid models.

Why Carriers Are Adopting SD-WAN
Tectonic shifts in application and traffic patterns are leaving no portion of the network unchanged. What started as network virtualization in the data center has spilled into other portions of the network with the Wide Area Network (WAN) becoming a poster child for this transformation.

Carbonite buys Seagate subsidiary EVault for $14m
Carbonite, a provider of cloud and hybrid business continuity solutions for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) has purchased EVault from Seagate for $14m. EVault provides cloud-based backup and recovery hardware and software for the SMB market.

Verizon Seeks $2.5B From Data Center Sale – Report
Verizon Communications is hoping to raise more than $2.5 billion from a sale of its data center assets, according to a report from Reuters.

Verizon Wireless Connected VoIP is Here
The value of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is well known; having the ability to make long distance or international calls at huge discounts, as well as having access to a variety of premium phone services often included in the base price is hard to pass up without some consideration.

Public cloud vs. on-premises: Which is more secure?
As the cloud market continues to mature in 2016, organizations are more willing than ever to use cloud-based services. But this question about cloud security remains.

QTS and Carpathia Become Single Company
QTS Realty Trust announced on Tuesday that it has completed the integration of Carpathia Hosting operations and that all of its data center, managed hosting, and cloud services are offered under the QTS name.

Who May Buy Verizon’s Data centers?
While officially Verizon remains quiet about the alleged auction for its massive data center portfolio, the report that it is looking to offload some $2.5 billion worth of data centers isn’t far-fetched.

Seven Biggest Cloud Outages of 2015
Which cloud outages topped headlines last year? Here’s a closer look at seven of the biggest cloud outages from 2015.

Windstream wraps $575M data center sale to TierPoint
Windstream has completed the $575 million sale of its data center business to TierPoint, enabling the telco to focus on enhancing its last mile and long-haul fiber network to deliver a host of new services to its existing and new consumer and enterprise customers.

Data center providers see SDN, virtualization enabling new security service revenues
Data center providers are finding that as they implement virtualization and SDN their existing security network infrastructure could be a new source of revenue, says IHS Infonetics.

December 2015

Level 3 says ISPs should not be able to hide poor performance
Level 3 may serve as an intermediary between residential consumer service providers and content providers like Netflix, but it has told the FCC that traditional ISPs should provide information to consumers on broadband network performance.

IBM Strikes More Direct Cloud Connectivity Deals with Data Center Providers
Cloud infrastructure providers appear to have found a way to convince enterprises to put some of their more sensitive data and applications into the cloud, and that way is linking customers’ servers to their own with direct, private connections, often in the same data center, without using the public internet.

Amazon Plans Virginia Data Center to Serve Federal Clients
Amazon subsidiary Vadata plans to build at the Warrenton Training Center in Virginia, a classified US federal government communications complex that serves the likes of CIA, NSA, and the Department of Defense.

Ashburn Virginia leads US data center growth
The number one area for data center building in the US is now Northern Virginia, which has overtaken New York to take 20 percent of the UK data center market.

BroadSoft Integrates With Microsoft Office 365
BroadSoft announced that BroadSoft BroadWorks®, BroadCloud® and UC-One® unified communication and collaboration solutions are now compatible with Microsoft Office 365.

Verizon Provides Direct Access to IBM Cloud
Verizon is now offering its customers a secure and direct connection to the IBM Cloud.

QTS' Disaster Recovery and Infrastructure as a Service Solutions Achieve Cisco Powered Certification
QTS Realty Trust, one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data center facilities and cloud services, announced that it has received Cisco Cloud and Managed Services Certification for both its Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings.

IT shops will pass the cloud tipping point in 2016
A survey of IT buyers indicates that more than half of a company's IT environment will be hosted in the cloud by the end of 2016.

Verizon Becomes First Service Provider to Offer New Cisco Software-Defined Networking Technology
Verizon unveiled its new software-defined WAN service using Cisco’s Intelligent WAN (IWAN) technology that harnesses the power of the Internet with the performance and reliability of a private IP network.

Digital Realty closes on land in Loudoun
Digital Realty Trust announced that it has closed on a $43 million acquisition of 125 acres of undeveloped land in Loudoun County.

Verizon CEO: US Commercial 5G Starts in 2017
Verizon's CEO says that the operator is ready to start testing 5G wireless technology early in 2016 with initial commercial deployments starting in 2017.

November 2015

Verizon Cloud Survey Says... Time To Sell Terremark?
Verizon Enterprise Solutions released its 2016 State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud report Monday. The top-line finding: Enterprises are quickly shifting critical production workloads into public and hybrid clouds.

Verizon explores sale of enterprise assets worth around $10 bn
US wireless carrier Verizon Communications Inc is exploring a sale of its enterprise assets worth around $10 billion, as part of its plan to focus on its core business, Reuters today reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft to make Red Hat Linux available on Azure
Microsoft is adding Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the list of Linux distributions supported natively on its Azure cloud platform. The pair are collaborating on middleware and developer technologies, as well.

Gap Connects Stores Over the Internet With Software-Defined Networking
The Gap Inc. is in the process of changing how it connects stores to one another in a corporate network. The company can now route traffic over the public Internet by using encrypted connections.

CenturyLink Wants to Sell its Data Centers
CenturyLink, the telecommunications company with a substantial data center services business, no longer wants to own its massive data center fleet.

CenturyLink Sees 100% Virtual IP Net by 2018
CenturyLink is revving up for the race to total virtualization, saying Monday that it will have 40% of its global IP core network locations virtualized this year with full global virtualization coverage in its IP core network and data centers planned by 2018.

Analyst: US Telcos Should Consider Selling Hosting Units
Investment banking firm Cowen and Company initiated coverage of CenturyLink with a call for the telco to sell its cloud-based web hosting business.

Verizon Expands Reach of Secure Cloud Interconnect
Verizon Enterprise Solution’s Secure Cloud Interconnect service is expanding and deepening its footprint globally with expansion into Latin America and additional sites in Europe and the U.S. These include Sao Paulo; Frankfurt and Russelsheim, Germany; and New York, and Los Angeles in the U.S.

Google to give away software to Microsoft Office defectors
Google takes aim at Microsoft's Office franchise with free software for defecting customers

Windstream to Sell Data Center Business for $575M
In what may be a sign of things to come, Little Rock, Arkansas-based telecommunications company WindStream Communications has agreed to sell its data center services business to TierPoint, a rollup that’s been focused on buying companies that provide data center services in under-served regional markets.

U.S. CIO tells IT leaders to trust the cloud
Tony Scott, U.S. federal government CIO, says big cloud providers are just as secure as today's largest financial institutions and advises his fellow IT leaders to embrace cloud sooner than later.

DOCSIS 3.1 Poised to Create Cable Gigabit Boom
We could see a cable gigabit boom in the market beginning next year, now that companies like Comcast are getting set to roll out DOCSIS 3.1.

Comcast may want to be your next wireless carrier
Enforcing a 2011 agreement between Comcast and Verizon, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts announced plans to run a test that would offer wireless service for mobile devices by reselling Verizon’s wireless service in an unnamed market. Comcast is likely testing an option where the company would package wireless carrier service in conjunction with cable or Internet service.

7 warnings to heed before a cloud migration
If a cloud migration is in your company's future, some IT cloud veterans are warning you to avoid the technology pitfalls that could be lurking in the dark.

SummitIG continues to ramp dark fiber reach into data centers, businesses
SummitIG, an emerging dark fiber provider, is making progress with its network build, adding new metro and long-haul underground fiber routes and increasing its on-net penetration into new businesses and data center locations.

Equinix Doubles Down in One of Internet’s Most Important Locations
Equinix founders choosing in 1998 to build the company’s first data center in Ashburn, Virginia, may have been the best site-selection decision a data center company has ever made.

Debunking Unfounded Cloud Security Fears
Working with modern cloud and data center technologies isn’t always easy. We’re seeing a boom in cloud adoption and data center utilization.

Verizon to Start Deploying LTE-U in 2016
Verizon is planning to start deploying 4G technology in unlicensed radio spectrum next year as it continues to add capacity to its LTE network in the US.

Level 3 Offers Secure Cellular Internet Access
Level 3 Communications has launched a new service to allow companies that use cellular Internet access as a backup or even primary service to do so securely.

Satellite Above! Dish Proposes 5G in Space
Never let it be said that Dish has modest ambitions. The TV provider's latest proposal involves using tiny satellites to help deliver future mobile broadband services from space.

What You Should Know About Using Third-Party Cloud Management Tools
While cloud providers usually offer powerful tool sets for managing your cloud environment, third-party tools can truly expand that environment’s capabilities. Oftentimes, highly dispersed cloud infrastructure requires a level of granular visibility native hypervisor and cloud monitoring tools cannot provide.

Growth Continues in Secondary North American Data Center Markets
While top data center markets like New York, Silicon Valley, and Dallas get most of the attention, a lot of growth is taking place in markets considered secondary.

October 2015

Level 3, Google strike interconnection pact to improve CDN access
Level 3 Communications has established a new interconnection agreement with Google Cloud Platform, allowing customers to get access to content delivery network services through CDN Interconnect, part of the Google Cloud Interconnect product line.

Windstream remains mum on data center sale rumors, says cloud services are critical
A Windstream executive would not confirm the company is going to sell off its data center business, Hosted Solutions, debunking rumors that emerged in August that a deal was forthcoming.

Level 3 to cut jobs as part of tw telecom integration process
Level 3 is going to lay off some employees as it continues to move forward with integrating tw telecom into its fold.

Comcast Business threatens Verizon, AT&T with enterprise unit, but VPN, mobility, and scale remain key issues
Comcast Business (NASDAQ: CMCSA) has emerged as a potentially new threat to AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon (NYSE: VZ) and Level 3 Communications on the large business front with the introduction of a new unit that will offer business services to large Fortune 1000 business customers in the U.S.

XO targets Amazon Web Services customers with managed security bundle
XO Communications has developed a new managed security bundle in partnership with BAE Systems and Fortinet, targeting Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) Direct Connect service customers.

Verizon serves up Microsoft ExpressRoute, Azure Government Cloud for business customers
Verizon (NYSE: VZ) has added Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) ExpressRoute for Office 365, Skype for Business and Microsoft Azure Government Cloud to its Secure Cloud Interconnect service, adding another service choice for business customers considering a cloud migration.

Verizon faces call to expand FiOS from 14 East Coast mayors
Verizon (NYSE: VZ) is facing a call from 14 city mayors on the East Coast to expand its FiOS FTTH network into more areas that have limited access to high speed services.

IPv4 to IPv6 Transition: Why There’s Still More Work to Come
September 24 will be remembered as the day that the North American registry ran out of IPv4 addresses. It’s not a big deal yet because Internet service providers, large enterprises and other parties still have plentiful stockpiles of IPv4 addresses. More importantly, the Internet community has been anticipating this day for years and a considerable amount of work has gone into preparing for this eventuality.

XO Communications Has The Largest Installed Base of SIP Connectivity Trunks In The United States
As part of its comprehensive portfolio of voice-related services, XO Communications (XO) leads the top tier of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking providers with the largest installed base of SIP connectivity trunks, according to the 2015 IHS Infonetics SIP Trunking North American Service Provider Scorecard.

5 tips on cloud migration from those who know
For enterprises considering a move to the cloud, or even in the middle of a move right now, the transition can be daunting -- even a bit overwhelming.

Cloud computing, data center consolidations save feds $3.6B
A five-year-old effort by the U.S. government to cut IT costs through data center consolidations, cloud computing and other technology changes may be paying off, according to a report Tuesday by a government watchdog agency.

Rackspace Brings Signature Fanatical Support to AWS
Rackspace announced the launch of its anticipated AWS managed services offerings Tuesday at AWS re:Invent. A post on the official Rackspace blog accompanying the announcement asked the obvious question: Why is Rackspace supporting Amazon Web Services?

Private Links to Office 365 Now Live at Equinix Data Centers
Equinix and Microsoft have partnered to offer performance- and privacy-sensitive enterprises the option to consume Microsoft’s cloud productivity software suite Office 365 over private network links out of Equinix data centers around the world.

Verizon's Secure Cloud Interconnect Service Now Available with Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365, Skype for Business and Microsoft Azure Government
Verizon Enterprise Solution's Secure Cloud Interconnect service will now offer Microsoft ExpressRoute for Office 365, Skype for Business and Microsoft Azure Government Cloud as announced at Microsoft Corp.'s online conference AzureCon on Tuesday (Sept. 29).

September 2015

Cell Carriers Battle for Wi-Fi Airwaves
A battle is brewing among tech giants over the future of Wi-Fi, the ubiquitous and unregulated wireless connections at the core of the mobile Internet.

Prepare Early. Act Fast. Verizon Rapid Response Retainer.
Cyberattacks happen every day, to every type of enterprise. And they can prove disastrous if not handled swiftly.

Appeals Court Affirms FTC Authority Over Corporate Data-Security Practices
Companies that fail to provide customers with reasonable protections against theft of online data can be sued by federal consumer-protection enforcers.

Study Finds Office 365 Tops Business Cloud Apps
Microsoft Office 365 is the most frequently deployed business app across the globe, according to a report that studied 4,000 of-the-shelf cloud-based products.

States Eye Taxes on Streaming Video and Cloud Computing
With sales of DVDs, video games and normal finished programs slumping for years, state and local governments are eyeing technologies such as streaming video subscriptions and cloud computing to make up for hundreds of millions of dollars of lost tax revenue.

Lumos eyes colocation providers as potential acquisition targets
Flush with new funding from Pamplona Capital, Lumos Networks said it is now in a position to pursue potential acquisitions, particularly in the data center colocation and regional fiber provider space.

Obama Administration Delays International Transfer of Key Element of Internet Governance
Transfer of key element of Internet governance is delayed.

Netflix to Pull Plug on Final Data Center
Netflix says it will pull the plug on its final data center.

Attacks on Fiber Networks in California Baffle FBI
Authorities have yet to nail down a motive or culprit for more than a dozen breaches in the Bay Area.

Attackers are hijacking critical networking gear from Cisco, company warns
Cisco Systems officials are warning customers of a series of attacks that completely hijack critical networking gear by swapping out the valid ROMMON firmware image with one that's been maliciously altered.

Lumos Networks gets $150M investment from Pamplona Capital, sets stage for growth
Lumos Networks has secured $150 million in funding Pamplona Capital Management, enabling it to pay down debt and pursue new potential organic and inorganic growth opportunities.

XO Study: 86% of Enterprises Move to Hybrid Clouds
Despite long-held concerns about security and performance, enterprises are pursuing aggressively a multicloud strategy.

Verizon Aggressively Working on VoLTE Transition
Verizon Wireless has 4 million customers using voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) today, and it's working aggressively to move it from an opt-in feature to an out-of-box offering and, eventually, to the only voice option on LTE phones.

August 2015

Cloud services to drive 50 percent of server shipments by 2017
Cloud service adoption will provide benefits to server vendors.

Level 3 says it has advantage over AT&T, Verizon in the enterprise market
Level 3 Communications maintains that as AT&T and Verizon focus more of their attention on wireless and entertainment, the company will benefit as it pursues new growth opportunities in the enterprise services space.

Level 3: Integration Has Us Poised to Grow
Level 3 Communications is successfully integrating its tw telecom acquisition and increasing its enterprise revenues faster than its rivals.

Colocation Market Forecast to Reach Nearly $52 Billion by 2020
The market for global colocation services will grow at a 12.8 percent compound annual growth rate to reach $51.8 billion by 2020.

