I attend a lot of collaboration conferences every year. Over the last couple of years, I routinely hear the same question: Is email dead? In this post, I hope to shed some light on the reason people are asking this question, and why it should matter to you.

With the internet, in all its glory, playing host to over 1.8 billion websites that can be accessed by virtually anyone in the world, it stands to reason that businesses may not want users accessing some of these websites due to security threats, inappropriateness, or other factors while on their network. How can businesses control what websites their users gain access to? Typically, most organizations have utilized a blacklist, which identifies websites that users are not allowed to access. This method is not very restrictive and can be problematic in that it allows access to everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, that is not on the blacklist. A whitelist, as you might guess, is the exact opposite of a blacklist, and only grants access to websites explicitly identified on the list. If the site isn’t on the list, then the user isn’t granted access to it. The concept of a whitelist has been around for many years in website filtering but has seldom been implemented. It can also be problematic because, given the breadth and depth of the internet, only a fraction of the available websites would be allowed.

With cybercrime predicted to reach $6 trillion annually by 2021 and to be more profitable—and therefore, more attractive to criminal organizations—than the global combined trade of all major illegal drugs, businesses can no longer rely on traditional network security tools and expect to achieve protection.[1]

Charlotte, NC, June 8 2018 – Internetwork Engineering (IE) announced today that CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named IE to its 2018 Solution Provider 500 list. The Solution Provider 500 is CRN’s annual ranking of the largest technology integrators, solution providers and IT consultants in North America by revenue.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever found working with Cisco licensing to be challenging. If you raised your hand, you’re not alone! The complicated Cisco licensing process has been time consuming and created opportunities for errors. Who out there remembers the infamous product activation key (PAK)? For those of you who aren’t familiar, the fun started by tracking down who within your company received the emailed PAK, sending the PAK back to Cisco along with information on which device it will be installed on, and then finally receiving back a license file that you could apply. Well, I’m here to offer you some great news! Cisco has made great strides to improve how they deal with licensing and has proudly introduced a new solution, Cisco Smart Licensing.