Media-Insert Communications

Overcoming latency: Witch WAN for data acceleration?

The witches have used WAN Optimization in the past, but they have found that it doesn’t live up to their expectations.

Halloween is here again, and the witches are hard at work. Yet, their Wide Area Networks are suffering from jitter and packet loss caused by the specter of latency. It’s more trick than treat – even when working remotely, operations are hindered by slow WANs. Backing up and restoring data takes ages to complete, making disaster recovery and service continuity hard to achieve.

The three witches have decided to meet again, but their autonomous brooms have also been hit by technical errors. They rely very much on being able to access the Internet, virtual private networks (VPNs), edge computing and cloud networks. The war in Ukraine is adding an additional challenge, so the witches need to discuss how to implement Secure Access Service Edge (SASE).

Read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications. Published by Data Center Dynamics, and bylined to David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks.

Addressing Connectivity Uncertainty for the Connected Car

There are a range of factors that will be crucial for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs).

Among them is 5G connectivity, automation and electrification. They are converging to transform the automotive industry – enabling and enhancing, for example, the connected car. An introduction to a TU-Automotive webinar, which was held in February 2022, and which was sponsored by Infovista went on to add: “From self-driving prototypes on private networks in mines and ports to connected mobility applications that enhance user experiences and enable new business models, the value potential is enormous. Wireless connectivity, however, has gaps and performance variability that, if not well managed, can impact application performance and reliability.”

So, what has changed over the last 2 years – beyond the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, which also caused disruption? To answer this question and others, we spoke to Jack Palmer, senior consultant in Frost and Sullivan’s mobility practice, and Magnus Gunnarsson, Ericsson’s head of connected vehicle portfolio. Key to the discussion were the challenges of delivering connected mobility applications in 2022, including how to avoid connectivity issues impacting customer experience and critical application performance.

Read the complete article on TU Automotive, or on Urgent Communications.

Client: InformaTech, published by TU Automotive 16th September 2022; Also published by Urgent Communications on 20th September 2022.

 

Healthcare organisations: Invest in network upgrades or WAN acceleration?

With data volumes increasing, healthcare organisations are having to handle, move and back-up growing amounts of data.

Even though there is a shift to mobile networks, SD-WANs and to edge computing, there is still a need to find ways to analyse, securely back up, and restore terabytes of data from a wide array of different formats – from X-rays to MRI scans. Read the complete article...

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications. Published by Health Tech World on 6th September 2022, and by-lined to David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks.

Changing payments: Growing mobile - Commerce Opportunities Post-pandemic

During the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, e-commerce has accelerated right across the globe - to the extent that Econsultancy.com believes it’s a trend that’s hard to ignore. This is particularly since consumers shopped with increased frequency online out of necessity. Subsequently, lockdowns and stay-at-home orders also forced brands to rapidly change their strategies. Companies that hadn’t paid much attention to e-commerce and to m-commerce, or were only just beginning to embrace digital transformation, now found themselves having to transform their operations to both stay afloat and compete with rivals. Growing mobile commerce also spurred on the growth of mobile payments.

Strongest trends in 2021

According to Econsultancy.com’s ‘Stats roundup: the impact of Covid-19 on ecommerce’, “App Annie’s State of Mobile 2021 report has revealed that the total time spent by Android users in shopping apps globally came to more than 100 billion hours in 2021. This is up from just under 85 billion in 2020. This means that the amount of time spent in shopping apps globally has more than doubled since 2018, when Android users spent 48.7 billion hours using retail apps.

Grow your mobile commerce opportunities, read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bango Plc. Author: Graham Jarvis. Published by Digitalisation World in June/July 2022. 

WAN acceleration: Why cloud automation isn’t enough in 2022

David Trossell, Bridgeworks CEO, features in this ITPro Portal about the increasing need for technology to support cloud computing initiatives in 2022.

For a number of years, every company and every person has become increasingly dependent on cloud computing in its many disguises. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation in many organisations, aided by work from home orders; and stay at home orders have created shifts in purchasing behaviour, away from the High Street or Main Street to e-commerce.