Hosted VoIP/ UC Users to Reach 42 Million by 2021
Growing adoption and use of cloud computing and communications systems is on the rise, boosting use of IP telephony and unified communications and collaboration services.

Windstream VA Contract Win Could be Worth $450 Million
Windstream has won a major contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs – a five-year agreement potentially worth more than $450 million.

Copper Retirement Gets FCC Go-Ahead – With Strings Attached
As expected, the FCC formalized requirements for telecom service providers that want to retire copper network infrastructure.

Cloud-Computing Kingpins Slow to Adapt to Own Movement
For nearly a decade, Amazon Web Services, the giant retailer’s cloud computing division, has told prospective customers: Ditch your data center and trust us to run your applications, store your data and host your internal software development.

No More Uptime Tier Design Certifications for Service Providers
The recent massive United Airlines and New York Stock Exchange outages served as a reminder of just how much the world today depends on reliability of IT infrastructure.

Top Business Issues When Moving to the Cloud
When planning a move to the cloud, CIOs often worry about if and how legacy applications will migrate successfully, what level of security and archiving they need, whether they have the right internal skills, and which cloud providers and toolsets are best.

Facebook ready to test giant drone for Internet service
Facebook says it will begin test flights for a solar-powered drone with a wingspan as big as a Boeing 737, in the next stage of its campaign to deliver Internet connectivity to remote parts of the world.

Microsoft and Rackspace Form Cloud Alliance
Microsoft Corp. and data center services company Rackspace Hosting Inc. are teaming up to ease customers over barriers to using Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing service.

July 2015

Oracle goes all in on cloud services
Oracle's transition from cloud critic to cloud convert is complete.

Amazon to Build Cloud Data Centers in India
Amazon Web Services announced plans to build cloud data centers in India in 2016.

Masergy Launches NFV Platform, Premises-Based Virtual Router
Masergy Communications announced Virtual f(n), its virtualized network function platform.

Five Real-World Tips for Creating Corporate Cloud Policies
With cloud computing taking off at a very fast pace, some administrators are scrambling to jump into the technology.

Solar Farm to Supplant Amazon Data Center Energy Use in Virginia
Amazon will support construction and operation of an 80 MW solar farm in Accomack County, Virginia, which will be called Amazon Solar Farm US East.

Verizon closes AOL acquisition
Verizon has closed its acquisition of AOL, saying the deal gives the telecommunications giant the opportunity to be a leader in technology and media.

Frontier to raise $2.5B to fund three-state Verizon wireline purchase
Frontier has launched a $450 million offering of its shares, and an offering of $1.75 billion of its preferred stock with the intention of raising $2.5 billion in cash to fund part of its acquisition of Verizon's wireline properties.

Level 3 acquires DDoS mitigation firm Black Lotus
Level 3 has snapped up DDoS mitigation firm Black Lotus.

Office 365 vs. Google for Work / A cloud comparison for small businesses
Microsoft and Google offer low-cost cloud tools for small- and medium-size businesses, but each of their offerings has unique strengths and weaknesses.

Data Centers and Hidden Water Use
In California, computer farms are under scrutiny for their large and growing use of water for cooling.

Oracle extends cloud offerings, looks to compete with Amazon.com
Oracle Corp founder and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said his database company is expanding its cloud-computing offerings, bringing Oracle into more direct competition with Amazon.com Inc.

Carpathia and QTS Emphasize World Class Customer Support as Integration Priority
Carpathia announced initial plans for integration into QTS Realty Trust.

Airbus to build satellites for OneWeb to beam Internet from space
Europe's Airbus Group will design and build about 900 satellites for privately owned OneWeb Ltd, which plans to offer high-speed, space-based Internet access to billions of people worldwide.

June 2015

Verizon’s Biggest Union Claims Carrier Isn’t Fixing Broken Landlines
Verizon says CWA’s allegations aimed at pressuring in advance of contract talks

SpaceX founder files with government to provide Internet service from space
Elon Musk’s space company has asked the federal government for permission to begin testing on an ambitious project to beam Internet service from space, a significant step forward for an initiative that could create another major competitor to Comcast, AT&T and other telecom companies.

Microsoft Invests In 3 Undersea Cable Projects To Improve Its Data Center Connectivity
Microsoft announced that it is partnering with a consortium of telecom companies to build a new transpacific undersea cable that will connect a number of points in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan with the U.S. West Coast.

Banks Curtail Employee Use of Voice Mail
Voice mail is viewed as an expensive vestige of a bygone era

Will Phone Companies and the NSA Play Nice?
Law doesn’t require telecommunications firms to keep records

Level 3 Tries to Waylay Hackers
Internet carrier takes to blocking traffic to servers believed controlled by criminal gangs

Verizon Saves 60% Swapping Copper for Fiber
Verizon has transformed only seven of its central offices from copper to fiber, but the benefits realized from the first seven have convinced it to do the same with its remaining 2,000-plus central offices.

Comcast, Level 3 Ink Interconnection Deal
Comcast and Level 3 Communications announced they have reached a new multi-year, bilateral interconnection agreement as part of a multifaceted arrangement that will help both companies meet their customers’ needs into the next decade and beyond.

Dark cloud hangs over job security of CIOs
IT departments are desperately trying to cling on to control, while business many units are buying cloud services without its knowledge or permission, according to a survey from network vendor Brocade.

Peak 10 Expands In North Carolina With Raleigh Data Center
Peak 10 has several expansions afoot, the latest being construction and renovation of a new 31,500 square foot Raleigh data center. The company is adding 17,000 square feet of raised-floor data center space.

Verizon, Sprint to Pay $158M to Settle Illegal Billing Investigations
The Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau announced that Verizon Wireless will pay $90 million and Sprint Corporation will pay $68 million to settle investigations that revealed the companies billed customers millions of dollars in unauthorized third-party premium text messaging services, a practice called “cramming.”

Microsoft Execs Expressed ‘Shock and Disbelief’ at Internet Address Shortage
Microsoft encountered a shock earlier this year: Networking issues suddenly cropped up across the company’s sprawling Redmond, Wash., campus, causing headaches for engineers and pushing the company toward substantial expenditures.

Google Moves Its Corporate Applications to the Internet
Google Inc., taking a new approach to enterprise security, is moving its corporate applications to the Internet. In doing so, the Internet giant is flipping common corporate security practice on its head, shifting away from the idea of a trusted internal corporate network secured by perimeter devices such as firewalls, in favor of a model where corporate data can be accessed from anywhere with the right device and user credentials.

May 2015

Microsoft urges companies to upgrade old servers, warns of cyberdangers
You really need to upgrade your servers, Canada. That’s Microsoft Corp.’s increasingly urgent message as it counts down to the end of service support for a popular enterprise operating system called Windows Server 2003. As you can tell from the name, it’s more than 12 years old, and yet there are still some 380,000 servers running it in Canada (40 per cent of Microsoft’s client base).

HP Comes to Terms With the Cloud
A year ago, Hewlett-Packard thought it was going to change cloud computing. Now it looks more as if cloud computing is changing HP, just as the company enters one of the greatest attempts at reorganization in the history of technology.

Cloud Computing Brings Changes for IT Security Pros
Watch out, computer security professionals: cloud computing vendors are coming for your jobs. It may be inevitable, or you may be able to take back control by rigorously studying how your organiation uses technology. But either way, life is changing for IT security experts.

QTS Eyeing Another Giant Atlanta Data Center
QTS Realty has plenty of room to grow in the Atlanta data center market despite already being a top dog there. The company recently filed paperwork with the city regarding an undeveloped property adjacent to its nearly 1 million square foot data center in the Atlanta Metro area.

IDC: Cloud Infrastructure Spending to Reach $32 Billion in 2015
Worldwide spending on cloud IT infrastructure – servers, disk storage and Ethernet switches – will increase 21 percent year-over-year in 2015 to reach $32 billion, according to the latest IDC Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker. Spending in the market segment will represent fully one-third of overall IT infrastructure spending for the year, IDC highlights in a news release.

Microsoft Outperforms Its Low Growth Expectations
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Satya Nadella had warned investors not to expect much growth from his company for a few months. He was wrong.

Amazon Is King of Public Cloud, But Some CIOs Go Hybrid
Amazon Web Services dominates the public cloud, but some CIOs prefer a hybrid approach that knits together public and private clouds with corporate data centers. Amazon rivals are putting their bets on the hybrid approach.

Comcast Plans to Drop Time Warner Cable Deal
Fourteen months after unveiling a $45.2 billion merger that would create a new Internet and cable giant, Comcast Corp. is planning to walk away from its proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said.

You Thought Amazon's Cloud Was Big? Alibaba's Is Huge
After keeping the world waiting for nine years, Amazon finally broke out earnings for its Amazon Web Services. The $1.57 billion in sales for the quarter suggest that the company is far ahead of rivals in the cloud computing business. But as AWS expands globally, it faces strong competition from a familiar foe: Alibaba.

Exec: Verizon SDN Plans Include Wireless and Landline Networks
Verizon expects its transition to software defined networking (SDN) to begin at the network core and move outward to the network edge, said Verizon Vice President of Network Planning Brian Higgins in an interview. The SDN initiative, announced today, will encompass Verizon’s wireless and landline networks, Higgins said.

Verizon Announces Shift to Software Defined Networking
Verizon Communications Inc.VZ +0.68% said Tuesday it will join a growing number of telecom carriers that are replacing traditional network hardware with software, a process known as software defined networking. The adoption of software versions of traditional hardware such as routers and switches will lead to economic benefits, and to a host of new features, such as the increased ability of customers to provision services for themselves, over the Web.

Testing is Key to Successful Cloud Migration
The motivation behind performing a cloud migration varies from one company to another. It might be a desire to upgrade an operating system or aging infrastructure, or simply to improve performance and scalability. However, the one constant involving cloud migration remains rigorous performance testing.

Equinix Targets Enterprise SaaS Space With Office 365 Services
Equinix is now offering private, managed connections to Microsoft Office 365, the Software-as-a-Service version of Office. The service will be available in 15 markets worldwide in the third quarter.

Level 3's SDN Play Focused on Hybrid Clouds
Level 3 Communications is moving rapidly to incorporate the on-demand bandwidth capabilities it acquired as part of last year's tw telecom buy, and will be rolling that out across its North American network by the end of this month. The driving force is the need to offer flexible Ethernet connections to both public and private clouds in a hybrid approach, and today's announcement with Microsoft is one example of such a connection. (See Level 3 Leverages SDN for Automated Azure Access.)

Lumos Networks Corp. Introduces Dark Fiber Offering
Lumos Networks Corp, a leading fiber-based provider of data, voice and IP-based telecommunication services in the Mid-Atlantic region, today introduced a dark fiber product offering to meet the growing demand for high-capacity, customizable network connectivity for FTTC (both small cell and macro sites), large enterprises and data centers.

QTS Buys Government Cloud Heavyweight Carpathia for $326M
Data center provider QTS Realty Trust has agreed to buy Carpathia Hosting, a colocation, cloud, and managed services provider that does a lot of business with U.S. government agencies, for $326 million. Growing its government cloud business has been a major focus for QTS in recent years. The acquisition will strengthen that part of the strategy and enhance overall geographic footprint and variety of services the Overland Park, Kansas-based company can provide.

April 2015

Level 3 takes top spot in competitive Ethernet race, says VSG
Level 3 Communications has taken the top rank in Vertical Systems Group's 2014 U.S. Competitive provider Ethernet Leaderboard, surpassing XO, Cogent and Zayo.

Lumos Networks starts pre-selling services on its new 75-mile fiber route in Virginia
Lumos Networks is putting its new 75 route mile long-haul network from Richmond to Hampton Roads, Va., to work by beginning to pre-sell services to businesses and carriers that reside along the path between these two cities.

AT&T Expands Network on Demand to 100 Cities
AT&T is making it easier than ever for businesses to manage their network services in near real time. The company’s switched Ethernet service with Network on Demand is now available in more than 100 U.S. cities.

Does Backing Up Data to Cloud Make Financial Sense?
Over the past 30 years, data backup has been accomplished by using an application that makes a copy of the data on tape and, more recently, to disk. A copy of the tape is sent offsite or data is replicated over a WAN to have an offsite copy for disaster recovery.

The Best Approach to Cloud: Date, Don’t Marry
Choosing the right cloud provider for data migration is a stressful task. With so many players in the market, it’s difficult to pick just one to lock-in for a long-term relationship. Luckily, businesses no longer have to “put a ring on it” with their first cloud choice — they have the option to date a few at the same time.

Telecoms Ready Fight Against Net Neutrality
The telecommunications industry has myriad objections to the government’s new net-neutrality rules, but its legal challenge could start with a procedural point: whether the Federal Communications Commission provided adequate notice.

IBM to Pump $3B Into IoT
IBM has thrown its hat into the IoT ring with a pledge to invest $3 billion during the next four years in a new business unit focused on the Internet of Things.

MegaPath Completes Sale of Managed Services Business to GTT Communications
MegaPath, a leading provider of voice, data, security and cloud services in North America, today announced the completion of the sale of its Managed Services business division to GTT Communications, Inc. (NYSE:GTT), a leading global cloud networking provider to multinational clients.

vSphere 6, VMware’s ‘One Cloud’ Strategy Centerpiece, Enters Availability
VMware’s “one cloud, any application, any device” strategy is afoot. The company announced Monday general availability of VMware vSphere 6, its flagship suite of software tools for building cloud, its own OpenStack flavor, and the VMware Virtual SAN 6.

How Time Inc. Secures Applications in the Cloud
Time is building security features aimed at protecting its applications outside of the company’s data centers as it moves to Amazon Web Services. The example underscores one element of the complex cloud migration process, in which companies must navigate a number of technological gray areas with few clear examples to follow.

Ford uses Microsoft cloud to seamlessly update cars
The U.S. auto maker will begin selling some cars later this year with a computer system that can be automatically updated anytime the car connects to a Wi-Fi network. The cloud-based system is expected to be available in all of Ford's cars by the end of 2016, according to Don Butler, Ford's executive director of Connected Vehicle and Services.

Cisco, Microsoft Team Up to Target Cloud Vendors
Many technology vendors offer cloud-style computing services for businesses. Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are among them, but the two technology majors also want to sell to other cloud providers.

Level 3 to provide CDN services to BMW's 4,000 locations
Level 3 continues to gain momentum in the growing content delivery network (CDN) space and winning a contract with BMW to provide services between the German car manufacturer's headquarters and over 4,000 dealers reflects that trend.

5 reasons why AT&T, Verizon should see Level 3 as bigger business services threat
ach quarter Level 3 has been making progress in growing its Core Network Services (CNS) revenues, with enterprise services being the key driver. This trend continued into the fourth quarter of 2014, where CNS and enterprise revenues rose to $1.46 billion and $1.01 billion, respectively.

Lumos 2014 Revenue Dips
Lumos Networks Corp. (“Lumos Networks”, “Lumos” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: LMOS), a fiber-based service provider of data, voice and IP-based telecommunication services in the Mid-Atlantic region, announced financial results for the fourth quarter of 2014 and full-year 2014.

Masergy Introduces New SDN Self-Provisioning
Masergy Communications Inc., a global leader in managed networking and cloud services, today announced the general availability of its Network as a Service (NaaS) self-service option. Today’s announcement is an extension of Masergy’s Software Defined Network (SDN) Platform. This innovation underscores Masergy’s commitment to reducing IT complexity through software-defined, self-service configuration options.

