Michael Cooney
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Palo Alto grows SD-WAN platform buy snapping-up CloudGenix for $420M
With an eye towards significantly bolstering its edge networking offerings, Palo Alto has entered into an agreement to buy cloud-based SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix for $420 million in cash.Palo Alto said upon the completion of the acquisition it will integrate CloudGenix's cloud-managed SD-WAN products to accelerate the intelligent onboarding of remote branches and retail stores into its Prisma Access package. More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method • SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN? Announced in May 2019, Palo Alto’s Prisma is a cloud-based security package that includes access control, advanced threat protection, user behavior monitoring and other services that promise to protect enterprise applications and resources.To read this article in full, please click here
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Palo Alto grows SD-WAN platform by snapping-up CloudGenix for $420M
With an eye towards significantly bolstering its edge networking offerings, Palo Alto has entered into an agreement to buy cloud-based SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix for $420 million in cash.Palo Alto said upon the completion of the acquisition it will integrate CloudGenix's cloud-managed SD-WAN products to accelerate the intelligent onboarding of remote branches and retail stores into its Prisma Access package. More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method • SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN? Announced in May 2019, Palo Alto’s Prisma is a cloud-based security package that includes access control, advanced threat protection, user behavior monitoring and other services that promise to protect enterprise applications and resources.To read this article in full, please click here
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NEWS UPDATE: The impact of COVID-19 on public networks and security
As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns. What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation. Check back frequently!UPDATE: 3.26 Week over week (ending March 23) Ookla says it has started to see a degradation of mobile and fixed-broadband performance worldwide. More detail on specific locations is available below. Comparing the week of March 16 to the week of March 9, mean download speed over mobile and fixed broadband decreased in Canada and the U.S. while both remained relatively flat in Mexico. What is the impact of the coronavirus on corporate network planning? Depends on how long the work-from-home mandate goes on really. Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. takes an interesting look at the situation saying the shutdown “could eventually produce a major uptick for SD-WAN services, particularly in [managed service provider] Businesses would be much more likely to embark on an SD-WAN VPN adventure that didn’t involve purchase/licensing, Continue reading
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ROLLING UPDATE: The impact of COVID-19 on public networks and security
As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns. What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation. Check back frequently!UPDATE 3.27Broadband watchers at BroadbandNow say users in most of the cities it analyzed are experiencing normal network conditions, suggesting that ISP’s (and their networks) are holding up to the shifting demand. In a March 25 post the firm wrote: “Encouragingly, many of the areas hit hardest by the spread of the coronavirus are holding up to increased network demand. Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, and San Francisco have all experienced little or no disruption. New York City, now the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., has seen a 24% dip out of its previous ten-week range. However, with a new median speed of nearly 52 Mbps, home connections still appear to be holding up overall.”To read this article in full, please click here
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How enterprise networking is changing with a work-at-home workforce
As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns. What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation. Check back frequently!UPDATE 4.3 In an April 2nd call with the Federal Communications Commission chair, the nation’s largest telecom and broadband providers reported network usage during the COVID-19 pandemic had risen about 20-35% for fixed networks and 10-20% for cellular networks in recent weeks. In general, company representatives reported that their networks were holding up quite well, and they expected that resilience to continue. In their conversation with Chairman Ajit Pai, no providers expressed concern about their networks’ ability to hold up to increased and changing demand. To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco warns of five SD-WAN security weaknesses
Cisco has issued five warnings about security weaknesses in its SD-WAN offerings, three of them on the high-end of the vulnerability scale.The worst problem is with the command-line interface (CLI) of its SD-WAN Solution software where a weakness could let a local attacker inject arbitrary commands that are executed with root privileges, Cisco wrote.To read this article in full, please click here
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Coronavirus challenges remote networking
