Our Insight

While some network and infrastructure managers are gambling on ‘if it aint broke, don’t fix it’, many others are actively trying to find ways to improve WAN functionality and service levels while lowering costs. Which camp do you fall into? If you’ve realised SD-WAN is an essential part of your WAN strategy, then you’ve likely already moved onto weighing up the pros and cons. 

Many of the snails which will appear around the city in mid-September will have their own stories and unique inspired designs. Discover why artist Rosie Apps wanted to get involved in Snailspace and why her tongue-in-cheek, bold designs are a good fit for Ideal. 

The direction of travel for IT infrastructure is undoubtedly - and quite rightly - towards automating as much as possible of deployment and maintenance. Automation is the driver towards real business benefits such as increased visibility, operational effectiveness and guaranteed compliance in technical operations, but like any approach it’s not a panacea. Successful approaches to automation require pragmatism rather than ideological inflexibility to really make it add value within an organisation.

DevOps is often thought of in a cloud context. But how can networking benefit from breaking down the silos of Development and IT Operations roles and introduce automation to achieve efficiencies, speed and agility? SD-WAN has the answer. 

It’s argued that there is a place for both SD-WAN and MPLS in modern WANs. But we’re backing SD-WAN and for good reason...

Purdey joined us from France to help progress her studies and her career in Sales. In Purdey's blog she shares her experiences of her time at Ideal and her impression of Brighton.

Work placement Billy gives an insider view to working at Ideal for a summer placement. 

The modern network can't survive without a security ecosystem. But with multiple complementary services, devices and systems producing millions of log events each month, identifying and acting on security events is a skilled and time-consuming job.

So you have three choices

Here's the problem with supporting a network: by the time someone comes to you and tells you they couldn't connect at, say, 7pm on a Friday evening, it's 10.30 on Monday morning. Sure, you could wade through thousands of lines of log text from your switches, access points or authentication server, but in the meantime the problem has resolved itself, and your team has more important things to do.

Since we launched our Managed SIEM service, we've been talking a lot about the kind of security, reporting and compliance headaches that businesses face, and how Managed SIEM (security information and event management) can help solve them. That's an important angle - as I know very well from my 22 years 'client side' at a major retailer - but I want to explore the additional benefits of having a team of information security experts on call, armed with the latest threat intelligence and event management tools.

SIEM isn't a one-size fits all proposition. Organisations have unique IT estates, face unique threats and risks, and have unique requirements from their security solutions. Finding the right SIEM (security information and event management) solution means weighing up your needs and matching them to the vendor and service who can best satisfy them, and at the right price.

To help you choose wisely, we've put together these 10 tips for getting a SIEM service that meets your requirements.