95 percent of private clouds 'fail'
Private clouds are a failure, according to Gartner analyst Tom Bittman, who has issued a research note outlining the top ten reasons why.

What Should You Consider When Moving to Colocation or Managed Services?
When your data center is reaching the end of its life, its power or cooling are strained, and it’s a struggle to keep pace with ever growing capacity demands, one starts to consider colocation or managed services solutions. Just buying some colo space is not as simple as it seems.

QTS Reports Positive First Year as Public REIT
QTS Realty has reported results for its first full year as a publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trust. Results were on the whole positive, but were greatly assisted by a blockbuster 19-megawatt deal with an unnamed tenant closed during the year.

March 2015

What Affects the Dynamics of Data Center Pricing?
Multi-tenant data center pricing trends are not an easy subject to broach. In North America, each market has different dynamics. Coupled with an industry evolving beyond power and ping to other services, dissecting raw space and power from everything else is further complicated.

Equinix Partners With Science Logic on Cloud Migration
The relationship between Equinix and infrastructure monitoring provider ScienceLogic has deepened. Equinix already monitors its worldwide footprint through ScienceLogic, but now the two are collaborating on simplifying and easing cloud migration for enterprises.

Is it Time to Put a ‘For Sale’ Sign on Your Data Center?
If you are a corporation that has a data center that’s reasonably up to date, this may be a good time to sell it. You'll get out of the business of data center management, recoup millions of dollars of capital, and prevent losing any more money to depreciation. If you sell it, you can stay in the facility as a tenant and use the money you made from the deal to upgrade the infrastructure.

Equinix Expanding Global Data Center Footprint
New data centers in New York, Toronto, London, Singapore, and Australia—all key global financial and network interconnection hubs—will contribute close to a half-million square feet to the Equinix data center footprint this year.

VMware Unveils Virtual Network Functions Delivered as Cloud Services
VMware has added a powerful new capability to its public cloud services. About 30 vendors are now offering virtual network functions as services delivered on top of VMware’s vCloud infrastructure.

How Google Avoids Cloud Downtime With VM Migration
Heartbleed, the security vulnerability that affected 17 percent of all web servers on the internet when it was disclosed last April, sent ripples of downtime across users’ infrastructure deployed with various public cloud providers as the providers rebooted cloud VMs to patch against the bug.

Cloud Confusion: Separating Real Outcomes from Marketing Hype
Moving your mess to someone else's data center is not really cloud computing, says Guest Contributor John Halamka. "Software and hardware are one component, but the combination of business processes, people, and technology work in concert to achieve a desired result," he writes. "It is outcomes, not buzzwords, that we're all interested in, right?"

Comcast Business Named Fastest Growing Ethernet Provider
Comcast Business today announced that it was named the fastest growing Ethernet provider on Vertical Systems Group’s 2014 U.S. Carrier Ethernet LEADERBOARD. This is the second consecutive year that Comcast Business was named the fastest growing Ethernet provider, which helped drive its ranking up two spots to sixth on the research firm’s latest LEADERBOARD based on year-end 2014 U.S. business Ethernet port share results.

Firmer Pricing in US Data Center Market Expected in 2015
Despite healthy market dynamics and strong leasing activity, pricing trends in the U.S. data center market have been somewhat at odds, according to a recent Cushman & Wakefield report. Pricing was largely soft in 2014, but the real estate company expects firmer pricing in 2015.

Why Hybrid Cloud Continues to Grow: A Look at Real Use-Cases
Cloud computing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, there are more cloud platforms, services and environments being developed each and every day.

Report: AT&T to Sell $2B Worth of Data Center Assets
AT&T wants to sell about $2 billion worth of data center assets as it looks for ways to pay down debt after making huge investments in spectrum and acquisitions, Reuters reported, citing three anonymous sources.

IBM Pumps $4 Billion Into Cloud, Mobile Initiatives
International Business Machines Corp. is in the same bind as many of its corporate-tech peers: how to foster fast-growing but unproven initiatives while lucrative older businesses are slowing down. Having identified a set of promising new directions, the company plans to invest more in them.

FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules, Setting Stage For Legal Battle
The Federal Communications Commission set aside two decades of laissez-faire policy Thursday to assert broad authority over the Internet, voting to regulate broadband providers as public utilities and overruling laws in two states that made it harder for cities to offer their own Web service.

Best Web Regulator Not Necessarily Net Neutrality
Fans of J.K. Rowling pay more for her latest book in hardcover than those willing to wait for the paperback. Last-minute travelers pay more than those who booked six months earlier. Drivers in a hurry take the toll road rather than endure traffic jams on the public freeway running alongside.

Business IoT Connections Forecast to Quadruple by 2020
Social and political factors are coalescing with technological advances to accelerate enterprises making use of "Internet of Things" (IoT) technology. Though usage is low on an absolute basis, the declining costs of IoT components, such as sensors, connectivity and processing power, are among the key factors fueling enterprise adoption, according to Verizon.

What To Consider When Moving to Colocation or Managed Services
When your data center is reaching the end of its life, its power or cooling are strained, and it’s a struggle to keep pace with ever growing capacity demands, one starts to consider colocation or managed services solutions. Just buying some colo space is not as simple as it seems

The Hidden Waste and Expense of Cloud Computing
The benefits of shifting business applications to Web-friendly cloud services is proving far more complex than lining up a partner and flipping a switch, say executives who have made the transition. Absent proper expense controls, they say the cloud can be exceptionally wasteful of expensive resources.

February 2015

Cisco: Software, Cloud to Be 'Main Focus' | Light Reading
Software and cloud capabilities are to be the main strategic focus for Cisco Systems in the years ahead, the networking giant will announce later this month when it unveils details of its new corporate strategy.

Cloud jumping: When it's time to switch providers
Relationships with vendors seldom last forever. Here's how some IT managers have approached change-ups with their cloud providers.

FCC Poised to Reclassify Broadband as a Title II Service
The Federal Communications Commission is getting set to classify broadband as a Title II or communications service, according to news reports.

Google Fiber to roll out 1 Gbps service in four Southeast cities
Google Fiber is going to bring its 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service to four new metro areas, reports The Wall Street Journal, citing two people close to the issue.

Of the Big Three Cloud Providers AWS Was Most Reliable in 2014
Users of Amazon Web Services saw fewer service interruptions than users of the other two big providers of public cloud infrastructure services – Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure – in 2014, according to two different companies that analyze cloud downtime.

Which IaaS Provider is Cheapest? Which One Has More Configurations, Locations?
Cloud pricing comparison is often an exercise in comparing apples to oranges. Cloud Spectator, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service consulting and research firm, has published a cloud vendor report that attempts to take a nuanced look at the IaaS market and find each provider’s advantage depending on use case.

Which cloud providers had the best uptime last year?
Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform recorded impressive statistics for how reliable their public IaaS clouds were in 2014, with both providers approaching what some consider the Holy Grail of availability: five nines.

Verizon gets 'black eye' in long cloud shutdown
The Verizon Cloud platform is up and running again after a 40-hour shutdown over the weekend for a planned upgrade.

Zayo Acquires Data Center Operator
Zayo Group, an international provider of Bandwidth Infrastructure services, announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire the operating units of Latisys Holdings, a colocation and infrastructure as a service (“Iaas”) provider for a price of $675 million.

Frontier Stakes Its Claim on Landlines
As the telecom industry marches forward, Frontier Communications Corp. is growing quickly by snapping up the unloved telephone lines its bigger competitors are leaving behind.

VPNs Dissolve National Boundaries Online, for Work and Movie-Watching - NYTimes.com
Rod Drury, an entrepreneur in Auckland, New Zealand, regularly visits the United States. Sometimes there are multiple visits a day. “People here can’t get Netflix, so they get a VPN that gives them a U.S. I.P. address, and watch Netflix like they’re in America,” he said. “If I want something off iTunes, I buy U.S. cards online.

Hybrid Cloud Turns IT from a Cost Center into a Revenue Center
Hybrid cloud – it means many things to many people. This past year, as both a concept and a practical solution, hybrid cloud finally came into its own.

Frontier acquires Verizon wireline assets in 3 states for $10.5B
Verizon is selling off wireline assets in three states to Frontier Communications for $10.5 billion. In a separate deal, Verizon is also selling over 11,300 of its company-owned wireless towers to American Tower Corporation for $5 billion.

VMware Looks to Help Carriers Bridge Private, Public Clouds | Light Reading
VMware has introduced technology to allow service providers to simplify connecting private and public clouds for their customers.

FCC to Propose Strong ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules
The Federal Communications Commission is about to fundamentally change the way it oversees high-speed Internet service, proposing to regulate it as a public utility.

Verizon Near Deals to Sell $15 Billion in Assets
Verizon Communications Inc. is close to selling a package of assets including cellphone towers and parts of its wireline business, a group of deals whose value could top $15 billion, people familiar with the matter said.

DDoS attacks threaten data center bottom line | Datacenter Dynamics
Frequency of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against infrastructure providers continues to increase, with some data centers assaulted dozens of times a month, according to the annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report published by Arbor Networks.

Zayo to Buy Latisys for $675 Million
Zayo Group Holdings Inc. agreed to buy Latisys Holdings LLC for $675 million, the telecom operator’s second-largest acquisition and its biggest move yet into data centers.

Obama Is About To Call For A Ton More Competition Among Broadband Service Providers
President Barack Obama will call for an end to laws that thwart competition among broadband service providers and his administration plans to file a letter with the Federal Communications Commission about it, a White House official said.

January 2015

The Internet’s Future Lies Up in the Skies
There are currently about three billion people connecting to the Internet, most of them through mobile devices and cellular networks, according to the International Telecommunication Union.

Most US Companies Plan to Increase Public Cloud Spending 15 Percent or More in 2015
Indicating greater confidence in cloud infrastructure and expanding budgets for public cloud workloads, a new survey shows that 64 percent of companies will spend at least 15 percent more on public cloud infrastructure in 2015.

Cisco’s cloud has a competition problem
Cisco has plenty of potential as a public cloud provider, but it needs to overcome several challenges before it can take on the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

IT infrastructure continues march into the cloud
Moving IT infrastructure into the cloud is a hot trend, but it appears the practice is burning brighter on one side of the Atlantic. That’s according to newly released survey data showing those who hold the budget purse strings in the US have been faster to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud when compared with their UK counterparts.

Oracle Bets CIOs Won’t Want to Integrate Cloud Services
Oracle Corp. cloud service revenue rose 45% with many customers preferring multiple services. Oracle is betting that customers won’t want to integrate clouds from different vendors.

IBM Cloud Closes The Year With A Bang--More Data Centers, More Customers
2014 has been an important year for IBM IBM +0.24% and its cloudy ambitions. The company has gone on an aggressive offensive – investment, development, acquisition and PR. The latter part was a little humdrum with IBM redefining a few terms in order to justify its claim to being one of the top dogs in the cloud world.

Charlottesville, Va., is about to get ‘Google Fiber lite’ thanks to this small wireless carrier
Someday soon, Google will announce a new set of cities that will receive Google Fiber, the search giant's blistering-fast Internet service. Among the cities being considered are places like Portland, Ore., Nashville and Phoenix.

Strangest Data Center Stories of Past Few Years
Let’s close out the year looking at some of the strangest technology stories of the past few years, many of which flew under the radar. This started as a list for 2014 only, but stories from a few years back proved too weird to pass up.

AT&T Expands Bring-Your-Own-Device Capabilities
AT&T is opening up new bring-your-own-device (BYOD) options for businesses. With the AT&T Work Platform, businesses can add AT&T data, voice and messaging services to a variety of mobile enterprise management solutions – all while keeping employee and company service bills separate.

CoreSite Brings Second Virginia Data Center Online
CoreSite Realty has opened the second facility on its Reston, Virginia, data center campus with the first phase fully leased. The building, close to 200,000 square feet in size, has a 50,000 square foot Phase I, which was leased last quarter to a single tenant.

Lumos advances data center connections to 29 with Expedient's Pittsburgh deployment
Lumos Networks has been making progress in extending its fiber network to data center locations and its recent deployment to Expedient's data center in Pittsburgh's Allegheny Center Mall (ACM) is evidence of that trend.

Verizon's desire to sell parts of its wireline network could kick off new consolidation trend
Verizon may still be one of the largest wireline telcos in the U.S., but it's clear that the telco's ongoing focus to trim non-essential assets and increase its market share in the wireless industry is driving it to consider selling some of its fixed line assets.

December 2014

'The cloud is the new normal,' Amazon Web Services executive says
The cloud is no longer relegated to handling ancillary jobs, but is quickly become the base for mission critical -- or even all -- enterprise IT operations, the head of Amazon Web Services said.

AT&T Delays New Fiber Rollout Until Net Neutrality Rules Sorted Out
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told investors on Wednesday that the telecom will wait to roll out fiber connections to 100 cities until rules around net neutrality are solidified.

Cloud Computing Set to Rain on Indian Outsourcers’ Parade
Companies that have traditionally used in-house servers running on custom-made applications are putting more of their business on external servers and using off-the-shelf software.

JLL says Northern Virginia is one of world’s most important data-center markets
Northern Virginia is one of the world’s most important data center markets, offering 2.4 million square feet of data center space with 498.3 megawatts of available power, according to research in JLL's Data Center Outlook for 2014.

Software-Defined Networking Will Take Off in 2015: Verizon Enterprise CIO
Updating network infrastructure to handle business data coming from mobile devices, analytics and the cloud will be a major focus of CIOs’ strategic investments for 2015, says Ajay Waghray, CIO of Verizon’s Enterprise Solutions unit.

Comcast Leans on Ethernet for New Cloud Connectivity
Comcast Business today announced a data center and cloud program designed to provide customers with more efficient access to their own cloud solutions. This new initiative will give businesses more freedom and added flexibility to perform critical processes like data storage and backup, dev/test, collaboration, billing or website hosting.

Google Must Be Crazy? A Web Balloon Crashes in South Africa
According to a report Thursday in the Afrikaans-language Beeld newspaper, Urbanus Botha, who farms in the arid landscape of the Karoo south of Bloemfontein and Lesotho in the center of South Africa, came across the crashed balloon and initially thought it a weather balloon from the nearby weather station at De Aar...

Report: Colo Business Thrives as Enterprises Move to Cloud
The colocation data center market is very well insulated against the huge shift in enterprises pushing IT workloads to the cloud, according to Synergy Research Group. The colocation industry is in fact thriving, the analysts said.

ThinkingPhones gets $56.7M, plans to double headcount to 500 next year
ThinkingPhones, a Cambridge-based communications technology company, announced Wednesday it has scored $56.7 million in funding. The money brings the company's total funding to date to $89 million and will allow ThinkingPhones to double its headcount, open new international offices and invest in new products, according to company executives.

CenturyLink Acquires Cloud DR Provider DataGardens
CenturyLink has acquired Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service provider DataGardens. Building on an existing relationship, the acquisition gives CenturyLink a proven, fast cloud DR service it can offer its customers and technology that enhances data migration capabilities.

Top 5 Data Center Stories, Week of December 5th
Modular Data Center Firm IO to Split Into Two Companies, Seagate Moves Into Iron Mountain’s Underground Data Center, HP Opens Up Converged Infrastructure for Use with Cisco Switches, In Americas, Equinix Focused on Brazil and New Jersey Markets, CenturyLink to Seek Data Center Operations Certification for All Facilities ...