As the coronavirus spreads, many companies are requiring employees to work from home, putting unanticipated stress on remote networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.Businesses have facilitated brisk growth of teleworkers over the past decades to an estimated 4 million-plus. The meteoric rise in new remote users expected to come online as a result of the novel coronavirus calls for stepped-up capacity.Research by VPN vendor Atlas shows that VPN usage in the U.S. grew by 53% between March 9 and 15, and it could grow faster. VPN usage in Italy, where the virus outbreak is about two weeks ahead of the U.S., increased by 112% during the last week. "We estimate that VPN usage in the U.S. could increase over 150% by the end of the month," said Rachel Welch, chief operating officer of Atlas VPN, in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
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Coronavirus challenges remote networking
As the coronavirus spreads, many companies are requiring employees to work from home, putting unanticipated stress on remote networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.Businesses have facilitated brisk growth of teleworkers over the past decades to an estimated 4 million-plus. The meteoric rise in new remote users expected to come online as a result of the novel coronavirus calls for stepped-up capacity.Research by VPN vendor Atlas shows that VPN usage in the U.S. grew by 53% between March 9 and 15, and it could grow faster. VPN usage in Italy, where the virus outbreak is about two weeks ahead of the U.S., increased by 112% during the last week. "We estimate that VPN usage in the U.S. could increase over 150% by the end of the month," said Rachel Welch, chief operating officer of Atlas VPN, in a statement.To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco security warnings include firewall holes, Nexus software weaknesses
Cisco has issued another batch of security warnings that include problems in its Firepower firewall (FXOS), Unified Computing System (UCS) software and Nexus switch operating system (NX-OS) .Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum The firewall and UCS vulnerabilities all have a severity level of “high” on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System and include:To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco goes to the cloud with broad enterprise security service
Cisco has unveiled a cloud-based security platform it says will go a long way in helping customers protect their far-flung networked resources.Cisco describes the new SecureX service as offering an open, cloud-native system that will let customers detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. IT security teams can then automate and orchestrate security management across enterprise cloud, network and applications and end points.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum “Until now, security has largely been piecemeal with companies introducing new point products into their environments to address every new threat category that arises,” wrote Gee Rittenhouse senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group in a blog about SecureX.To read this article in full, please click here
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Juniper bolsters wireless security; fights against encrypted malicious threats
Juniper is filling out its enterprise security portfolio this week by integrating support for its Mist wireless customers and adding the capability for customers to gain better visibility and control over encrypted traffic threats.With the new additions, Juniper is looking to buttress its ability to let users secure all traffic traversing the enterprise network via campus, WAN or data center. The moves are part of Juniper's grand Connected Security platform that includes a variety of security products including its next-generation firewalls that promise to protect networked resources across infrastructure and endpoints.To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco goes to the cloud with broad enterprise security service
Cisco has unveiled a cloud-based security platform it says will go a long way in helping customers protect their far-flung networked resources.Cisco describes the new SecureX service as offering an open, cloud-native system that will let customers detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. IT security teams can then automate and orchestrate security management across enterprise cloud, network and applications and end points.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum “Until now, security has largely been piecemeal with companies introducing new point products into their environments to address every new threat category that arises,” wrote Gee Rittenhouse senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group in a blog about SecureX.To read this article in full, please click here
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Juniper bolsters wireless security; fights against encrypted malicious threats
Juniper is filling out its enterprise security portfolio this week by integrating support for its Mist wireless customers and adding the capability for customers to gain better visibility and control over encrypted traffic threats.With the new additions, Juniper is looking to buttress its ability to let users secure all traffic traversing the enterprise network via campus, WAN or data center. The moves are part of Juniper's grand Connected Security platform that includes a variety of security products including its next-generation firewalls that promise to protect networked resources across infrastructure and endpoints.To read this article in full, please click here
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Google Cloud moves to aid mainframe migration
Google Cloud this week bought a mainframe cloud-migration service firm Cornerstone Technology with an eye toward helping Big Iron customers move workloads to the private and public cloud. Google said the Cornerstone technology – found in its G4 platform – will shape the foundation of its future mainframe-to-Google Cloud offerings and help mainframe customers modernize applications and infrastructure.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] “Through the use of automated processes, Cornerstone’s tools can break down your Cobol, PL/1, or Assembler programs into services and then make them cloud native, such as within a managed, containerized environment” wrote Howard Weale, Google’s director, Transformation Practice, in a blog about the buy.To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco: IoT traffic is taking over; 5G, WiFi 6 are ascending
