Howard C. Berkowitz is Chief Technology Officer of Gett Communications, where he says he plays doctor, both directly ministering to networks and also playing a physician on advanced systems for clinical medicine. Not limiting himself to the challenges of computers in medicine, he also is using medical and biological paradigms to deal with the complexity of modern networks. He has a special interest in applying infectious disease epidemiology to the problems of cybernetic disease, such as worms and virus.

His interests include high-availability and scalability both in the Internet and life-critical medical systems. His most recent IETF work is RFC4098 on BGP control plane convergence, and he is most involved with the new OPSEC working group on ISP security. Howard authored or coauthored of several RFCs in IP addressing and international standards in performance testing. In the Internet Research Task Force, he has worked on requirements for the successor to BGP and works with international operations forums such as NANOG, ARIN, and RIPE. He is developing a seminar on ISP core security for a major networking company.

Howard’s latest book is Building Service Provider Networks. His previous books include the WAN Survival Guide, which deals with making choices about which service level agreements are needed and how to select technologies to meet them. His other books are Designing Addressing Architectures for Routing and Switching, and Designing Routing and Switching Architectures for Enterprise Networks. In addition, he has written dozens of articles for the industry press and spoken at numerous trade shows and user groups. He is the author of the networking chapter in Harvey Deitel’s widely used textbook on operating systems.