Half of IT Networks Will Feel the Stranglehold of IoT Devices: IDC Report
Within just three years, IT networks are expected to go from having excess capacity to being overloaded by the stress of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices.

CyrusOne Brings Northern Virginia Data Center Online
CyrusOne’s Northern Virginia data center is now up and running. The first 30,000 square feet of colocation space has been commissioned within seven months of the company breaking ground on the first 125,000 square foot building in Sterling. The building will have up to 12 megawatts of critical load.

Study Highlights Potential Tax Burden Of Net Neutrality
The Progressive Policy Institute released a study today claiming that President Obama’s net neutrality plan would result in billions of dollars in taxes levied onto the consumer from both Federal and local governments.

November 2014

QTS Brings Mega Data Center in Dallas-Fort Worth Online
QTS Realty Trust is officially opening its latest mega data center in the Dallas-Fort Worth market this week. The facility is a retrofitted former semiconductor plant in Los Colinas, between Dallas and Fort Worth, the company bought in early 2013.

IT Outsourcing More Popular Than Ever
Companies across the globe, representing all major industrial sectors, continue to outsource legal, HR, and especially IT services in ever greater numbers, according to findings in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s 2014 Global Outsourcing and Insourcing Survey.

Super-Sizing Solar Power for Data Centers
Traveling east from Princeton, drivers can catch a brief glimpse of the panels, which are hidden by a series of high berms. It’s only when you walk around the edge of these grassy mounds of earth that the massive scale of the solar energy generation system is revealed.

Level 3 wraps its acquisition of tw telecom, enhances domestic and global reach
Level 3 has completed its acquisition of tw telecom, creating a company that will have a deeper domestic and global footprint to serve multi-site businesses. As a combined company, the new Level 3 will be able to provide its growing mix of enterprise, government and wholesale customers with an even broader mix of IP and Ethernet-based services that will be supported by both its global network and growing North American metro network footprint.

How New Types of DDoS Affect the Cloud
At a recent security meeting with a large healthcare organization, I had the privilege of looking at the logs of a private cloud infrastructure which I helped design. They showed me a couple of interesting numbers and what looked like possible DDoS attacks. Except, they were different.

N. Virginia Set to Overtake New York as Biggest Data Center Market by 2015
Northern Virginia will overtake the New York metro as the biggest multi-tenant data center market in the country by the beginning of next year, according to 451 Research. The region, whose data center market is mostly concentrated in Loudoun County, is now nearly tied with the New York-New Jersey area in terms of size.

Equinix Inc., the Internet’s Biggest Landlord
Data-center giant Equinix Inc. is hardly a household name, but it’s hard to find a household that isn't in some sense a customer. With a string of network hubs from Shanghai to Dubai, the company has become the Internet’s biggest landlord...

Equinix taps Juniper to enhance its cloud interconnection service
Equinix is enhancing its Cloud Exchange product, an interconnection solution that gives enterprise customers access to multiple cloud services and networks worldwide, by deploying Juniper Networks MX Series 3D Universal Edge routers in 19 markets.

Where Will Cloud Computing Be in 2020?
The future holds great promise when it comes to the cloud. It’s no secret cloud computing has taken off in recent years with new innovations and business applications. But figuring out where cloud computing will be by the end of the decade can be difficult for those who don’t know what cloud computing is.

Combining Cloud With Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Emergencies happen, environments go down, but the business process must go on! Right? Over the past few years, smaller and even mid-size organizations found it challenging to enter the DR and even business continuity conversation.

Ensuring Your Cloud Provider Meets Your Business Needs
Every company has its own needs, yet solution providers often try to force a square peg into a round hole by offering a "one size fits all" cloud solution. Companies that opt for this cloud model must adjust their processes and procedures to the capabilities of the system, while enduring the pain of knowing that the solution does little to address their business needs.

New Software Aims to Liberate Networks from Brand-Name Hardware
A non-profit group announced plans to offer what it calls the SDN Open Network Operating System, a software program designed to help to manage the flow of data between computers. It is also designed make it easier for companies to use commodity "white-box" networking devices in addition to more expensive switching systems from big-name vendors.

Cloud expected to make up three-fourths of data center traffic by 2018
Over the next four years, data center traffic is expected to nearly triple, largely thanks to a booming cloud computing industry.

Net Neutrality and Title II: Obama’s Proposal
The FCC has been considering whether to reclassify broadband Internet connectivity since an appeals court in January struck down Net Neutrality rules that had been in place for several years, arguing that the FCC did not have authority to impose those rules because broadband had not been classified as a telecommunications service.

QTS Expands Service Offerings With New Facility Management Service
As it enters the facility management business, QTS Realty sees its new Princeton campus as an ideal showcase for its approach to data center services. The 200-acre property provides QTS with a lease from an existing tenant, revenue from its facility management services, room to expand its infrastructure, and a partner to help fill that new space with customers.

October 2014

Windstream CFO Offers Rural Telecom Providers “Elegant Exit” Option
Small telecom service providers and cable companies could have an "elegant exit strategy" by selling their network assets to the real estate investment trust that Windstream plans to spin off, said Windstream Chief Financial Officer Tony Thomas...

Disaster Recovery: Strong People Bring Stronger Results
Disasters – whether caused by Mother Nature or human error – are lurking around every corner and the outcomes can be catastrophic to an ill-prepared company. Unfortunately, when disaster strikes, the first place business performance is affected is at the data center.

The worst cloud outages of 2014 (so far)
Which companies have failed the worst when it comes to cloud outages in 2014? Time for the list no one wants to land on.

Verizon Adds Direct Links to AWS for Enterprise Clients
Verizon Enterprise Solutions has added Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the list of cloud providers available via its Secure Cloud Interconnect (SCI) service in an attempt to make an Amazon enterprise cloud more palatable for security and network-performance-conscious companies.

N. Virginia Set to Overtake New York as Biggest Data Center Market by 2015
Northern Virginia will overtake the New York metro as the biggest multi-tenant data center market in the country by the beginning of next year, according to 451 Research. The region, whose data center market is mostly concentrated in Loudoun County, is now nearly tied with the New York-New Jersey area in terms of size.

Security Experts Expect ‘Shellshock’ Software Bug in Bash to Be Significant
Security experts warned that Bash, a free piece of software that is now built into more than 70% of machines, contained a particularly alarming software bug that could be used to take control of hundreds of millions of machines around the world...

Amazon confirms that EC2 reboots are due to Xen issues
About 10 percent of Amazon’s EC2 instances will need to be rebooted starting Friday, according to an AWS update.

Facebook Wi-Fi Drone the Size of 747 Could Fly in 2015
The Facebook drones are on their way, and we're not talking about bored friends who send out Candy Crush Saga invites. The company shared a few more details about its plan to use drones to provide free Wi-Fi to the two-thirds of the world's population that lack Internet access...

Russia Steps Up New Law to Control Foreign Internet Companies
Russia's parliament sped up measures to tighten control over foreign Internet companies such as Google Inc., Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., raising concerns over state pressure on social networks that have become one of the country's few remaining spaces for dissent.

EmTech: Google’s Internet “Loon” Balloons Will Ring the Globe within a Year
Google X research lab boss Astro Teller says experimental wireless balloons will test delivering Internet access throughout the Southern Hemisphere by next year.

Bash Bug Has Cloud Providers, Linux Distro Firms on High Alert
The widespread critical vulnerability Shellshock is the new Heartbleed. Also dubbed the “Bash Bug,” it affects GNU Bash, a very common open source program. It’s a major vulnerability but might not be a major threat depending on how quickly everything gets patched.

IBM Opens Largest U.S. Business Continuity Center in North Carolina
IBM has officially unveiled its newest business continuity center in Research Triangle Park (Durham, North Carolina), which includes data center space and can act as a DR site (disaster recovery).

U.S. Is ‘Cloud First’ in Policy, Not Practice
The U.S. government has been slow to move to cloud services, despite a policy that encourages agencies to consider cloud services first in order to save money.

QTS Realty Expands Disaster Recovery Portfolio with DRaaS
QTS Realty Trust announced a new disaster recovery solution dubbed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) Monday. DRaaS is a cloudy counterpart to the company’s existing managed disaster recovery portfolio.

Google shakes up cloud services market with another price cut
Google has fired back at Microsoft with cheaper cloud services, signaling another round of price cutting in an increasingly competitive market.

Explaining the Uptime Institute’s Tier Classification System
Uptime Institute’s Tier Classification System for data centers is approaching the two decade mark. Since its creation in the mid-1990s, the system has evolved from a shared industry terminology into the global standard for third-party validation of data center critical infrastructure.

Great Cloud Server Reboot of 2014 Is Drama-less (So Far)
The vulnerability that led some cloud providers to reboot many of their servers last week was a “big deal” that, if exploited, would have allowed hackers to bypass security on virtual machines.

In Net Neutrality Discussion, Lawsuits Loom Large
After discussion and debate at six Federal Communications Commission roundtables stretching over 24 hours, a consensus has finally emerged on net neutrality: Whatever rules the F.C.C. adopts, someone will take it to court.

September 2014

Where’s my cloud price cut?
Cloud service providers like to advertise huge price cuts, but buyer beware: You need to look closer to see what you’ll actually be paying.

CenturyLink Wants to Acquire Rackspace: Bloomberg Report
CenturyLink is in talks to acquire cloud provider Rackspace. Citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter, the report said that odds of the deal going through are "less than 50 percent unless Rackspace is willing to take payment in stock or enter a joint venture."

Level 3 and tw telecom Receive U.S. Department of Justice Approval
Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) and tw telecom (NASDAQ: TWTC) today announced the U.S. Department of Justice has cleared Level 3′s pending acquisition of tw telecom. The clearance completes the process under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 (HSR), and is effective immediately.

iCloud Data Breach a Black Eye For Cloud In General
Apple is investigating vulnerabilities in iCloud after the service was exploited to hack the accounts of celebrities, leading to the publication of nude photos and videos. There are reports of more than 100 female celebrities being compromised.

Five easy ways to keep your business secure that you might not have considered
Even though security hasn’t always been well funded by businesses and was considered more of an afterthought, recent major hacking attacks show that it’s important to have a good defense at play.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Putting Your Plan in Place
The most important question to ask is, where would your business be without electricity? For those who think it won’t happen to them, think again. According to a recent Forrester survey – The State of IT Resiliency and Preparedness – 1 in 3 companies have declared a disaster in the past five years. In 2010, the statistic was 1 in 5.

Is the Commodity Data Center Around the Corner?
The data center is changing. We have new methods of cooling, optimizing the data center and even the utilization of green energy through next-generation geothermal technologies. The insides of the data center and what goes into the rack has been changing as well.

Verizon promises to get its cloud service online in early September
Verizon’s promised new cloud infrastructure will go live the first week in September. Like some rivals Verizon will offer base-level infrastructure for one price with additional charges for layered services atop it.

Level 3 Opens Northern Virginia Data Center
Level 3 opened a 12,000 square foot, 1.5 megawatt data center in Herndon, Virginia. The data center is one of the company’s “Premier Elite” facilities, its highest tier of data center.

Rackspace Expanding Data Center Capacity Globally
As the cloud infrastructure services market grows, so does the amount of data center space that hosts the systems that support cloud services. While the largest cloud providers, the Amazons and Microsofts of the world, mostly build their own data centers to support their services, mid-size players rely to a large extent on wholesale data center landlords.

August 2014

Cloud Protection: How to Avoid Emergency-Related Outages
It only takes one emergency to take down a data center but a simple plan and proper preparation can prevent it, writes Brian Burns of Agile Defense, Inc. Data centers can use these five steps to ensure minimal to no disruption if disaster strikes.

Why a Media Giant Sold Its Data Center and Headed to the Cloud
Two weeks ago, venerable media company CondA(c) Nast -- publisher of magazines like Vogue, The New Yorker and Wired -- decommissioned its Newark, Del. data center. The 67,200 square feet facility had already been sold and the deal closed. The 105-year-old company had gone all-in with the cloud.

How to Survive 4 Cloud Horror Stories
Horror stories don't just happen at the movie theater. In a few cases, companies make a big play to use the wrong cloud application or experience widespread outages in their connection to cloud storage.

Lumos adds 673 fiber-enabled cell sites in Q2, reconfirms year-end target of 825 total sites
Lumos Networks continued to make progress with its fiber to the cell (FTTC) buildout strategy in the second quarter, connecting 673 wireless cell sites, up 40 sequentially, which represents about a 45 percent year-over-year increase in total FTTC sites.

Surge in net-neutrality comments crashes FCC site; deadline extended
The Federal Communications Commission extended Tuesday's deadline for public comments on its proposed net neutrality rules until Friday after a last-minute surge in submissions overwhelmed the agency's website.

Comcast building out its all-fiber internet network, increasing residential customers' speeds
Comcast does not have a sterling reputation for customer-friendliness, something the cable behemoth struggled against even before a recording of one of its retention agents badgering a customer went viral. But if the company is going to reverse that perception, providing faster internet speeds to its customers is a start.

Level 3 tapped by DHS to provide LAN managed services
Level 3 has been tasked by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to deliver a set of local area network (LAN) managed services inside the National Capital Region (NCR).

Don't Send Your RFP to Too Many Suppliers
You might think you're maximizing your chances of getting quality responses, but sending out too many RFPs is actually counterproductive.

Windstream to Spin Off Networks Into Publicly Traded REIT
Windstream Holdings Inc. plans to spin parts of its telecommunications network into a publicly traded real estate investment trust that won’t have to pay federal income tax, an unusual financial transaction that analysts said other phone companies may mimic.

Verizon will start restricting LTE speeds for its heaviest unlimited-plan customers
Verizon’s 4G networks soon will start favoring customers who pay for mobile data by the gigabyte over customers who draw deeply from Verizon’s unlimited plans. The new policies will only apply when the network gets crowded.

Who has the biggest cloud? By year’s end, the answer may surprise you.
Microsoft’s cloud biz, including Azure, Office 365 and other stuff, will hit $5.77 billion run rate by December, surpassing Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com, according to Nomura Securities Analyst Rick Sherlund.

Experts: Electromagnetic Interference Threat to Uptime is Real
Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and intentional electromagnetic interference is a serious threat that has not been in the forefront of the conversation within the data center industry but the industry is becoming increasingly aware.

July 2014

Ten of the Strangest Data Center Outages
Every once in a while, utility power goes out and the backup systems fail, or a technician makes a mistake, and the data center goes down. While outages have become less frequent, as the industry’s practices continuously improve, things still occasionally go wrong.

Peak 10 Building Tampa Data Center From Scratch
Fresh off its acquisition by GI Partners, Peak 10 announced it was constructing a 60,000 square foot data center in Tampa, Florida. This will be the first facility designed and constructed from scratch for the provider that offers colo, managed services and cloud.

US Data Center Providers Neutral on Government Access to Customer Data Stored Overseas
During a May meeting with a group of CIOs in Berlin Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith witnessed something unusual: a CIO for a German state came in carrying a copy of a legal decision. It was a magistrate’s decision in a federal court in New York on the question of whether the U.S. government could get unilateral access to data in a data center outside the U.S. with a warrant and without knowledge of the data’s owner.

Why One CIO Is Saying 'No' to BYOD
Rosendin Electric has thousands of employees, hundreds of smartphones, more than 400 iPads and a few Microsoft Surface tablets -- none are Bring Your Own Devices.

Afraid of the Cloud? How to Handle Your Fears
A study released this week shows that 73% of IT executives believe cloud providers are hiding performance problems. Industry analysts say IT professionals are smart to be cautious, but added that they need to do their homework and ask the right questions before selecting a vendor.

