Blog & Tools

Shari Lund is thrilled with the fast and effective service that SDN Communications provided to replace a key piece of networking equipment at her bank.

Overall, the Top 10 blogs for 2017 highlight an interesting mix of people. It includes staffers at SDN ranging from interns to Mike Haskins, the company’s new vice president of network operations and engineering.

The company’s 160 employees contributed more than $53,000 in cash to charitable causes in the Sioux Falls area during 2017. That comes out to about $332 apiece.

Not all ransomware attacks are successful, of course. Companies are learning to adequately back up data and to keep their networking equipment and programs up to date.

Approximately 34 million Americans lack broadband access, and 23.4 million of them live in rural areas, according to Microsoft’s proposal to connect more rural residents to the benefits of high-speed internet.

People in Brookings, including students, staff and visitors at South Dakota State University, can look forward to improved telecommunications in 2018.

As director of IT, Jon Scarbrough oversees the internal corporate network and application development. In addition to vast experience, Scarbrough brings to SDN a passion for cybersecurity, which is an increasingly important issue in telecommunications.

The national movement from paper files to electronic medical records has greatly improved the efficiency of treating patients. But it's also making all of that personal data more available to hackers around the world.

During recent months, the Managed Firewalls that SDN Communications’ customer use weeded out approximately 2,000 attacks directed at a vulnerable version of Apache Struts website-building software.

People living in cities expect broadband to be delivered as efficiently as water, says Sioux Falls Public Works Director Mark Cotter.

Businesses entrusted with personal and sensitive data can no longer consider cybersecurity a secondary support duty. Keeping information safe is more important than that. The Better Business Bureau is hosting a free program designed to help keep business representatives up to date on the cyber threat landscape.

Implementing 5G, as well as improving current wireless communications, will require better tower coverage, especially in high-use areas. That’s where the deployment of small cell technology comes into play.

Sometimes SDN Communications gets referred to as a pioneer provider in the telemedicine field because of our long partnership with Avera eCARE. That gives us too much credit; we only provide the fiber or pipe, if you will, for the eCARE Emergency connection envisioned long ago by the smart IT folks and doctors at Avera.

SDN officially launched a new and improved portal on its website for businesses and member companies. It’s a secure, self-service path to a repository of private information about the services SDN provides to companies.

Companies have been experimenting with driverless cars for decades, and progress is grabbing attention, especially during the past few years. Developers are testing self-driving cars every day on American streets, as companies race toward the consumer marketplace.

“We’re part of the community. What the Sioux Falls Public Schools do is educate the next generation of the community,” says Vernon Brown, vice president of marketing and community relations at SDN. “We feel a strong obligation to assist with that. Tax dollars don’t cover all the needs.”

There’s a cautionary side to the expanding, positive uses of technology that should remain in public awareness, too, of course. Among the risks are an increasing array of weapons and hacking strategies that endanger computer networks.

Along with the proliferation of IoT devices comes new scams. Gartner warns that by 2020, there will be a billion-dollar black market selling fake sensors and video data to enable criminal activity.

Bill Burr has been widely described as being the father of the modern-day password. Lately, he’s also become a prominent second-guesser. Now, he says, long phrases that people can actually remember might be a better option.

DDoS attacks are incidents in which in which perpetrators unleash large volumes of malicious traffic to disrupt and maybe temporarily disable a targeted computer network or program. Ninety-five percent of service providers who responded to an annual survey experienced attacks last year, according to Arbor Networks’ Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report for 2016.