A six-figure surprise is awesome when it’s a lottery win. It’s not so awesome when it’s the “Amount Due” appearing in your monthly cloud bill. But enterprises receive these “surprises” all the time, and what can sting even more is trying to explain this preventable expense to management. Inefficient (not optimized) traffic routing to and from your various cloud instances and other services can hurt your business in other ways too.

If your enterprise is like most of Forward Networks’ customers, then your IT shop oversees a sizable cloud estate. You probably have hundreds of accounts, projects, or subscriptions across different cloud vendors. There are tons of related objects too — virtual machines, firewalls, transit gateways, subnets, and more. And cloud-native apps? Maybe you hundreds of those in use or development as well.

Do cloud environments really have to be so foggy? Absolutely not. Yet, many enterprises have come to accept that not having full visibility into their cloud estate is just “how it is.”

Discovered on December 9, 2021, the log4Shell vulnerability is one of the most talked-about vulnerabilities in computing. Because simple text can be used to take control of a device and download anything that is Internet-accessible, companies are taking it seriously. As they should – log4Shell has the maximum CVSS score of 10 (CVSS, Common Vulnerability Scoring System, is an industry-standard for ranking vulnerabilities).

Predicting the future is tricky business. However, when you’re privileged enough to frequently speak with the technology leadership at Fortune 500 companies, looking forward is less about gazing into a crystal ball and more of an extrapolation of trends that you're seeing. I’m honored that Fast Mode published my article detailing what I think is in store for cloud computing in 2022.

When a large government agency decided to refresh its infrastructure down to Layer 2 switches, Forward Networks data delivered over $6 million in savings. Like many companies around the world, this organization had challenges getting full visibility and the structure of its network, which had grown organically over time.