Network Critical Selected as a 2012 Red Herring Top 100 Europe Award Winner!

Network Critical selected as a 2012 Red Herring Top 100 Europe
Amsterdam, Netherlands – Red Herring announced its Top 100 award in recognition of the leading private companies from Europe, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.
Red Herring’s Top 100 Europe list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work.
“Choosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across Europe to the Top 100 Winners. We believe Network Critical embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. Network Critical should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was the strongest it has ever been.”
Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in Europe.

Mobulation Explosion

By: Dan O’Donnell

I will take credit here for coining a new word, “mobulation.” I hope mobulation will someday be added to Webster’s Dictionary and make me famous. In the mean time, I will write some thoughts about the pending mobulation explosion.

Let’s start with a clear definition. Mobulation is the population of mobile network connected devices including cell phones, smart phones, tablets and laptops. The mobulation explosion is my term for the incredible growth in mobile devices and the network traffic they create. Cisco predicts that by the end of 2012 there will be more mobile devices than people on this earth we all share. This prediction will have a near term critical impact on the networking industry. The report is the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011 – 2016.

As more phones are put into service, more data will be generated. However, in addition to phone traffic, smart mobile devices are generating data and video traffic at a much greater rate. Here are some interesting numbers:
• Smartphones represent only 12 percent of global handsets in use today but they use over 82 percent of total handset traffic.
• The number of mobile-connected tablets tripled in 2011 to 34 million. Each tablet generates 3.4 times the network traffic than the average smartphone.
• Mobile connected laptops generate 22 times more traffic than smartphones. Mobile data traffic per laptop was 2.1GB per month, up 46 percent from 2010.
• Global mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold between 2011 and 2016 reaching 10.8 exabytes per month. (1 exabyte = 1 quintillion bytes or 10¹⁸ bytes)

These numbers remind me of when I was taking Astronomy in college. It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the numbers. Imagine, though, what will happen to network traffic when smartphones represent 40% of the global handset market. Imagine the mobile data traffic loads when the tablet market, which is still very young, matures to ubiquity.

These events will have enormous impact on today’s networks and not just for service providers. As smart mobile devices blur the line between corporate and private data traffic, the increased throughput will impact enterprise as well as carrier networks. New strategies will be needed for network monitoring, management and security. More specialized and faster appliances will be required to protect corporate assets and keep confidential information secured.

The glue holding all these appliances together is the network access device. A well-planned monitoring strategy built around permanent network access equipment will help keep appliance port costs down and maintain high network availability. The AFS by Network Critical is one example of this foundational piece for network monitoring and security. The AFS provides access, aggregation, filtering and load-balanced distribution in a small 1U package.

The experts at Network Critical are working with enterprise and carrier clients every day designing intelligent, next generation access strategies. The Mobulation Explosion is happening now. Do not wait until your network is overwhelmed by an onslaught of mobile data traffic. Plan your high speed/high availability network access strategy now.

I’ve Looked at Clouds from Both Sides Now

By: Dan O’Donnell

If you were not in college in the 70’s you probably do not recognize these wonderful lyrics by Judy Collins; “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now and, still somehow, I really don’t know clouds at all.” This is a song where the cloud is a metaphor for love, not ubiquitous computing power. However, I found myself humming these lyrics over and over as I attended a conference on Cloud Computing in Baltimore last week.

The conference, called Team Action Week, is produced bi-annually by the TM Forum, a wonderful consortium of Service Providers, equipment vendors and cyber defense experts. This is not a typical trade show. It is an opportunity for industry experts from around the world to discuss, debate and develop standards and best practices that can be used in the telecommunications industry to help Service Providers grow revenue, cut costs and improve business operations.

My first session of the week was the Service Provider Leadership Council meeting on Cloud Services. One truth came to me very clearly…while the big picture seems simple; there are many details that Cloud users need to understand. The Cloud SLA you negotiate will be much more complicated than a simple transport agreement. So here are a few observations from “both sides” of the cloud…the Marketing Side and the Reality Side.

Marketing: It does not matter where the Cloud is, your information is available to you from anywhere in the world.
Reality: True, one can access the cloud computing and data storage from anywhere. However, there are many government and industry regulations governing the location of certain information and computing platforms. The geographic location of the user’s Cloud service should be understood, meet national and industry regulations and be written in the contract. The same goes for back up locations.

Marketing: Your information is secure.
Reality: There are many levels of security. Access Control, while important, is only part of the story. Is the Cloud perimeter protected from data leakage from the inside as well as intrusion and hacking from the outside? The perimeter protection and associated risks should be detailed and described in the contract.

Marketing: End user’s networks are separate from other users.
Reality: The level of separation should be detailed in the contract. The “separation” could be a virtual instance with many other virtual networks on the same machine accessed by the same high speed links. The “separation” could, indeed, be a completely separate machine accessed by dedicated links. This is a high priced alternative but if complete physical separation is paramount, it should be discussed and written in the contract.

The moral of the story is that Clouds, like the song says, should be looked at from “up and down and in and out” before jumping in. I guess, in the end, Cloud computing, like love just needs to be experienced to be understood completely. However, the more you know going in, the better your chances of a good outcome.

To learn more about Network Critical, please visit networkcritical.com