Netflash

With a new Gartner report suggesting that AI problems will “shut down national critical infrastructure” in a major country by 2028, CIOs need to rethink industrial controls that are very quickly being turned over to autonomous agents. Gartner embraces the term Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) for these technologies, which it defines as “engineered systems that orchestrate sensing, computation, contro…

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) seems to be doubling down on its investigation of Microsoft and the tech giant’s potentially shady bundling and licensing practices. According to a Bloomberg report , the federal agency has been issuing civil investigative demands (CIDs) to companies that compete with Microsoft in the business software and cloud computing markets. CIDs are powerful, subpoena-…

More processor coverage on Network World: Intel news and insights | AMD news and insights With its legacy of innovation in GPU technology , Nvidia has become a dominant force in the AI market. Nvidia’s partners read like a technology who’s who list – e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Dell, HPE – and also crosses into vertical industries such as healthcare, finance, automotive, and manufac…

Nvidia has released analysis showing a 4X to 10X reduction in cost per token for AI inferencing by switching to open source models. The cost reductions were achieved by pairing Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU platform with open-source models from Baseten , DeepInfra , Fireworks AI , and Together AI . Their tests showed significant cost improvements across healthcare, gaming, agentic chat, and customer ser…

AI agents aren’t just hype, they’re actually having a material impact on content delivery network economics—at least for Fastly. Its fourth-quarter earnings call this week provided evidence of how AI agent behavior differs from traditional web traffic and how much revenue that difference generates. The edge cloud provider posted $172.6 million in revenue for Q4 2025, up 23% year over year. That m…

Network and infrastructure roles continue to shift as enterprises adopt technologies such as AI-driven network operations , multicloud networking, zero trust network access ( ZTNA ), and SD-WAN . Here’s a recap of some of the latest industry research, hiring statistics, and certification trends that impact today’s network professionals, infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders, and data center…

The market for networking and security skills is shifting as AI implementations move from experimental to operational and enterprise organizations deploy more sophisticated IT architectures. So, which skills are commanding the highest premiums? And which skills are no longer in great demand? Foote Partners’ latest IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index shows a clear pattern: Premium pay is moving…

Hot on the heels of Starlink’s plan for a million data centers in space, Starcloud’s next launch will put hardware from AWS in orbit. “Starcloud will be the first to launch the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outpost hardware to space on our second satellite launching in October,” Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston wrote in a LinkedIn post. Outpost is AWS’s on-premises private cloud offering. Starcloud put …

A multi-year expansion cycle will drive worldwide data center capex to the $1.7 trillion mark by 2030, driven by hyperscalers as well as neo cloud service providers and sovereign AI initiatives, a new report from Dell’Oro Group indicates. All three segments are entering a new phase of infrastructure expansion; key among them are Amazon, Google, Meta and Meta, which at the start of this year had r…

IBM’s research laboratory in Zurich. Judith Linine – Shutterstock.com Above Lake Zurich, in the hills of Rüschlikon, the next chapter in industrial history is currently being written. While the world discusses the latest advances in generative AI, Alessandro Curioni’s team at IBM Research – Zurich , IBM’s European research center, is already working on a fundamental transformation that goes far b…

AI is driving new revenue for Cisco , while campus networking and other components added to a successful quarter for the vendor. CEO Chuck Robbins told analysts on a conference call that overall networking revenue increased 21% year-over-year to nearly $8 billion in company’s fiscal second quarter. Other highlights from the Q2 recap include the rising cost of system memory, AI infrastructure upta…

Intel said it was able to identify five vulnerabilities in the one of the most important confidential computing elements of its Xeon CPUs with help from Google’s cloud security team. The work was part of a five-month joint security review between Intel’s INT31 team (Intel’s offensive security research) and Google’s Cloud Security team . The partnership identified five vulnerabilities and 35 less …

Cisco is no longer trying to be just a software, hardware, or silicon company. It’s now positioning itself as a systems or platform company that delivers the critical infrastructure needed for the AI era. This week, Cisco held its annual Cisco Live EMEA event and announced its fiscal second-quarter earnings. During the Amsterdam keynote, Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, w…

Enterprises are rethinking their virtualization strategies in the wake of Broadcom’s changes to VMware licensing, but most are not yet ready to make needed changes. That’s according to a new survey by HPE, which found that two-thirds of enterprises are planning material changes to their virtualization strategy within the next two years as they assess virtualization alternatives. There’s been plen…

A newly discovered botnet is compromising poorly-protected Linux servers by brute-forcing weak SSH password login authentication. Researchers at Canada-based Flare Systems, who discovered the botnet, got into its staging server and believe at least 7,000 servers had been compromised by the end of January, half of them in the US. The botnet’s weapons include exploits for unpatched Linux vulnerabil…