If the industry needed more evidence that IoT devices and applications are taking over the world, Cisco this week said that by 2023 machine-to-machine communications will make up 50% or about 14.7 billion of all networked connections compared to 33% (6.1 billion) in 2018 and 3.1 percent in 2017.The M2M findings were just a part of Cisco’s annual forecast of networking trends now called the Cisco Annual Internet Report. The report replaces the Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast and looks at everything from 5G and Wi-Fi growth to broadband trends collected from actual network traffic reports and independent analyst forecasts.To read this article in full, please click here
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Multicloud, security integration drive massive SD-WAN adoption
Increasing cloud adoption as well as improved network security, visibility and manageability are driving enterprise software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) deployments at a breakneck pace.According to research from IDC, software- and infrastructure-as-a-service (SaaS and IaaS) offerings in particular have been driving SD-WAN implementations in the past year, said Rohit Mehra, vice president, network infrastructure at IDC. Read about edge networking How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers Edge computing best practices How edge computing can help secure the IoT For example, IDC says that its recent surveys of customers show that 95% will be using SD-WAN technology within two years, and that 42% have already deployed it. IDC also says the SD-WAN infrastructure market will hit $4.5 billion by 2022, growing at a more than 40% yearly clip between now and then.To read this article in full, please click here
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Arista snatches-up SDN-pioneer Big Switch Networks
Arista confirmed what had been rumored for the past few weeks, that it has acquired software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud-software vendor Big Switch Networks for an undisclosed amount.The move gives Arista a package of software technology that should complement Arista’s drive to meld data-center and campus networks with the multicloud deployments. To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco patches a security glitch affecting routers, switches and phones
Cisco has issued fixes for five security glitches that can be found in a wealth of its networked enterprise products – from switches and routers to web cameras and desktop VoIP phones. The problems center around vulnerabilities in the implementation of the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) that could let remote attackers take over the products without any user interaction. While no public exploit has been found, an attacker simply needs to send a maliciously crafted CDP packet to a target device located inside the network to take advantage of the weakness, Cisco stated.Cisco’s CDP is a Layer 2 protocol that runs on Cisco devices and enables networking applications to learn about directly connected devices nearby, according to Cisco. It enables management of Cisco devices by discovering networked devices, determining how they are configured, and letting systems using different network-layer protocols learn about each other, according to Cisco.To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco patches a security glitch affecting routers, switches and phones
Cisco has issued fixes for five security glitches that can be found in a wealth of its networked enterprise products – from switches and routers to web cameras and desktop VoIP phones. The problems center around vulnerabilities in the implementation of the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) that could let remote attackers take over the products without any user interaction. While no public exploit has been found, an attacker simply needs to send a maliciously crafted CDP packet to a target device located inside the network to take advantage of the weakness, Cisco stated.Cisco’s CDP is a Layer 2 protocol that runs on Cisco devices and enables networking applications to learn about directly connected devices nearby, according to Cisco. It enables management of Cisco devices by discovering networked devices, determining how they are configured, and letting systems using different network-layer protocols learn about each other, according to Cisco.To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM’s CEO Virginia Rometty to be replaced by its cloud, Red Hat chiefs
If anyone was still wondering how serious IBM is about being a major cloud player that question was resoundly answered this week when its current cloud and cognitive-software leader Arvind Krishna and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to be CEO and president, respectively, to replace long-time CEO Virginia Rometty.Krishna, 57, was a principal architect of IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat last year and is currently IBM’s senior vice president of Cloud and Cognitive Software, which has become the company’s palpable future. [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The Red Hat acquisition not only made Big Blue a bigger open-source and enterprise-software player, but mostly it got IBM into the lucrative hybrid-cloud business, targeting huge cloud competitor Google, Amazon and Microsoft among others. Gartner says that market will be worth $240 billion by next year.To read this article in full, please click here