Location, Reliability and Service: Finding Your Colocation Provider
IT organizations use colocation centers for a variety of reasons. They get space, power, cooling, connectivity and security – everything needed to support their critical IT operations. They also avoid the hefty capital expenditure associated with building an onsite data center.

CenturyLink Expands Canadian Cloud in Toronto Data Center
CenturyLink has been expanding its global cloud footprint at a rapid pace, and its next expansion is in its Toronto data center, where the company has established a cloud node. It joins an existing Toronto node as well as one on the country’s west coast in Vancouver.

Amazon Web Services’ Achilles heel: Complexity
Good news: Amazon has more instance types and higher-level services than any competitor. Bad news: that means a ton of complexity and tracking challenges for users.

Level 3 calls for net neutrality rules to extend to all ISP activities
Even if the FCC reimposes “net neutrality” rules, consumers’ video streams could still suffer if ISP’s are allowed to impose choke points at deeper layers of the internet.

Report: AWS Data Center May Be Coming to Germany
Amazon’s next data center to support its public cloud services may be located in Germany, according to an operations employee at a German mobile marketing startup, who found an Amazon Web Services end node identified as ec2.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com using open source cryptography tools.

Google Looks to the Day When it Can Quit Building its Own Servers
Google is well-known for building its own server hardware to meet the unique needs of its massive compute network, but that won't always be the case. As cloud deployments get bigger and more widespread, the industry will eventually catch up to Google's style of computing and the company will no longer need to build its own systems.

Moving From Cloud Back to Data Center – Not as Easy as You May Think
What if you went down the cloud path and realized it was a mistake? What if you deployed a massive data point or critical application into a cloud data center and it’s not working very well. Now what? How do you pull back and place your environment back into your own data center?

Architecting your organization for the cloud
While cloud computing has seen widespread adoption, many organizations still see cloud-based services as something to be kept at arms length rather than as an integral part of an organization’s extended IT architecture.

Ten of the Strangest Data Center Outages
Every once in a while, utility power goes out and the backup systems fail, or a technician makes a mistake, and the data center goes down. While outages have become less frequent, as the industry’s practices continuously improve, things still occasionally go wrong.

Verizon Lets Other Carriers Sell Services in More of Its Data Centers
Verizon has been gradually adding more and more carrier-neutral data centers to its footprint, where customers now have the option of selecting third-party network providers for carrier diversity and redundancy.

Data Center Migration: Critical Lessons Learned
Today’s reliance on technology in the business world has placed many more workloads into the modern data center platform. So, as your organization grows – your data center must stay agile as well. This is where the challenge comes in.

QTS Acquires New Jersey Data Center from McGraw Hill Financial and forms Strategic Partnership with Atos
QTS Realty Trust one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data center facilities and cloud services, and a leader in security and compliance, has completed the acquisition of a data center facility in East Windsor, New Jersey, from McGraw Hill Financial, Inc., for approximately $75 million, and has formed a new strategic partnership with Atos.

QTS Acquires Sun Times Press Facility in Downtown Chicago
QTS Realty Trust (QTS), one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data center facilities and cloud services, and a leader in security and compliance, announced that it has completed the acquisition of the former Sun Times Press facility, a 317,000 square foot building located on 30 acres in downtown Chicago, for approximately $18 million.

How to Get the Most Value from Your Cloud Provider
As cloud computing continues to impact the modern organization, businesses will need to look at how they deploy their IT environment – and where. While the use of the cloud addresses many challenges often faced by IT departments, there are two little known pitfalls of the cloud.

Level 3 Agrees to Buy TW Telecom in $5.7 Billion Deal
Level 3 Communications Inc. (LVLT:US), which helps route traffic across the Web, agreed to buy TW Telecom Inc. in a deal valued at about $5.7 billion to gain a direct connection to business customers.

June 2014

Confirmed: Peak 10 Acquired By GI Partners
Private equity firm GI Partners has signed a definitive agreement to acquire IT infrastructure and cloud provider Peak 10, Inc. from investor Welsh, Carson Anderson & Stowe. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a report from Reuters last week said market rumors valued the deal at between $800 million and $900 million.

tw telecom Adds Its Intelligent Network Dynamic Capacity® to Internet, IP VPN and Managed Services
tw telecom (TWTC), a leading provider of Business Ethernet and networking solutions announced it is extending its industry-first Intelligent Network Dynamic Capacity capability that has been available with Business Ethernet services to its entire data and Internet portfolio to include Internet, IP VPN and Managed Services.

Savvis Colo Roots Remain Core to CenturyLink’s Strategy
With all the marketing and publicity outreach CenturyLink Technology Solutions has been doing around its cloud services, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Savvis, the company CenturyLink acquired to kick off its foray into the infrastructure services market, was and still remains very much about providing traditional data center services.

Verizon Expands HIPAA-Enabled Footprint, Portfolio of Data Center and Cloud Services
To help enable the healthcare industry to meet the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requirements for safeguarding electronic protected health information, Verizon is expanding its Healthcare Enabled Services to five additional data centers and offering a broader range of cloud and data center infrastructure services.

Are virtual desktops the new battleground for cloud providers?
IaaS, PaaS and SaaS have long been synonymous with the cloud. Today, companies are finally waking up to the DaaS call. Gigaom Research Analyst Janakiram MSV looks at why.

QTS Gets Three Data Centers Open-IX-Certified
QTS Realty Trust has secured Open-IX certification for three of its data centers, joining the multi-company effort to create a distributed member-governed Internet exchange system in North America.

Internap Data Center Outage Takes Down Livestream, StackExchange
Internap experienced a power outage at its data center located in the Google-owned building at 111 8th Avenue in New York City. There appears to have been a utility power outage, followed by a problem with uninterrupted power supply system that supported the Internap facility.

Rackspace Hires Morgan Stanley to Evaluate Acquisition or Partnership
Rackspace Hosting, one of the last major U.S. cloud infrastructure service providers that have not been swallowed by giants, is getting serious about a partnership with a bigger player or an outright acquisition

Amtrak aims to boost Wi-Fi speeds from Washington to Boston with a track-side network
A wireless broadband network built parallel to Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor tracks could dramatically boost capacity to individual trains, thus boost boosting Wi-Fi speeds for passengers inside them.

May 2014

Cloud Spending by Companies Outpaces Predictions
Corporate spending on cloud-computing services, software and resources will reach $191 billion in 2020 as companies replace older equipment and programs with Internet-based systems, a research firm said.

Masergy Launches "Intelligent Transport" Service
Masergy Communications, Inc. announced a new delivery service that offers Ethernet on a serial connection to deliver Ethernet anywhere enterprise customers do business. This unique IP transport service gives enterprise customers a simple, flexible, cost-effective way to get a global Ethernet solution with end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS). MASERGY's Intelligent Transport service also lets customers put their public and private network services on a single circuit while allowing for prioritization of applications based on business requirements.

tw telecom and GoGrid to Deploy Cloud and Network Infrastructure Equipped for Big Data Solutions
Hybrid IT environment to deliver security, scalability solutions for companies looking to manage big data in the cloud- tw telecom's eLynksm solution delivers integrated access to and through the data center for secure, scalable and predictable application performance

Windstream Hosted Solutions Debuts First-Ever Cloud Path Migration to vCloud Director at EMC World
Windstream Hosted Solutions has partnered with Racemi, the leading cloud migration Software as a Service (SaaS) provider, to launch the first-ever VMware vCloud Director enabled cloud migrations using Racemi Cloud Path. This tool will enable businesses to quickly and automatically migrate existing physical and virtual servers into one of Windstream's eight multi-tenant cloud platforms, all of which are VMware hybrid cloud enabled.

How can telcos compete in cloud computing? Ask CenturyLink
On our Structure Show podcast, CenturyLink’s VP of cloud explains why he thinks the company be the first telco to really make a dent in the cloud computing market by leveraging its network assets and offering an enterprise cloud that also caters to developers.

Final Phase of Countdown to Last IPv4 Address Begins
It is no secret that the number of IPv4 addresses has become critically low. American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is down to the final /8 (around 16 million addresses) and has moved into Phase Four, the final phase, of its IPv4 countdown plan. This means the registry may no longer be able to fulfill all qualifying IPv4 requests.

QTS Eyes Former Sun-Times Plant in Chicago
QTS Realty Trust has rapidly expanded its data center footprint with a distinctive playbook: buy huge, empty industrial properties at a discount, and convert them into high-technology hubs. It may now be looking to apply that template in the busy Chicago market, according to local media reports.

CenturyLink Follows Cloud Giants’ Lead With Big Price Cuts
CenturyLink became the latest public cloud provider to slash prices, following major cuts by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. A typical CenturyLink cloud virtual machine will now cost at least 60 percent less.

Digital Realty Tweaks Strategy, Plans Property Sell-off
Digital Realty Trust is planning to divest the least-performing properties in its massive global portfolio and change its mix of product offerings to include solutions that combine its traditional space-and-power offerings with services higher up the stack provided by some of its customers.

HP Ramps Up Enterprise Cloud Play With $1 Billion Investment
HP kicked off a new $1 billion cloud services initiative that will include Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings, all underpinned by OpenStack – the popular open source cloud infrastructure software.

Verizon 300 Mbps WiFi Coming Soon
Verizon plans to offer an in-home router that will support WiFi connectivity at speeds up to 300 Mbps beginning this summer, said Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo at the Jefferies 2014 Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference today.The device supporting Verizon 300 Mbps WiFi is proprietary, Shammo said, and is expected to drive increases in subscriber broadband speeds as end users consume more bandwidth within the home.

Reinventing the internet: How wireless networks could become the workhorses of the web
In this part of our special report on reinventing the internet, a look at how the wireless networks of the future should evolve to handle a world in which mobile computers are the standard computers.

April 2014

Cloud Migration: Knowing When to Make the Move
Cloud computing carries a number of great benefits for organizations that need a new delivery platform. Cloud migration is upon us as information technology undergoes rapid change and organizations of all types begin to embrace the idea of moving computing infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud.

How to Design a Cloud-Ready Disaster Recovery Infrastructure
It’s important to create an environment capable of supporting business continuity needs. This means understanding the fact that the cloud can and will potentially go down. For example, in a recent major cloud outage, a simple SSL certificate was allowed to expire.

Windstream Opens North Carolina Data Center
Windstream Hosted Solutions (Nasdaq:WIN), one of the nation’s premier providers of enterprise-class managed hosting solutions, today announced the official opening of its fourth data center in Charlotte, N.C., bringing its nationwide total to 27.

12 Ways to Disaster-Proof Your Critical Business Data
How can you keep critical data safe when disaster strikes? There is no one magic answer, but there are steps your business can and should take to protect important files and applications in the event of a disaster.

Five Technologies That Will Improve Your Cloud
You’re a large organization, using cloud computing to your advantage. You’ve enjoyed your cloud experience and see how this model is helping you evolve. Still, you wish you could make your cloud infrastructure run a little bit better. You’d love to experience better performance and utilize your cloud resources a bit more efficiently.

6 IT Strategies to Stay Ahead of Data Center Trends
Automation, virtualization, cloud computing -- these technology trends are transforming the data center and enabling companies to lower costs, increase flexibility and improve reliability. However, these shifts require IT, and their outsourcing providers, to rethink traditional strategies.

New Owners for Philadelphia Carrier Hotel at 401 North Broad
Amerimar Enterprises and Abrams Capital have acquired 401 North Broad Street, the major data center and carrier hotel in Philadelphia, and will partner with telecom industry veteran Hunter Newby to own and operate the property. The new owners will invest and reposition the 1.3 million square foot, fiber-rich building.

Cisco joins cloud computing race with $1 billion plan
Cisco Systems Inc plans to offer cloud computing services, pledging to spend $1 billion over the next two years to enter a market currently led by the world's biggest online retailer Amazon.com Inc.

Exclusive: CenturyLink to add data centers
Telecom company CenturyLink Inc. (CTL) is expected to announce plans to expand its data center presence in eight markets in a bid to capture revenue from corporate customers making the move to so-called cloud computing and other online services.

SDN Changing the Shape of Networking, IT Careers
Cisco recently announced new certifications for its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) programmable networking initiative, its response to software-defined networking. The certifications are designed to tailor new roles for IT practitioners looking to transition their company's infrastructures to programmable, application policy driven, SDN-type environments.

IHS: Enterprise Cloud Spending To Rise 20% in 2014
Enterprise-scale businesses will spend more than $235 billion on cloud computing architecture and services by 2017, 35% more than the $174 billion forecast for 2014 and triple the $78 billion spent in 2011, according to a new report from IHS.

Google Gets Practice Flying its High-Altitude Balloons in Project Loon
Google, which has been testing balloon-powered Internet access in underdeveloped area, said one of its balloons circled the Earth in 22 days.

Equinix Plans 1 Million Square Foot Data Center Campus In Ashburn
Equinix plans to build a massive data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia, not far from its existing interconnection hub in the heart of northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley.”

Sungard Availability Splits From SunGard, Rebrands
Sungard Availability Services is now a stand-alone company, with a new logo, new branding and a lower case “g” in its name. As it splits from SunGard Data Systems, the company is asserting its independence while maintaining the continuity of the most familiar brand in disaster recovery.

CenturyLink to Add 20 Megawatts of Data Center Space in 2014
CenturyLink is planning a big year in terms of growth in its data center network. Ever since its acquisition of Savvis, the telco company has been seeking to build on existing strengths and synergies with Savvis.

Windstream Reduces Cloud Provisioning Time, Improves Process With New Rapid Automation Tool
Windstream Hosted Solutions, part of Windstream (WIN) and one of the nation's premier providers of enterprise-class managed hosted solutions, today announced that it has incorporated a new system that reduces customized cloud provisioning time from days to hours.

March 2014

3 Essentials Steps to a Software Defined Data Center
Imagine this in your data center: A swath of compute, networking and storage hardware from a variety of different vendors that are all controlled not individually but by software that overlays the entire operation.

Help! Most Enterprises Turn to Consultants When Using the Cloud
Customers using the cloud overwhelmingly turn to professional service consultants to execute or plan out projects, according to a report from Technology Business Research.

Google May be Planning Massive Google Fiber Expansion
Ever since Google announced their first Google Fiber plan in Kansas City, their intentions with this broadband service provider approach have been debated. Was Kansas City (and Austin and Provo which followed) just an experiment as a way to ‘shame’ other ISPs into offering next generation broadband?

Windstream Hosted Solutions Opens Fourth Data Center in Charlotte, North Carolina
Windstream Hosted Solutions, one of the nation's premier providers of enterprise-class managed hosting solutions, announced the official opening of its fourth data center in Charlotte, bringing its nationwide total to 27.

Level 3 and Windows Azure for Enterprise Cloud Services
Level 3 Communications has announced a strategic relationship with Microsoft to deliver private, direct network connections to Microsoft Windows Azure as part of the Level 3 Cloud Connect Solutions partner ecosystem.

The next big step for cellular networks isn’t 5G. It’s the cloud.
We're about to hear a lot about 5G, that amorphous term for the next generation of cellular network technologies. But while the transformation to 5G is still years away, we’re going to see the first evidence of another more subtle transformation: the migration of the mobile network into the cloud.

Whatever Happened to the IPv4 Address Crisis?
In February 2011, the global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority allocated the last blocks of IPv4 address space to the five regional Internet registries. At the time, experts warned that within months all available IPv4 addresses in the world would be distributed to ISPs.