Brian McHugh writes, in his blog for ‘IT Automation Without Boundaries’, on Gartner’s IT Automation Trends for 2022 for Advanced Systems Concepts: “The pandemic has permanently disrupted the way we work, shop and access services. In response, enterprise organisations will continue to shift towards digital-first business models and cloud-native operations in 2022, with big implications for IT automation.”

Read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bridgeworks Ltd. Originally published in IT Pro Portal, which has morphed into IT Pro. Published circa. 30th March 2022. 

Expanding your IT’s maturity for strategic growth in 2022

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation and the need for IT departments to adapt to the working from home environment. While in recent months there has been a call from large corporates for the return of their staff to the office, many people have continued to work from their home offices. Some organizations have realized the benefits of a remote working culture, such as the ability to scale back on expensive offices, while others are adopting a hybrid approach that allows people to commute occasionally to the office and work from home most of the time.

Infor-Tech Research Group says, “If the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that organizations need their IT departments to survive and thrive in today’s digital economy. This has now paved the way for IT leaders like yourself to expand on your department’s maturity level and move out of a supportive role toward a more strategic role, enabling growth within your organization. The challenge then becomes, how do you move up the maturity ladder?”

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bridgeworks Ltd. Originally published by IT Pro Portal, which has morphed into IT Pro. 6th January 2022.

The Push for Digital Transformation in Schools

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for change for many organisations, and schools haven’t been left out of the push it has created for digital transformation and online learning. Although now over, school closures “drove multi-generational digital upskilling in schools. A study published on 26th April 2021 by education and assessment company Pearson reveals the extent to which the pandemic has helped to improve tech capabilities among the teaching workforce.”

Read the complete article.

Written for, and published by Teach-Now on 12th August 2021.

Post-Brexit: how has data protection compliance changed?

While much of The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) have been incorporated into UK law, it’s still important to consider what has changed in terms of how companies – particularly UK-based ones – ensure compliance to data protection regulations. It was argued in 2017 by Index Engines that GDPR puts personal data back in the hands of citizens. This raises the question: “Does this still apply?”

No matter what has changed, one challenge will remain: organisations’ ability to find business and legal-critical information within their vast unstructured data stores. Then there are the decisions about when to delete and where to store it, when to modify and rectify it. This is a complex issue now involving multiple petabytes of data, and organisations have no real understanding of what their unstructured data contains. With this top of mind, there is arguably a need for Wide Area Network (WAN) acceleration to gain the ability to find and move data around at high speed by mitigating latency and packet loss. This works to provide quicker data access and retrieval.

Read the complete article. 

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bridgeworks Ltd, featuring David Trossell - CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks. Published by Information Age on 25th August 2021. Author: Graham Jarvis. This article was also originally published on IT Pro Portal, which has morphed into IT Pro magazine.

EVs are First Step in Auto Insurance Transformation

Despite a slump in car sales during the pandemic, ING Group expects care sales to rebound by 8% in 2021.

However, EV insurance premiums are typically higher than those of other cars, demonstrating that they are riskier for insurers than being bound by a policy for a comparable ICE vehicle. This is because EVs are more expensive to repair – few workshops are qualified to fix them, parts are costly and unibody construction techniques lead to more cars being written off following low-speed crashes.

Nonetheless, David Williams, managing director, underwriting and technical services at AXA, finds that there has been an increase in the take-up of EVs. It’s slow but it’s progressing. He adds: “If you want to buy an EV, it’s more expensive than the internal combustion engine version. This will change – when you build more of something, the price comes down.”

Read the complete article to find out more about why electric vehicles are the first step in auto insurance transformation. 

Client: InformaTech, published by TU Automotive on 12 May 2021. Author/Journalist: Graham Jarvis.

SD-WAN: Why Banks Need WAN Acceleration Overlays

The Covid-19 pandemic has created a push to speed up digital transformation. There has also been the move to the working from home environment and embracing hybrid working as a concept, whereby employees work from home as well as in branch or at the office. This has led to a transformation in data flows and changes in bank processes to adapt to less face-to-face contact with customers. All of this has inspired the upgrading of IT infrastructure with many banks deploying or upgrading their SD-WANs.

Find out why banks need to WAN Acceleration Overlays by reading the complete article

Client: Trudy Darwin Communications for Bridgeworks Ltd. Byline: David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks Ltd. Published: 12th May 2021 .