ONUG Social Compact: Building Trust and Collaboration in the IT Community

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the relationship between IT professionals and their networks is pivotal. ONUG stands at the forefront of this dynamic, fostering a unique social compact with its IT professional members. This compact is rooted in trust, agnosticism towards suppliers, and a commitment to the IT consumer community. A Trusted and Supplier-Agnostic Brand ONUG’s primary commitment is to serve as a trusted and supplier-agnostic brand. This principle is central to our operations, ensuring that our members receive unbiased, well-rounded perspectives on the…

The Goals, Barriers, and Why Now is the Time to Invest in Network Hyperautomation

To excel in today’s economy, enterprise leaders are focused on accomplishing more with less. The accelerated pace of business transformation in the past four years has only added to the complexity of these goals. Today, with sprawling hybrid, multi-vendor, multi-domain, multi-cloud environments making up the backbone of leading enterprise networks, a focus on hyperautomation is crucial. Even after establishing the goals of an enterprise’s hyperautomation transition, the approach network teams and leadership take to accomplish these goals can lead to differing degrees of success. Hyperautomation…

The Business Cycle of Tech Consumption: The Need for Design Patterns and New Operating Models

In recent years, the enterprise tech sector has witnessed a unique cycle of overconsumption. This surge in technological investments and acquisitions isn’t merely a trend; it reflects the rapid digitization of business processes and the indispensable nature of tech infrastructure today. But like any cycle, there is an inevitable shift towards optimization after this period of overconsumption. Today, businesses are pivoting towards grand transformation projects that fuse the cloud’s agility with on-prem resources, integrating Network, Security, OT, and IT into seamless platforms. These transformative steps…

We Need Design Patterns in the Enterprise Cloud Era

In a world driven by rapid technological advancements, network engineers have found themselves traversing the unfamiliar terrain of cloud infrastructure and its integration with on-prem systems. For over five years, this journey has been likened to a trek through a vast, challenging desert, primarily due to the nature of cloud offerings by service providers. The Unique Cloud Landscape Most cloud service providers have presented us with proprietary methods to integrate with their platforms. While innovation is the lifeblood of progress, the unique approaches adopted by…

Show Me the Money: Network Engineers Usher in a New Era of Cloud Integration

“Show me the money!” – The iconic line from Jerry Maguire isn’t just a catchy phrase; it embodies the pursuit of value and success. Much like the sports agent in the movie sought to revolutionize the industry, network engineers are revolutionizing the cloud landscape, ushering in a new era of operational models that bridge cloud infrastructure and on-prem solutions. Two New Operational Models The CCoE Model: Help Me Help You Just as Jerry Maguire used the phrase “help me help you” to show his clients…

What Is Network as a Service or NaaS?

The term “Network as a Service” (NaaS) has been gaining traction in the IT services industry as a way to deliver enterprise WAN services virtually on a subscription basis. However, it’s important to understand its specific context to fully grasp its functionality. One prevalent interpretation sees NaaS in the context of the “network cloud,” where communication service providers deliver connectivity services and additional value-added services using an API-based, flexible, elastic, and on-demand paradigm. The Concept of “Network Cloud” Under the network cloud paradigm, NaaS is…

Spotlight on Key Trends and Insights from ONUG Spring 2023

The recently concluded ONUG Spring 2023 in Dallas was a resounding success, marked by insightful discussions, vibrant networking, and a deep dive into emerging trends and practices. The keynotes by Merck and Cigna were standout moments of the conference. Merck’s talk provided unique insights into leveraging technology to optimize operations within the pharmaceutical sector, while Cigna gave a compelling presentation on the power of data analytics and personalized customer experiences in the health services industry. Nick Lippis and Dr. Alex Shulman kicked off the conference…

Ladies and Gentlemen: Please Welcome the Cloud Network Engineer and Team

We are all in the process of building the most powerful communication infrastructure the world has seen. It is built upon a programmable network infrastructure that delivers on demand capacity and is cloud delivered. It’s the combination of cloud native and networking technologies. Why cloud native? Just look at 5G and the wide range of Network as a Service or NaaS offerings; they are built with cloud native technologies and APIs.   This new infrastructure promises to provide choices and options for corporations to accelerate their…

Application-Centric Networking for the Modern Enterprise Era

The modern enterprise has applications and services that are distributed across on-prem, multicloud and intelligent edge environments. By 2025, 75% of the enterprise data will be created and processed at the edge. The enterprise application users are themselves becoming mobile with the hybrid work paradigm gaining ground. These drastically shifting needs of applications and users are not addressable with traditional models of networking, including traditional SDN solutions. This leads to increased pressure on the NetOps and CloudOps teams. Without the ability to provision networking for…

The Growing and Evolving Role of Today’s Networking Professional

As businesses evolve to meet customer needs and satisfy the demands of a remote workforce, cloud computing adoption has grown at a record pace. With forecasted market size growth in cloud computing rising from 545.8B in 2022 to a market size of 1,240.9B in 2027, the demand for networking expertise is growing. Today’s enterprise requires networking professionals who have the skills to adeptly provision, implement, process, analyze and secure the cloud infrastructure. As cloud adoption soars, how has the role of the networking professional changed,…