QTS Builds Federal Cloud Business in Richmond Mega-Center
There’s a saying in real estate that you make your money when you buy a property, not when you sell it. This has been a guiding principle for QTS Realty Trust, which is a firm believer in buying huge commercial properties at a discount and converting them into data center space.

Cyrus One Will Build 48 Megawatt Facility in Northern Virginia
Data center service provider CyrusOne will build a 420,000 square foot, 48 megawatt data center in northern Virginia, the company confirmed. CyrusOne recently purchased 14 acres of land in Sterling, Virginia, which will serve as the campus for its first East Coast data center.

February 2014

Disaster Recovery Options for Smaller Companies
The growing number of natural disasters and the rise in data loss has increased the significance of having an effective disaster recovery (DR) strategy. Thankfully new capabilities are helping smaller companies keep pace.

How SMBs Can Keep Their Data Safe When Natural Disasters Strike
Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards – any one of these natural disasters could wreak havoc on a data center, leading to power surges, leaks or, worst of all, data loss. And if that happens, the consequences could be catastrophic. It is critical to have a plan in place to protect the data center.

Here’s what the internet’s arteries look like in 2014
Telegeography has published the 2014 edition of its submarine cable map, providing an excellent representation of the infrastructure that makes global connectivity global.

Data Centers Now 'Magnets' for DDoS Attacks
Data centers have become "magnets" for DDoS attacks with many recording a marked rise in incidents since 2013.

Savvis rebrands as Centurylink Technology Solutions
Savvis now operates under the brand CenturyLink Technology Solutions three years after the colo outfit was bought by the US telecoms giant. In an interview with FOCUS, Becky Carr, CMO at Centurylink Technology Solutions offered insight into the objectives, process and thinking behind the brand change.

The Morning Download: IBM Makes Huge Bet on the Cloud
International Business Machines Corp. said Thursday it will invest $1.2 billion to add 15 new data centers around the world in 2014, bringing the total number of data centers run by IBM to 40.

15 years later, Googlers recall first data center
Google runs its services from some of the biggest, most sophisticated data centers on the planet, but it wasn't always that way.

Cloud Availability Trumps Security Concerns When it Comes to Shadow IT
As pressure mounts to deliver value with ever-increasing speed, lines of business (LOB) are often drawn to cloud computing's ease of use, flexibility and rapid time-to-value.

Outsourced Data Center Space Expected to Grow 15 Percent This Year
Almost a quarter of data center space in North America is now outsourced, and the growth trend in data center outsourcing and colocation shows no signs of abating.

5 Things to Consider When Weighing Public Cloud Against Private Cloud
A few years ago the only cloud game in town was the public cloud, but today private and hybrid clouds are also true contenders. In fact, private cloud implementations address a prevalent set of challenges and issues that public clouds cannot and can help speed up and smooth the way of cloud adoption.

Netflix Warns ISPs Against 'draconian' Response After Net Neutrality Ruing
Netflix has a message for ISPs that might be thinking about charging more to carry its video service in the wake of last week's net neutrality ruling: Do so at your own risk.

January 2014

Infrastructure-as-a-Service basics: a guide for IT pros
Though it started as a phenomenon primarily driven by startups, public cloud is gaining traction among all customer segments including large enterprises.

QTS Tenant Powers Up, Adds 5 Megawatts in Atlanta Data Hub
A major customer of QTS Realty Trust is adding five megawatts of power and 25,000 square feet of space to their existing data center at QTS’ Metro Atlanta facility, the company said this week. QTS isn’t saying who it is, but all signs point to Twitter, the fast-growing microblogging service.

Equinix, Savvis hold dominant spots in U.S. colocation market
Equinix and CenturyLink's Savvis subsidiary have become the two dominant U.S. colocation providers, according to a new Synergy Research Group report. These two providers continue to see positive colocation and managed service earnings results.

Data Center Leasing Surged 25 Percent in 2013
Demand from social media companies and cloud-builders contributed to a surge in leasing of wholesale data center suites in 2013, with total leasing volume up about 25 percent from 2012, according to a report from a real estate firm.

NSA Will Cool its Secret Servers With Waste Water
A new data center being built by the National Security Agency (NSA) will use up to 5 million gallons a day of treated wastewater from a Maryland utility. The agency last week reached an agreement with Howard County to use treated waste water that would otherwise be dumped into the Little Patuxent River.

NSA Scandal Prompting Shift Away From U.S. Providers
Since the NSA privacy scandals broke eight months ago, there’s been plenty of speculation about how the revelations might impact U.S. hosting providers. Forrester made the bold prediction that the cloud market would take a $180 billion hit over the next three years as a result of new privacy concerns.

AWS: Our Virtual Desktop Will Succeed Where Others Have Stumbled
AWS hopes that its new WorkSpace VDI service will appeal to enterprises with low cost and maintenance

December 2013

Verizon quietly unleashes its LTE monster, tripling 4G capacity in major cities
On the third anniversary of its LTE launch, Verizon is delivering a new 4G network. Over the last few months, it’s been quietly deploying the fastest, highest capacity LTE network in the country.

Meet WISP, the wireless future of Internet service
Most people get Internet service from either a telephone company or a cable company because those providers already provide physical connections to their homes and businesses.A A WISP (wireless Internet service provider) doesn't need to bring wire to your location, making it a good solution for serving rural areas where telcos and cable companies couldn't be bothered to invest.

Study: Data Center Downtime Costs $7,900 Per Minute
Unplanned data center outages are expensive, and the cost of downtime is rising, according to a new study. The average cost per minute of unplanned downtime is now $7,900, up a staggering 41 percent from $5,600 per minute in 2010.

5 Considerations Around Leasing vs Buying a Data Center
Build vs. Buy? Many administrators and data center operators are still asking this question. The reality here is that this is always going to be a bit of a challenge when the decision has to be made.

Google Cloud Compute Goes Live
After running the service in preview mode for over a year, Google is making its IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) Google Compute Engine (GCE) available as a full-fledged commercial service.

Zayo Expands Support of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect
Zayo Group, LLC, (“Zayo”) an international provider of bandwidth infrastructure services, today announced expansion of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect as an Amazon Partner Network (APN) Technology Partner.

Disaster Recovery Site Selection: Factors and Approach
Disaster recovery is an important aspect of a company’s strategy for providing uninterrupted services to its customers and end users. With a robust DR/BCP program in-place, various business outcomes can be achieved.

Ubiquity Eyes Turning Sears Auto Centers into Data Centers
Ubiquity Critical Environments, the data center unit of Sears Holdings, is considering a concept to convert some of its Sears Auto Center stores into data centers.

8 Sure-Fire Ways to Screw Up a Cloud Contract
Cloud licensing's become so complex that it's easy to pay too much or get burned later on. Here are some tips to make sure you're getting your money's worth.

Get Me Outta Here! Avoiding Vendor Lock-In with Cloud-Based Software
You probably know from personal experience how tough it can be to change from one service provider to another. Think about the last time you changed your Internet service or gym membership. It was probably a pain, and there’s a reason.

tw telecom Announces Accelerated Market Expansion
tw telecom inc, a leading national provider of managed services, including Business Ethernet, converged and IP VPN solutions to enterprises across the U.S. and to their global locations, today announced a multi-market expansion that increases its addressable market by expanding its metro fiber footprint approximately 17%.

Cloud Pricing: It's (Really) Complicated
In theory, cloud computing offers a fairly straightforward model for consuming compute and storage resources. Customers request capacity, it is provided by a vendor and it is paid for. Customers should be able to spin up and down resources as they need to and only pay for what they use.

Comcast Xfinity Broadband is now one the largest IPv6 network
Comcast’s Xfinity broadband network — 20.28 million subscribers — is on its way to becoming one of world’s largest IPv6 networks, thanks to a new software upgrade by ARRIS, a cable equipment maker.

Why CIOs Stick with Cloud Computing Despite NSA Snooping Scandal
Explosive revelations in the past six months about the U.S. government's massive cyber-spying activities have spooked individuals, rankled politicians and enraged privacy watchdogs, but top IT executives aren't panicking -- yet.

Data Centers Play Fast and Loose with Reliability Credentials
The Uptime Institute says some data centers are playing fast and loose with its "tiering" system for rating data center reliability, making false claims or at best being economical with the truth about how resilient their facilities are.

November 2013

Risky Business: When Disaster Strikes With No Recovery Plan
With experts estimating the average cost of downtime at $5,000 per minute, many organizations are at significant risk when it comes to the reliability of their data environments.

6 IT Outsourcing Lessons Learned From Healthcare.gov's Troubled Launch
The federal government's recent launch of Healthcare.gov is a stunning example of outsourced IT gone wrong. The multi-contractor project has been riddled with issues and should serve as a reminder to any IT outsourcing customer regarding steps to take to ensure a smooth rollout.

Windstream Hosted Solutions Gains PCI Certification for Cloud and Hosted Data Centers
A Key Success in Advancing Windstream's Cloud Hosting Strategy of Expansion Into New Markets and Regions and Qualifications for Financial, Medical and Government Sectors

Level 3 Launches Cloud Connect Solutions - Quick Facts
Level 3's Cloud Connect Solutions provide private network access to major cloud and data center services to deliver critical enterprise applications and information with greater performance, security and flexibility than the public Internet or other networks.

Comcast Conducts Industry's First Live 1 Terabit Network Trial
Comcast this week announced that in conjunction with Ciena, they've conducted the country's first 1 terabit live network trial, the first time in which live data traffic was carried over a 1Tb/s 16QAM super-channel on an existing, commercial network.

Peak 10 Expands In Atlanta, Seeing A Big Data Opportunity
IT infrastructure provider Peak 10 is adding space in Atlanta, looking to capitalize on predicted high growth in the market. The new location is located on Windward Parkway in Alpharetta’s High Tech Corridor, where Peak 10 will build out three 15,000 square foot phases for three separate data centers.

Disaster Recovery: 10 Lessons from Hurricane Sandy
As Hurricane Sandy tore up the Atlantic coast in late October, 2012, 8.5 million homes and businesses lost power, according to the U.S. Energy Department. The protracted power outages, widespread damage, and lost business wrought by the hurricane—estimated to cost between $30 and $50 billion, taught many companies unfortunate lessons about the importance of disaster recovery planning.

Terremark Data Center Outage Knocks HealthCare.gov Offline
A service outage at a Verizon Terremark data center caused downtime Sunday for HealthCare.gov, the trouble-plagued online insurance marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act.

Time to Get on the Colocation Train Before It Is Too Late
The data center industry is heading toward an inflection point that has significant impact on enterprises. It seems many aren't looking far enough ahead, but the timeline appears to be 12-18 months, which is not that far out! The issue is a typical supply chain issue of supply, demand and timelines.

How to Use Cloud-based Disaster Recovery Tools to Prepare for the Worst
How do you put a value on lost medical records or a client's financial information or proprietary, internal business documents? Losing critical or private data can often result in a company closing its doors for good.

EE pilots 300Mbps 4G in London, using LTE-Advanced Huawei router
The British mobile operator EE turned on a very fast 4G/LTE network in London on Tuesday, with theoretical maximum speeds of 300Mbps. The network is initially live in the Tech City startup hub, where a selected user program will begin in December, and it will be deployed across the capital in 2014.

Windstream Celebrates Opening of Data Center in Nashville
The new 22,000-square-foot, Tier 3-certified facility is the latest expansion in Windstream's nationwide network of data centers, accommodating the company's full suite of cloud computing, data storage and managed services.

Lumos Lights Richmond, Turns Toward Pennsylvania
In a flurry of activity, Virginia-based Lumos Networks released their earnings and provided updates on their ongoing projects in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Since splitting off from nTelos two years ago, Lumos has been moving aggressively to both make better use of the fiber they have and to build out into new adjacent markets.

Global Companies Should Stick to Only Two Data Centers on Each Continent
Most global organizations have "too many data centers in too many countries", according to analyst Gartner, and that in order to cut costs and optimise service delivery, they only need two data centers on each continent they operate in.

Masters of Disasters: IT Survivors of Katrina, Sandy and Other Natural Disasters Share Their DR Tips and Tricks
Natural and manmade disasters are facts of life. Smart IT managers prepare for the worst before trouble hits, so that the businesses and government institutions that rely on IT can resume normal operations as soon as possible.

Don't Live in Fear of Your Cloud Storage Provider Going Under
The announcement last month that cloud storage provider Nirvanix was closing up shop set off a wave of hysteria in the IT world and sparked speculation about the viability of cloud storage as an option for businesses.

New Verizon Broadband Router Supports Data and Voice
Verizon Wireless announced a new broadband router that works over its LTE network and allows voice and data connectivity for the home or small business.

How New Technology Can Boost DR and Business Continuity
One of the hottest conversations many business managers are having is how their organization can use the data center as a key element for their disaster recovery and business continuity strategies.

Rackspace’s New Powerhouse Cloud Rolls Out
Rackspace has re-engineered its cloud for greater speed throughput and reliability. A major part of the upgrade is move to all-solid-state disks (SSDs) in RAID 10 configuration, for a big boost in storage performance and I/O throughput.

Five Steps to Preparing Your Data Center for VDI
Virtualization, at least at the server level, has been in use for some time. Since, the concept has expanded to user, application, network, security, storage, and, of course, desktop virtualization (VDI).

Preparing for Recovery: Four Strategies for Disaster Proofing Data
According to International Data Corporation’s Digital Universe Study, in 2012, less than a fifth of the world’s data was protected, despite 35 percent requiring such actions. Levels of data protection are significantly lagging behind the expansion in volume.

October 2013

Cloud Services Will Be Dominant IT Model by 2019
Nearly 90% (89%) of enterprises are using cloud services todaY, But only 5% of enterprises depend on the outsourced cloud for the bulk of their IT resources...

This is Likely How You Will Buy Cloud Resources Moving Forward
The migration of services delivered through cloud-based resources is causing tectonic shifts across the IT vendor landscape and one area of the market that's been unsure about what it means has been channel resellers.

Cloud Guarantees - Is Your Future Safe with a Third Party?
Cloud computing is at the forefront for many organizations across the world. Experts believe it is the future of IT. Considering all the benefits offered by the cloud, making the transition may appear inevitable to enterprises.

Level 3 introduces SIP-based voice migration option for businesses
A multi-location business can connect more of its sites to the new service via a native PRI (primary rate interface) handoff capability--a common business service element most businesses already know and use.

5 Ways to Disaster-Proof Your Data Backups
The anniversary of Hurricane Sandy reminds us that businesses can fall victim to the forces of nature. Whether it's a blaze that burns through your office, or a flash flood that sends water coursing through your server room, disasters can hit at any time, and the most likely casualty is your data.

NSA Spying Fiasco Sending Customers Overseas
The spectacle of National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposing the covert spying nature of US federal officials has sent ripple waves through the technology industry -- especially in the outsourcing arena.

QTS Realty IPO May Raise Up to $422 Million
QTS Realty Trust hopes to raise as much as $422 million when it goes public through an IPO, which is currently scheduled for Oct. 9.

The Importance of Disaster Recovery Testing
Today's organizations face a multitude of choices when it comes to building a disaster recovery (DR) plan to protect their data and provide business continuity in the case of outages and other disasters.

Car companies are now cloud companies: BMW to have 10M connected cars in 5 years
There are around 3 million vehicles that are directly connected to BMW’s data centers, said BMW’s VP of IT Infrastructure Mario Mueller at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference in London on Wednesday.

