Over the next five years, the company behind Snapchat will pay Google at least US$2 billion in cloud bills.On Thursday, Snap revealed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it signed a five-year contract to pay Google at least $400 million a year for cloud services. That's a steep figure, considering that Snap made roughly $404 million last year. In return for the massive commitment, Snap will receive reduced pricing, though it’s not clear how deep the company’s discounts will be. Sinking a bunch of money into Google Cloud makes sense, because Snapchat began its life built on top of Google’s AppEngine platform-as-a-service offering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft today asked the U.S. government to create a mechanism for granting exemptions to last week's executive order on immigration that would meet "the pressing needs of real people," including scores of company employees and their families.In the letter to the heads of the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security, Brad Smith, Microsoft's chief legal officer, asked for exemptions that would apply to people with non-immigrant work visas, student visas or family members. The exceptions would let them come to and go from the U.S. for business trips and family emergencies, those trips not to exceed two weeks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are soon expected to outnumber end-user devices by as much as four to one. These applications can be found everywhere—from manufacturing floors and building management to video surveillance and lighting systems.However, security threats pose serious obstacles to IoT adoption in enterprises or even home environments for sensitive applications such as remote healthcare monitoring. IoT security can be divided into the following three distinct components:
Application service
End device
Transport
Although all three are critical for systemwide security, this post will address only transport security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this week, I wrote about my expectations for endpoint security at the upcoming RSA Conference. Similarly, here’s what I anticipate hearing about regarding network security:1. DDoS protection. While data breaches get front page, above-the-fold headlines, DDoS attacks remain relatively invisible by comparison. This is puzzling because DDoS attacks happen almost daily. A quick review of the news shows that the Trump hotel website, Sonic (ISP in CA), Emsisoft and Lloyd’s Bank have all been hit with DDoS attacks over the past few weeks. These are relatively pedestrian attacks compared to the now infamous Mirai botnet DDoS attack on Dyn back in October and the subsequent attack on French hosting provider OVH a week later. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Global WAN powerhouse BT is out to turn its sprawling network into dynamic beast that can accommodate today’s rapidly evolving needs. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix talked about the plans with Keith Langridge, Vice President of Network Services at BT Global Services, and Sunil Khandekar, Founder and CEO of Nuage Networks from Nokia, a critical new supplier that will enable some of the change.
BT
Keith Langridge, Vice President of Network Services at BT Global ServicesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Legacy is a scary and bad word in the computing industry. Most enterprises have "legacy" technologies, and all who do wish that they did not.Now everyone thinks of public clouds as the next greatest thing, which means they cannot possibly be "legacy." While the major public cloud vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) currently drive a great deal of innovation, they might also be trapping themselves and their customers into legacy situations.So, there is a real risk that the current public cloud leaders (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) could become legacy vendors. To understand this risk, we need to understand what creates legacy technologies and vendors and analyze the strategies of the public cloud vendors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Microsoft first showed off its disaster recovery service on Azure in 2014, it was called Hyper-V Recovery Manager and was an extension of a System Center tool for failing over Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) to another location, using the public cloud to coordinate testing and managing recovery between your data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
User demand for enterprise mobility management (EMM) software continues to grow -- and vendors keep consolidating -- so prices are rising and buyers don't have much power at the negotiating table, according to analysts at IBISWorld Inc.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
AT&T will launch its first 5G wireless service in Indianapolis and Austin later this year, offering theoretical top speeds of 400Mbps or higher, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft held the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in China last December, but it has just released a very interesting video that highlights where it would like to see the PC market head in the coming years. The video, from the session "Next Generation of Windows Devices," isn't all that surprising, as Microsoft has already been advocating for things such as Ink and Hello. Its description of the Modern PC falls into three categories: Cool Designs, Better Performance and New Experiences. + Also on Network World: Battle lines drawn as Chromebooks, Windows PCs renew rivalry +
Microsoft had an interesting factoid. It said that there are over 600 million Windows devices in use that are more than 4 years old. Those are pretty much all Windows 7 and perhaps Windows 8 machines, since Windows 10 is only a year old. That's 600 million people Microsoft wants to upgrade. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet Hall of Fame, a virtual museum celebrating the living history of the Internet, is back seeking a new class of inductees after going quiet for the past couple of years.A spokeswoman for the Internet Society, which fights the good fight for an open and secure Internet, says "we wanted to take some time to get the inductees more involved in the program and get their insights to make sure it was positioned and well-structured for the long-term. We now have an Advisory Board of inductees who provide leadership on the program’s direction and are responsible for the selection of the next class of inductees. With 2017 as the Internet Society’s 25th anniversary, we felt it was the ideal time to host the next induction ceremony."