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Digitization. It’s a great buzzword. Over the past year it’s reached an all-time high in usage. Every hardware and software manufacturer has written article upon article about it. Many have dedicated entire marketing programs to it. Whoever coined the term should be given a marketing award because it’s a shiny new skin on something that has been around for a very long time. Something we've even encountered seventeen years ago.

We all know that the threat landscape isn’t getting any easier to manage. Fact is, most organizations don’t have the resources or the time to carry-out the endless activities that could reduce their exposure. However, there are a few things you can do that will make the most impact. Our partners at Tenable helped us put together these 10 Steps to Effective Vulnerability Management.

At IE, our wireless practice engineers often are called on to troubleshoot a network that’s gone awry, for some unknown or unforeseen reason, resulting in a negative impact to the business. The WLAN has been run through multiple support calls and RF surveys to show that good RF signal exists and the RF cell is stable. Vendor support centers may have been contacted, but with little to no actual onsite visibility, the vendor online support engineer has no real way to identify the issue. Quite often of late, this has been the result of a change to the network that may’ve been intended to improve the behavior of one client’s device at the cost of older legacy devices on the network. One, or multiples of, new Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards have been engaged and legacy client devices are suffering. These standards are varietal configurations of 802.11r, k, v, and w. I will briefly describe what each of these IEEE roaming and protection standards is and how they could potentially cause issues with your WLAN client devices.

I took some time off one Friday morning and went fishing on Lake Murray. Despite being off, I had a couple meetings that I needed to attend, one of which required me to participate via Cisco WebEx on my laptop. I wasn’t about to let a little bit of water stop me from participating, nor was I about to let one meeting stop me from enjoying a day out on my boat. So, I grabbed my Cradlepoint IBR1100 router with Verizon SIM card and loaded it on the boat along with laptop, tackle box, and fishing rods. We pushed off before 8:00 AM; it was a beautiful peaceful morning on the lake. I plugged the router’s vehicle power adapter into the boat’s 12v power socket and had the wireless network up and running within 3 minutes. I popped open the laptop, looked up fishing reports, checked the weather, and streamed music thru the IBR until my meetings started. Once it was time for my meeting, I jumped on WebEx, screen-shared, and participated in the meeting as if I was in my office. All the while the kids fished and had a great time. When my meetings ended, I put the laptop away and went back to fishing. A great morning on the lake, productive and fun.

Last week on the IE blog we posted Sean Rollman's "Six Ways to Make Digitization Work for Your Business". If you missed it, we've created a handy infographic version for easy reading!

Digital. Digitization. Digitalization. These are words we hear thrown around a lot in technology circles today. In my last blog post we talked about how Domino’s Pizza was one example of businesses leveraging technology to create value, but what does that mean for you and your customers? How can you create and implement a digital strategy that not only produces competitive advantage, but improves the customer experience? We’ve taken the time to develop six ways to make digitization work for your business.