When I started college in the early 1990s, my network connection consisted of dial-up access to a serial terminal on the sole SCO Unix server, and the campus enjoyed a high-speed 56K dedicated circuit to the Internet. Fast-forward a decade or so: Big campuses have port-per-pillow network access, plus wireless overlays in public areas and classrooms. Most students own laptops, and they want their Wi-Fi.
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Educational IT professionals worry primarily about capacity, while their enterprise colleagues
are concerned about coverage. In offices where wired ports are still the mainstay, wireless access may need to span boardrooms, guest offices and executive suites on different floors. But at universities, students congregate at libraries and large lecture halls. Rather than five laptops in a boardroom, think 40 students in study carrels using one AP. This is an early look at what business organizations will experience as their wireless trials and initial deployments morph into production networks, and they move toward wireless connections.
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Tossing another AP in the ceiling won't solve capacity problems. First, there's the challenge of channel selection. Fred Archibald of UC Berkeley's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science likens channel assignment to a Rubik's Cube--change it in one place, and the whole puzzle must be re-examined.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