The HIPAA Final Rule and Staying Compliant in the Cloud
As healthcare and patient data move to the cloud, HIPAA compliance issues follow. With many vendors, consultants, internal and external IT departments at work, the question of who is responsible for compliance comes up quite often.

Cloud Shines Brightly as Future of Disaster Response IT
While awareness of disaster is near instantaneous, from tornados in Alabama to a tsunami in Banda Aceh, cloud computing is a technology that makes achievable the desire to help in a way inconceivable a decade earlier.

4 Ways CIOs Can to Respond to a Service Outage
Nasdaq and Intermedia are among the latest firms to suffer lengthy -- and public -- service outages. Eventually, the same thing will happen to you. Here are four key lessons IT leaders can learn from others' mistakes.

IT's 8 Biggest Frenemies
You probably have a good idea about who your enemies are. But what about your frenemies?

The Fastest ISPs of 2013
Thanks to PCMag readers who constantly tested their Internet Service Providers (ISPs), we can tell you which services to subscribe to and where to live in the U.S., Canada, and across the globe to get the fastest Internet speeds.

Why IT's Economics Revolution Is More Than OpEx and CapEx
Many view cloud economics as a question of operating expenses versus capital expenses -- or, more simply, the cost to rent versus the cost to buy. It's more complicated than that, though, since the cloud forces organizations to more thoroughly examine all costs associated with providing IT services.

How to Protect Against Your Cloud Storage Provider's Demise
When storing data in the cloud, facilitating the migration of cloud storage should factor into the overall contingency plan.

September 2013

QTS Confirms Plans for IPO, Major Expansion
QTS (Quality Technology Services) has confirmed plans for a $300 million initial public offering (IPO) that will help fund an expansion of the company’s footprint, focused on its massive data centers in Dallas, Richmond and Atlanta.

Windstream Adds Another Data Center - Analyst Blog
In an attempt to expand its line-up of data centers, U.S. telecom company Windstream Corporation ( WIN ) will set up a new data center at the Franklin, Tennessee campus just outside Nashville.

7 IT Mistakes That Will Get You Fired
There are lots of reasons for instant termination. Failure to fulfill your obligation to protect your employer's digital assets or abusing your vast powers for your own nefarious ends are two sure ways to end up on the unemployment line. You could be fired for opening your mouth at the wrong time or not opening your mouth at the right one.

The HIPAA Final Rule and Staying Compliant in the Cloud
As healthcare and patient data move to the cloud, HIPAA compliance issues follow. With many vendors, consultants, internal and external IT departments at work, the question of who is responsible for compliance comes up quite often. Not all organizations are equipped or experienced to meet the HIPAA compliance rules by themselves.

QTS Expands Already Massive Atlanta Metro Facility
The QTS Atlanta Metro facility keeps getting bigger. The company recently completed and commissioned 70,000 square feet of raised floor in its Atlanta Metro facility, in support of the expansion of existing customers and data center demand in the Atlanta market.

Why Every IT Organization Should Consider Cloud-Integrated Storage
You've probably already heard that storage capacity needs are growing rapidly, with IDC projecting the digital universe will exceed 40,000 exabytes (40 billion terabytes) by 2020.

The Telco Cloud Dilemma
One of the notable presenters at this week’s Cloud World Forum in Brazil was from telco giant Telefónica. This Spain-based powerhouse has extensive interests across Latin America as well as North America and Europe, and owns everything from undersea cables up to managed services.

London Internet Exchange Enters U.S. Market With EvoSwitch in Virginia
The London Internet Exchange (LINX) is entering the U.S. market, opening a neutral interconnection service in the EvoSwitch WDC1 data center in Manassas, Virginia.

PRISM Could Ruin Businesses That Rely on the Cloud
A report [PDF] from The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has revealed how the domestic spying system could cause the U.S. cloud computing industry to lose between $22 and $35 billion over the next three years.

SIP Trunks Aren't Just for PSTN Access
IT managers often think of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks as a lower cost alternative to the T1/PRI trunks they use to access the PSTN. But SIP trunks provide flexible access to many more communications services than just the PSTN.

QTS Adds Disaster Recovery Services
Data center provider QTS (Quality Technology Services) has launched two disaster recovery services designed to provide network availability in the event of virtual or physical server disruptions.

No, Your Data Isn't Secure in the Cloud
While online data storage services claim your data is encrypted, there are no guarantees. With recent revelations that the federal government taps into Internet search engines, email and cloud service providers, any myth about data "privacy" on the Internet has been busted.

How to Tell Whether an IT Vendor Sells 'Solutions' or Just Products
There's a subtle but important difference between IT products and IT solutions. Both have their rightful place, but buying a product when you need a solution--and vice versa--can be costly. Unfortunately, product-pushers aren't always easy to spot.

August 2013

Who Can Pry Into Your Cloud-based Data?
Can anyone access the data that you trust to the safekeeping of a cloud-computing vendor? It's a good question, made all the more relevant by the revelations regarding the National Security Agency's Prism program. So how can you best address these issues in your contract with your cloud vendor?

The CIO’s Role in Cyber Insurance
Cyber insurance can complement a company’s active security measures by providing enterprises with a means for funding a variety of activities in the aftermath of a data breach.

Does Anyone in IT Truly Relax on Vacation?
That IT professionals work on vacation is as obvious as sand on a beach. Some see it as part of the job bargain, and maybe there's something to relish about being indispensable.

PRISM as windfall for non-U.S. cloud providers
If you are a European cloud vendor, you will ride the U.S. NSA data gathering controversy for all its worth. And shame on you if you don’t!

In Disaster Recovery Planning, Don’t Neglect Home Site Restoration
In IT, many of us live by Intel chairman Andy Grove’s famous maxim: “Only the paranoid survive.” When it comes to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR), this is true in spades.

Google, Level 3 land Starbucks deal to boost Wi-Fi speeds
Tech giant Google and Colorado-based Level 3 Communications are replacing AT&T as the Internet service and network provider for Starbucks. A multiyear deal, announced Wednesday, is intended to bolster speeds for the coffee chain's free Wi-Fi service by up to 10 times.

Cloud Computing Alters Thoughts on Disaster Recovery
Cloud computing gives organizations the opportunity to rethink many traditional IT practices, but it may be a particularly good fit for disaster recovery and business continuity.

What the HIPAA Final Rule Means for Data Centers and Cloud Providers
The long-awaited HIPAA Omnibus Final Rule (“Final Rule”), which primarily amends regulations in the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules and breach notification rules, went into effect on March 26, 2013 and the compliance date is fast approaching.

Eleven Points to Consider Before Buying a Data Protection Solution
The term “solution” is not something to use lightly as it refers to a product or set of products that provide the total package. While no single vendor can be the answer to every pain and problem a business encounters, there are important items to consider before making an investment in a data protection solution.

Lumos Networks' strategic data revenues jump to $29.9 million
With more wireless operators expanding their 4G wireless deployments in the next few years, Tim Biltz, CEO of Lumos, said during the earnings call that he expects that the number of clients it serves on each tower site will rise.

If you could actually see Wi-Fi, this is what it would look like
It is remarkable to see Wi-Fi, a technology so core to our modern existence, brought alive by color and illustrations. These five gorgeous visualizations show us how Wi-Fi networks propagate and work in the real world.

Clouds Are Backing Up Clouds, with More Choices on Tap
Enterprises that rely on cloud-based services are getting more options for falling back on another cloud if necessary.

NASA comes under fire for cloud
Audit finds NASA operations could be at risk following with no clear guidance into rolling out cloud services

PRISM could end up harming US cloud market
Report suggests US cloud industry could lose up to 20% of revenues predicted to come in by 2016, as a result of mistrust

Update: Microsoft's Office 365 uptime exceeds 99.9%
In each of the past four quarters, overall uptime for Office 365 has exceeded 99.9%, and Microsoft wants everyone to know it.

Space Weather and the Data Center: The Risk from Solar Storms
Solar flares are a potential threat to critical infrastructure, according to NASA scientists. who say the sun’s vast magnetic field is about to flip, an event that creates an elevated risk of solar activity and “space weather.” A concern for data center providers is the potential for solar storms, which can wreak havoc on infrastructure.

Survey: Five Out of Six Organizations Use or Plan to Use Cloud Storage
Annual cloud adoption survey examines adoption rates, benefits and barriers.

July 2013

Cloud Services Pave the Way for Call Center Growth
When Ray Valentine first started managing technology for major call center providers 20 years ago, you had do everything yourself. "I came up through the old, big, Avaya premise-based heavy iron solutions," Valentine says.

Server Farm Realty Building Data Center for Windstream
Windstream Hosted Solutions is in building mode. Server Farm Realty has broken ground on a new data center for Windstream in Charlotte, a facility first announced earlier this month. This will be Windstream’s fourth Charlotte facility and seventh overall in North Carolina.

What CIOs Need to Consider When Migrating to Cloud Is the Next Big Move
In enterprises across the globe, CIOs are looking cautiously in one direction: up - to the cloud. Migrating to the cloud changes not only the operations of the data center but also the roles of the CIO and IT staff.

A city with two gigabit Internet ISPs, and neither one is Google Fiber
Gigabit Internet service is popping up in all sorts of places, from Google Fiber in Kansas City to major cities like Seattle and even a rural part of Vermont. But a city with two gigabit Internet service is a rare thing indeed.

Lumos Networks Launches 100 Gig Wavelength Services across Mid-Atlantic Network
a leading provider of fiber-based bandwidth infrastructure & IP Services in key mid-Atlantic markets, today launched 100Gbps wavelength services across its entire Mid-Atlantic footprint. We see a migration to 100Gbps across our footprint as necessary to meet the dramatic surge in network traffic.

Apple unveils 18-megawatt solar farm to power cloud data center
Apple plans to build an 18-megawatt solar power plant to power a new data center in Reno. Apple announced the Nevada solar power facility in its 2012 "Environmental Footprint Report."

The Immersion Data Center: The New Frontier of High-Density Computing
As you enter the data center at CGG, the first thing you notice is what’s missing – the noise and the breeze. Instead of rows of air-cooled black cabinets, the room is filled with tanks of liquid coolant, each containing up to 42 servers.

The Cloud: The Most Disruptive Approach to DR/BC
Naturally, businesses are all building good Disaster Recovery and Business Continuance (DR/BC) plans for that inevitable bad day - or are they? According to the Small Business Alliance and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), between 25 and 40 percent of businesses never reopen after a major disaster.

3 Things to Consider Before Buying Into Disaster Recovery as a Service
Vendors offer DRaaS to increase their market share and revenues. Enterprises, especially small businesses are interested in the inexpensive yet comprehensive DR solution DRaaS offers. There are cautionary notes and considerations too that demand the smart businesss attention before and after buying into DRaaS.

Enterprises Starting to Trust Cloud for More Sensitive Apps
Trusting the cloud to handle sensitive transactions and security services isn't for every enterprise, but organizations from banks to app developers are starting to give it a try.

Rackspace Bringing Hybrid Cloud to CERN
Rackspace Hosting has been pushing the hybrid computing message, and CERN is kicking the tires. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will be relying on Rackspace’s Open Hybrid Cloud to help it discover the origins of the universe.

What happens when the world turns into one giant brain
Currently much of the big data being churned out is merely exhaust. But imagine the possibilities once we figure out how to produce and process better data on the fly on a global scale. Call it Big Inference.

FCC Wasting Phone Subsidy Money, Study Says
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on telephone subsidies, with some rich areas of the country receiving up to US$23,000 per line per year from the agency's Universal Service Fund, according to a new study.


June 2013

One lesson from the NSA scandal: Find out where your cloud provider’s data centers are located
As the recent NSA scandal has shown, the security of the cloud is not a given. As with real estate, location is critical — and where you data is hosted can determine how safe it is.

RagingWire to Invest $150 Million to Earn Virginia Tax Breaks
RagingWire is making a commitment to invest $150 million and create 50 new jobs at its data center operations in Virginia, allowing the company to qualify for a coveted state sales tax exemption. The company said the sales tax exemption on data center equipment will attract new customers to its Ashburn campus and lower its total cost of ownership.

Know the key legal and security risks in a cloud-computing contract
Enterprises that store data with cloud providers may no longer have physical control over it, but they're still on the hook legally for its protection and security.

Windstream Opens Second Data Center in Virginia
Capitalizing on the growing demand for cloud and managed services, Windstream Hosted Solutions announced it has opened its second enterprise-class data center in Virginia. The new location in McLean joins an existing Windstream data center in Richmond.

SunGard Brings Cloud Service to Disaster Recovery
Can the old guard in business continuity and disaster-recovery services thrive in an era when the companies are looking at new ways to process business data? SunGard Data Systems, with decades of experience in availability services, is feeling the pinch as some business clientele move data to the cloud.

Does Your Cloud Vendor Protect Your Rights?
From time to time, organizations are asked to provide access to data for legal reasons. Those requests can be more complicated when the data is in the cloud. But a new report sheds some light on one critical aspect of such requests.

Going Off The Grid: Delaware Data Center Will Generate its Own Power
There’s a major project brewing in Delaware, with a group called The Data Centers LLC (TDC) planning a sizeable data center near Newark. TDC says it is planning to invest more than $1 billion in the project, with construction alone for the first two phases expected to be around $400 million.

How robots can do more in data centers and lower the costs of operating the cloud
An article from Data Center Knowledge points to things robots can do to increase efficiency in data centers. But hurdles lie ahead, and data centers will still need administrators, the article suggests.

Sears Replaces Retail Stores With Data Centers
Recognizing the world needs less space for retail and more to store data, Sears (SHLD) plans to turn some of Sears and Kmart locations into data centers and disaster recovery spaces.

Does Your Data Center Have A Disaster Plan?
The National Weather Service has its watchful eye on the Eastern Seaboard as the 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season officially kicks off. Does your IT strategy include a disaster plan? Though the waters of last season have long receded, a cloud still lingers over IT operations caught in the storm’s wake and beyond.

Verizon offers VMware Horizon Mobile virtual workspace to Android users
We'd heard talk long, long ago of Verizon hooking up with VMware for a virtual workspace on its smartphones, and we can at last say that it's more than just chatter. Now, Verizon's business customers can buy VMware's Horizon Mobile for their Android devices. The solution gives corporate phones a common desktop with encrypted apps, data and policies that can't be touched from the device's regular environment.


May 2013

Not Quite Ready to Live in the Cloud
Google’s impressive Chromebook Pixel is just the latest in a series of devices which are trying to entice users to compute in a different way. With (almost) ubiquitous connectivity, and an increasing reliance upon web-based services for mail, calendars, document creation and more, might we be reaching a point at which the browser really can be our means of accessing everything?

Choosing a Cloud Protection Gateway Provider
As the proliferation of the cloud continues, Cloud Protection Gateways are increasingly being discussed as a way to address security issues surrounding cloud adoption. Whatever stage of cloud adoption your organization is in, a thorough vetting of the different gateways available will be important to address key security issues...

New QTS Lab Will Advance High-Security Federal Clouds
QTS (Quality Technology Services) wants to help federal agencies get comfortable with cloud computing, and is dedicating some of its data center space toward this goal. The company, in conjunction with i2 Sentinel Associates, has set up a testbed inside its massive data center campus in Richmond, Virginia ...

Companies spending less on office space thanks to cloud
The overlap between cloud computing and enterprise mobility is becoming ever more pronounced. And according to a new survey from Rackspace Hosting, the proliferation of cloud computing, and mobilising workforces means that companies are likely to spend far less on office space...