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet of Things (IoT) presents a security threat. A key point of my last article is that manufacturers do not have the right incentives. But all is not lost. With a little ingenuity, we can make a quilt of independent pieces that can nevertheless turn out to offer good security coverage.The term “patchwork quilt” is often used pejoratively to describe something that is made up of an assortment of other parts. Yet it is worth remembering that a well-made quilt is still functional, durable and beautiful. And quilts are often made collaboratively in quilting bees. We need this sort of approach to network security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems has fixed a critical vulnerability that could allow hackers to take over servers used by telecommunications providers to remotely manage customer equipment such as routers.The vulnerability affects Cisco Prime Home, an automated configuration server (ACS) that communicates with subscriber devices using the TR-069 protocol. In addition to remotely managing customer equipment, it can also "automatically activate and configure subscribers and deliver advanced services via service packages" over mobile, fiber, cable, and other ISP networks."A vulnerability in the web-based GUI of Cisco Prime Home could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and execute actions with administrator privileges," Cisco said in its advisory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco this week issued a notice that faulty clock timing chips in some of its switches, routers and security appliances could fail after about 18 months of service – causing those devices to crash and not recover.The notice includes some of the company’s most widely deployed products, from certain models of its Series 4000 Integrated Services Routers, Nexus 9000 Series switches, ASA security devices to Meraki Cloud Managed Switches. Clock components are critical to the synchronization of multiple levels of a given device.+More on Network World: Cisco amps-up Tetration platform with better security, reduced footprint, AWS cloud option+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the major challenges that’s long faced enterprise network is the ability to spin up new network services. SD-WANs make this a lot easier through service insertion and service chaining.Suppose for a moment you want to construct a secure perimeter around your compute resources in your data center and Amazon Web Services (AWS) implementation. Normally, you’d introduce a firewall and an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) into each location. That way, should a security incident happen in one location, such as a malware outbreak or a denial of service attack, you would be able to mitigate that event without any reengineering work. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Users of Microsoft's Outlook app for iPhone and iPad can now get work done quicker using third-party integrations.As of Thursday, Outlook for iOS supports add-ins, which let software companies build extensions to their own products that interact with emails in Outlook on a user’s smartphone and tablet. At launch, the app supports add-ins from Evernote, GIPHY, Nimble, Trello and Smartsheet, in addition to those that Microsoft has created.For example, users will be able to translate emails using a Microsoft Translator add-in, add cards to a Trello board straight from their email and quickly reply to an email thread with a funny animated GIF.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The arcs of two industries, customer relationship management (CRM) and contact center, are about to entangle. More descriptively, these two industries are on a collision course. Consequences include exciting new innovations in customer experience and dramatic market-wide change.Changing times
Propelled in an age of big data and artificial intelligence (AI), CRM is entering the industry’s platinum age. At the same time, contact center is facing disruption as newer communications protocols come to broader acceptance, old guard companies face transitions, and ways of deploying applications—cloud for one—accelerate in adoption. + Also on Network World: How to conquer a CRM monster +
The two industries have existed in the same universe, that of the key ways that customers interact with an enterprise, but for the most part it's as if they have occupied different dimensions. As CRM matured, it was embraced by marketing, sales and service delivery. CRM and contact center would occasionally interact, such as when telephony call controls were added to a CRM screen or when a service call turned into an upselling opportunity. However, true synergies have seldom really gelled.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Explore the birthplace of the tech revolution as Marcus Holloway, a brilliant young hacker who has fallen victim to ctOS 2.0's predictive algorithms and accused of a crime he did not commit. In Marcus' quest to shut down ctOS 2.0 for good, hacking is the ultimate weapon. Players can not only hack into the San Francisco Bay Area's infrastructure but also every person and any connected device they possess to trigger unpredictable chains of events in this vast open world. Watch Dogs 2 for the Playstation 4 is currently discounted 50% off its list price on Amazon, so you can pick it up for just $29.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You can’t manage what you can’t see. That phrase that has been used over and over again with network managers as they look to get a better handle on the goings on in their networks. The problem is pervasive visibility is hard. Collecting information from multiple systems, rolling it up into an aggregated view and then trying to do some kind of manual machine learning on it is next to impossible. I suppose if Mr. Spock were running the network, things might be OK. But the last time I checked, the U.S. wasn’t accepting H1-Bs from Vulcan, so humans will have to do. + Also on Network World: Cloud monitoring: Users review 5 top tools +
The need for visibility has created a rising tide in the network packet broker market, and most of these do a fine job in the enterprise space, but the RISC-based processers that some of them use do not operate at cloud speeds when there are multiple 100 Gig-E connections that need to be tapped. I want to be clear that I’m making distinction between an enterprise monitoring cloud traffic and an actual cloud provider monitoring its internal traffic. The latter is Continue reading
If anyone can make sense of the over 74,000 pages of the US tax code, IBM’s Watson can. Or at least that’s the plan as Big Blue has teamed up its Watson cognitive supercomputer with the tax return specialists at H&R Block to help customers with tax filing options.As part of the first phase of the collaboration, H&R Block and IBM development teams trained tax language Watson, first applying the technology to the myriad questions and topics discussed during the return filing process.The service uses cloud-based Watson services to understand context, interpret intent and draw connections between clients’ statements and relevant areas of their return, the companies said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here