Answering questions at the Internet Association's Virtuous Circle conference last week, Secretary Kerry presented the U.S. Department of State's effort to prioritize global digital economy issues abroad in order to reflect the growing importance of these issues in both economic and foreign policy. The State Department has made real progress on this initiative in the last year and hopes to continue our momentum going forward. more
I'm not sure that most people understand the extent to which our online experience has moved to the cloud -- and this movement to the cloud means we're using a lot more bandwidth than in the recent past. A huge number of online functions now reside in the cloud, when only a few years ago, a lot of processing was done on our computers. Take the example of Twitter, where I keep an account to upload a copy of my blog every day. more
Congestion. Traffic. Two words that draw a visceral response, whether you are commuting to work or managing a network. Managing data traffic used to be easy. Everything was housed in centralized data centers, and all traffic was routed through big, dedicated, effective but expensive "pipes" -- Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) links. When all the applications are at the data center, it makes sense to build private access for all traffic. more
This year Black Friday online sales reached $1 billion for the first time. Of course, Cyber Monday is the busiest e-commerce day of them all. Sales for Cyber Monday reached $1.5 billion this year, a 30 percent increase from 2011... Website providers have been moving to cloud computing so they can instantly scale to meet increased traffic. But what happens when everyone needs to scale at the same time? more
Software-defined networking (SDN) itself represents a deconstructed view of current switching and routing architectures providing the abstractions of control from dataplane. With this newfound control, the industry is leveraging multiple virtualization strategies to build out public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures, delivering multiple new application services to the market. more
Cloud computing is on the rise. International Data Corp. predicts a $195 billion future for public cloud services in just four years. That total is for worldwide spending in 2020 - more than twice the projection for 2016 spending ($96.5 billion). As a result, companies are flocking to both large-scale and niche providers to empower cloud adoption and increase IT efficacy. The problem? Without proper management and oversight, cloud solutions can end up underperforming, hampering IT growth or limiting ROI. more
Last month, the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA) announced our Open Data Hub, a resource that's meant to boost transparency, trust, and data availability to help researchers, industry, and society realize a sustainable digital economy. It is essentially our answer to the challenge recognized across the sector: that the lack of reliable data is one of the most foundational issues we face in creating a sustainable ICT ecosystem. more