How Do You Choose Your Cloud Provider?
If you have been thinking how to choose your public cloud vendor you are not the only one. There are hundreds of offerings that you can choose from and comparing those can be a cumbersome exercise...

How to protect your company against vanishing cloud services
If startup history tells us anything, it’s that the majority of cloud services launched in the past few years won’t be around forever. The fact that they just vanish into the ether makes the problem quite perplexing...

Cloud SLAs 'Fall Short,' Says User Advocacy Group
Service level agreements in the cloud computing market are skewed in the favor of providers, can be difficult for customers to decipher and in some cases are rigid and non-negotiable. Those are some of the findings from the Cloud Standards Customer Council, a user advocacy group that recently reviewed SLAs from some of the industry's largest providers...

Equinix Unveils New ‘Crown Jewel’ for Ashburn Campus
Equinix keeps growing in northern Virginia, expanding the largest Internet exchange in North America with the largest facility yet on an already immense campus. The new DC11 facility will support growing network traffic in Ashburn, which shows no signs of slowing as the integral East Coast network hub...

How Cloud Computing Has Empowered The End User
Until the last couple of years, organizations have been focusing technologies around corporate efficiency, growth capabilities and the ability for business continuity. Of course, these are all still important. However, with the advancements around cloud computing, WAN technologies and virtualization, a new trend has begun to emerge...

The Billion Dollar Data Centers
Your iTunes downloads, Facebook posts and YouTube videos travel through these small rural communities en route to your desktop and mobile device. The growth of the digital economy is not just reshaping how we use the Internet, but creating a new data center geography in which armadas of servers now reside in suburbs or rural towns, often outnumbering the humans in these communities...

The CIA and the Cloud
If your company mistrusts the security of the cloud, it might want to take a look at what The Company is doing. "The Company" is a term that insiders have long used to refer to the CIA. Is there any organization that takes security more seriously? Perhaps, but probably not within the Fortune 500. And yet the CIA appears to be moving to the cloud...

Broadsoft CEO Explains Why Communications is Moving to the Cloud
You might not know BroadSoft if you're not in the telecommunications space. But if you use a hosted unified communications service from a provider like Verizon, Swisscom, or any of about 500 other telcos around the world, you may be a BroadSoft customer without realizing it...

The Cloud Delivers a New American Workforce
A new American workforce is emerging. A recent report from Accenture says the number of U.S. workers who are independent (such as freelancers, contractors or temps) is up 6 percent from 1989. Work as we know it is changing...

Ignoring the Harmless Looking “Force Majeure” Clause in a Cloud Agreement?
“Force Majeure” – An event that is a result of the elements of nature, as opposed to one caused by human behavior. This nugget is a common clause in contracts that essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control...

We are all bandwidth hogs now
Last year demand for bandwidth rose by 40 percent, and much of that demand is now coming from all over the world, not just in developed countries...

Companies Gobbling Up Turn-Key Data Center Space
Data center users have leased more than 400,000 square feet of turn-key data center space in recent months, according to a new market survey from real estate firm Avison Young. Despite that strong activity, the market for wholesale data center space continues to face a potential oversupply...

Lumos Networks Launches Metro Richmond With 100 Gig Connectivity
Lumos Networks Corp. (NASDAQ:LMOS) announced plans to build 100 Gig wavelength routes connecting Richmond to Ashburn and Lynchburg in Virginia. These networks are poised to handle the exponential growth in bandwidth as well as the need for superior latency and route diversity...

Verizon CTO: Future Services Will be Based on Four Key Platforms
Future Verizon services will be built on one of four “foundational platforms,” said Verizon Chief Technology Officer Tony Melone. Those four platforms include the company’s 4G LTE network, FiOS, data centers operated under the Terremark name and the company’s global IP backbone...

How Cloud Computing Is Changing IT Organizations
Rather than eliminating corporate IT jobs, cloud computing offers IT professionals opportunities to learn new skills and advance their careers...

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April 2013

Network administrators look to SDN with hope, concern
Some network operators say they need new tools to set up and manage connections in a virtualized world, even if that means adopting software-defined networking technology, which is still in its infancy...

5 Misconceptions of Cloud Software and Virtual Licensing
Are you leaving money on the table by not optimizing your virtual or cloud environment to cut software licensing costs? Don't fall prey to these five common software licensing misconceptions...

The World’s Highest Data Center
High atop the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes, at more than 16,500 feet above sea level, a unique supercomputer brings the heavens into focus. Here, at the world’s highest data center, sits the ALMA Correlator, a powerful system that allows a system of high-altitude antennas separated by up to 16 kilometers to work together as a single giant telescope...

With SIP Trunking the Savings are There But the Transition is Complex
The merits of SIP trunking have been talked about for years and now it looks like businesses are aggressively adopting the technology, lured by striking cost savings and the promise of new functionality that their old phone networks just couldn't support...

Is Cloud-based Backup Right for Long-Term Storage?
Cloud-based backup services, such as Mozy, Carbonite, and IDrive, upload your files to their servers as protection against your losing the originals. This has some big advantages over a local backup. Once set up they're completely automatic. And it's extremely unlikely that the same fire or flood will destroy your computer and your backup...

Gartner predicts the death of the traditional sourcing model by 2015
Gartner’s been gazing at its crystal ball again, and has forecast that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and so forth – will displace more traditional sourcing methods by 2015...

Private cloud mania drives data center expansion, survey says
The desire to implement private cloud infrastructure is among the top priorities for large companies in North America that expect to expand data centers this year or next year...

Shadow IT - The Reality is Here
A recent survey has shown that security policies and rules set down by IT departments are not just being ignored but having a bus driven through them by staff and senior executives, who wish to bring their own device to work so that they can do more, work smarter and be in touch all of the time...

Level 3 Promotes Chief Operating Officer Jeff Storey to CEO Job
Level 3 Communications Inc. (LVLT), an operator of global fiber-optic network, promoted Chief Operating Officer Jeff Storey to the top job, filling a role vacated by longtime Chief Executive Officer Jim Crowe...

SunGard Launches Managed Vaulting for NetApp
SunGard Availability Services has debuted a new service that enables end-to-end protection of data for customers with NetApp storage in their primary data-center environments...

Windstream Celebrates Grand Opening of McLean Data Center
The McLean data center was designed to meet the growing demand for cloud-based and dedicated managed services. With 45,000 square feet of raised floor space, the facility is capable of meeting the most stringent, around-the-clock requirements of today's businesses...

QTS Receives Honorable Mention for Its Isolated Rack Cooling Project
The isolated rack cooling duct delivers in-rack cooling to installed equipment, resulting in energy and cost savings. QTS was recognized under the Audacious Idea award category for its invention...

Cloud WAN Optimization Holds the Key to Driving Enterprise RaaS Adoption
In a constant effort to improve customers’ cloud experience and increase adoption, cloud providers are starting to introduce WAN optimization capabilities into their service offerings. This technology will allow organizations to realize significant performance improvements for cloud applications...

How Cloud Computing Helps Cut Costs, Boost Profits
Companies that are moving select IT capabilities to the cloud are saving money and increasing profits, which they are putting back into the business to increase headcount, boost wages and drive innovation...

Moving Your Company’s Application or Service into the Cloud?
A number of recent studies indicate that more enterprises will use cloud services in 2013 than ever before. This fact is not lost on many software vendor clients, who are transitioning many of their on-premises products into cloud-based offerings...

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March 2013

Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center
If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center...

Latency is a pain, and these researchers say they have the cure
here are two main things that can cause a real-time web service to be not-so-real-time: insufficient bandwidth and excessive latency. Bandwidth is an ISP issue, butlatency — the time it takes for your computer to contact a server and/or get a response — is largely down to the way the internet is engineered...

HIPAA and PCI Compliance Are Not Interchangeable
When thinking about compliance, many companies assume PCI DSS is interchangeable with HIPAA. Otherwise it is assumed that the gap between the two is small. This ignores that HIPAA and PCI DSS compliance protect different types of information, with different audit guidelines, safeguard requirements, and consequences for non-compliance...

Are There Other "as-a-Service" Cloud Offerings?
As already described in the previous few articles NIST defines three different service models for the cloud - IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. However if you look at the Wikipedia article about cloud computing you will notice that there are quite a few more "as-a-service" models mentioned the...

The Vatican Library Goes Digital
As the cardinals of the Roman Catholic church gather to elect a new pope, there’s also major change underway in another part of the Vatican.  As one of the oldest libraries in the world, the Vatican Apostolic Library holds many of the rarest and most valuable documents in existence, including the 42...

The Build or Buy Decision is All About Risk
Build or Buy?  The real answer is elusive.  Finding what is right for your enterprise is about understanding risk. A data center has a very specialized design. The build vs. buy decision isn’t about KW or cost per square foot. Sorry, I know a lot of dialog in this space goes right to looking for the one technical decision that will lead...

70% of 'Private Clouds' aren't Really Clouds at all
If an enterprise data center has a highly virtualized environment, a web portal for business users to request and access virtual machines and a method for tracking how many of those resources are being used... that's not quite...

Cloud Migration Without Integration is a Dead End
Today there is a war being fought between Amazon AWS and the enterprise over the future direction of the IT industry.  Amazon promotes the public cloud as a destination, a primary and permanent facility for a company’s IT infrastructure; while enterprises today are mostly interested in cloud as a secondary...

'Rogue Clouds' Giving IT Staffs Nightmares
Cloud computing is increasingly being adopted by companies around the world, but IT managers say "rogue cloud implementations" in which business managers sign up for services without getting IT approval is among their biggest challenges...

 

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February 2013

7 Reasons to Move Disaster Recovery to the Cloud
It's well-known that disaster recovery is vital to sustaining a business. Organizations simply cannot function without their IT systems. That first wave of DR solutions dating back to the 1970s created a safety net for computer systems, but still involved days of downtime...

The Changing Enterprise WAN in the Era of the Cloud
Enterprise IT managers today are burdened with multiple challenges. Their workforce is more and more globally distributed, with fewer of their users than ever located at headquarters, and an increasing proportion overseas. At the same time, most applications and servers...

Growing Confidence in Cloud Security
Take Len Peters, CIO at Yale University, who has undertaken a cost-benefit analysis of cloud-based services in comparison to on-premises software purchases, finding that not only are unit costs less for the kind of software-as-a-service (SaaS) he's most interested in, but that SaaS can also further the compliance and security goals the IT department has long espoused...

Peak 10 Cloud Validated for Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance
National IT infrastructure and cloud solutions provider Peak 10 announced that its data centers and cloud infrastructure have been validated for PCI DSS 2.0 Level 1 compliance. The company recently underwent a rigorous audit by an independent Quality Security Assessor (QSA) to ensure that it meets best practices and security controls needed to keep credit card data safe and secure during transit, processing and storage...

6 Hidden Costs of Cloud and How to Avoid Them
As organizations flock to the cloud—94 percent of enterprises are at least discussing cloud or cloud services—they are encountering a host of hidden costs. These costs can be avoided with a bit of planning...

IT Shifts From Owning to Outsourcing Data Center Space
n the top 20 markets in the U.S., which include Northern Virginia, New York, Boston, Seattle and Silicon Valley, there is a total of 22.1 million square feet of data centeroperational space, according to 451 Research. Operational space is revenue-producing space in a data center...

The states with the most data centers are also the most disaster-prone
As we saw with Hurricane Sandy, natural disasters can wreak havoc on data centers and the companies that rely on them. And unless we start distributing more of our data load to safer areas, we may need to brace for more of the same.  Internet companies build data centers across...

CenturyLink savvisdirect unveils AppGrid cloud utility service
As more traditional telecom service providers are moving to offer cloud utility services, CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) has announced its move into that segment with its new AppGrid private cloud service from its savvisdirect unit, launched last year...

'Rogue Clouds' Giving IT Staffs Nightmares
Cloud computing is increasingly being adopted by companies around the world, but IT managers say "rogue cloud implementations" in which business managers sign up for services without getting IT approval is among their biggest challenges...

 

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January 2013

Deploying the Cloud? Make 2013 the Year to Do It Right
It's no secret that the cloud is growing at an exponential rate. By 2016, two-thirds of the world's server workloads will exist in the cloud. But according to Cisco's 2012 Cloud Index, less than half of server workloads currently run in the cloud...

QTS Acquires Herakles to Expand into Sacramento
QTS (Quality Technology Services) has significantly expanded its footprint in California, acquiring the Herakles data center, the company said today. The Herakles facility is a 92,000 square foot Tier III data center in Sacramento, with 52,600 square feet of raised floor space and 9 megawatts of power capacity...

Disaster Recovery Is Not Business Continuity
A common theme in the world of data backup is the confusion of business continuity with disaster recovery. When it comes to protecting your data, it’s important to understand that these are two different concepts. The misunderstanding of the terms could result in organizations being left at a significant risk due to inadequate planning...

North Carolina’s Data Center Corridor: From Fiber to Servers
Catawba County which is about an hour’s drive north of Charlotte in western North Carolina, might seem an unlikely technology hub. But it was an early beneficiary of the Internet boom, as manufacturers of fiber optic cabling became the region’s largest employers in the late 1990s. Commscope and Corning each employ more than 1,000 workers here, placing them among the region’s largest employers.

Outlook 2013: Enterprise Will Seek a Better Network to the Cloud
In 2012, much of the industry was focused on what's going inside the data center to enable cloud computing. As we move into 2013 and beyond, enterprise IT will need to consider the network that connects the data centers - particularly how these inter-data center networks need to change to support new cloud use cases and associated network requirements for bandwidth scalability

WAN Technologies Help Data Centers Grow and Evolve
To many, cloud computing and WAN utilization can be considered synonymous. More organizations are seeing the direct benefits of moving towards a cloud platform. Whether they’re trying to reduce their internal hardware footprint, or are trying to distribute their data...

IT Shifts From Owning to Outsourcing Data Center Space
In the top 20 markets in the U.S., which include Northern Virginia, New York, Boston, Seattle and Silicon Valley, there is a total of 22.1 million square feet of data center operational space, according to 451 Research. Operational space is revenue-producing space in a data center...

Why Data Center Managers Shouldn’t Feel Threatened by Colocation
Colocation has been a viable option for a long time, yet some data center managers fear that it can be a threat to their job security. I’d like to spend a few minutes listing some reasons why colocation should be considered a part of any healthy data center strategy for all enterprises...

The Top 10 Data Center Images of 2012
The data center is ready for its close up. In 2012 we saw a welcome focus on the hidden beauty of data center technology, highlighted by several developments in a single week. On Oct. 10, Prentice Hall published The Art of the Data Center, a collection of photos and interviews of some of the world’s most unique IT facilities, curated by Cisco IT architect Douglas Alger. A week later, Google...

Using Cloud for Disaster Recovery
Use of cloud for DR solutions is becoming more common, even the organizations which are not using cloud for mission critical production applications are moving towards using cloud for application DR...

 

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Featured Position Papers...

 March 2011... Why is Google Blocking My Email?
November 2010... Disaster Recovery in the Cloud?
October 2010... SIP Trunking - Why does it sound so complicated?
May 2010...Who wants portable public IP addresses?
April 2010...We know what the cloud is - but is it the technology equivalent of global warming?
 

Podcasts...

SIP Trunking - This podcast will focus on the technology around SIP Trunking.
SAS 70 Type II Audits and Security Implications - The topic of this podcast is SAS 70 Type II Audits.
Behavior-based Network IDS - This podcast will focus on the technology around the Behavior-based Network IDS.