The coronavirus crisis has shaken up business as usual, with some IT strategies and tools rising to the occasion and others in line for a rethink or tough recovery post-pandemic.(Insider Story)
Cisco has issued three security advisories rated “critical” for some of its high-end software systems—two aimed at its Application Services Engine (ASE) implementation and one at the NX-OS operating system.The most concerning warning came for Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Multi-Site Orchestrator (MSO) installed with the ASE which was rated a worse-case scenario, 10 out of a possible 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). The ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator lets customers control application-access policies across Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller-based fabrics.To read this article in full, please click here
Happy at work? Maybe you are not alone. Our 2021 salary survey of IT professionals reveals current attitudes to pay, responsibilities and what matters most in their current jobs.
Linux certification is increasingly significant for tech workers as the public cloud and software-defined networking become ever more important. A Linux cert can set IT professionals apart from the herd and potentially put a lot more money in their bank accounts.Once these certifications were a gauge of reliability, according to CompTIA chief tech evangelist James Stanger. “Twenty years ago, Linux tended to attract people who were a little edgier,” he said. “So certification was traditionally used in the Linux side just to find people you can work with—will they show up on time?”Now, these certifications are a demonstration not only of proficiency but also dedication to self-improvement. “You can’t go wrong with a certification,” said Joe Faletra, director of infrastructure services at Modis, a technology staffing and consulting firm. “I’ll lean towards certs over experience [in hiring], because this person has put the effort into learning and passing the exam.”To read this article in full, please click here
You will have more connected devices than ever on your network in 2021, especially if you’re in healthcare, retail, or logistics, industries that are among the early adopters of the Internet of Things (IoT). You’ll have devices on your network edge, in your headquarters, on vehicles, in machinery, in your stores, in employees’ homes, and on public property.And there’s a good chance that some or many of these IoT devices have built-in security vulnerabilities that can endanger your network. In trying to capitalize on the voracious global appetite for connected commercial devices, many IoT manufacturers and developers are shoveling out enterprise IoT devices with, shall we say, varying levels of regard for security.To read this article in full, please click here
Our survey of 1,172 IT professionals finds that demand for some IT skills is strong but the pandemic has influenced the rate of hiring and roles that are being prioritized.
The Linux command line allows your system to remember commands that you use—up to a limit set by your HISTSIZE variable. Since each user’s HISTSIZE is generally set to 1000, that means Linux can remember the last 1000 commands you entered and make it easy to reuse them without retyping them.Unless you configure your history settings differently, all of your commands will be remembered. You can put some restrictions on that behavior if you like. For example, you might not want to save every command you use to read a man page or every time you type pwd to ask where you’re currently sitting in the file system. How to restrict the commands that are remembered and which are not is covered here.To read this article in full, please click here
It was probably inevitable, but companies are urging federal regulators to intervene or even block Nvidia’s planned $40 billion purchase of Arm Holdings.Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm are among a number of companies concerned about whether they will continue to have equal access to Arm technology after the acquisition closes, according to both Bloomberg and CNBC. And CNBC goes so far as to ask regulators around the world to scuttle the deal altogether.Earlier this month, UK-based AI chip start-up Graphcore asked the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to block the acquisition. Graphcore isn’t even an Arm licensee, just an Nvidia competitor in the AI-processor space.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco continues to expand customer cloud-neutral connectivity options, this time tying its Edge Intelligence software with Amazon Web Services' IoT cloud service.Specifically, Cisco’s Edge Intelligence software now works with AWS’s IOT Core service to let customers process data from, communicate with and manage thousands of IoT devices and applications linked via industrial operations networks.Cisco Edge Intelligence runs on Cisco’s IoT and industrial networking family and gathers data from connected devices to create logical flows from the edge into private, public or third-party clouds. For example, if a robotic arm in a remote system needs replacement, it can send telemetry about the problem. Edge Intelligence extracts that data and gives the operational-technology team information it can use to fix the problem.To read this article in full, please click here
As demand for data-center capacity has surged, owners and operators are struggling to keep pace on the employee side. Improved outreach, more creative approaches to recruitment, and better training and education opportunities are needed to ensure the data-centers can meet the "astronomical anticipated demand" for skilled people, said Rhonda Ascierto, vice president of research at Uptime Institute.The research firm's newly released Global Data Center Staffing Forecast reveals concern about the volume of open jobs and hard-to-find skills. In 2020, 50% of data-center owners and operators reported having difficulty finding qualified candidates for open jobs, compared to 38% in 2018. Meanwhile, demand for data-center staff is forecast to grow globally from about 2 million full-time employees in 2019 to nearly 2.3 million by 2025, Uptime Institute reports.To read this article in full, please click here
As demand for data-center capacity has surged, owners and operators are struggling to keep pace on the employee side. Improved outreach, more creative approaches to recruitment, and better training and education opportunities are needed to ensure the data-centers can meet the "astronomical anticipated demand" for skilled people, said Rhonda Ascierto, vice president of research at Uptime Institute.The research firm's newly released Global Data Center Staffing Forecast reveals concern about the volume of open jobs and hard-to-find skills. In 2020, 50% of data-center owners and operators reported having difficulty finding qualified candidates for open jobs, compared to 38% in 2018. Meanwhile, demand for data-center staff is forecast to grow globally from about 2 million full-time employees in 2019 to nearly 2.3 million by 2025, Uptime Institute reports.To read this article in full, please click here
Ransomware is becoming the number one threat to data, which makes it essential to ensure that bad actors don’t encrypt your backup data along with your primary data when they execute ransomware attacks. If they succeed at that, you will have no choice but to pay the ransom, and that will encourage them to try it again.The key to not having to pay ransom is having the backups to restore systems that ransomware has encrypted. And the key to protecting those backups from ransomware is to put as many barriers as you can between production systems and backup systems. Whatever you do, make sure that the only copy of your backups is not simply sitting in a directory on a Windows server in the same data center you are trying to protect. Let’s take a closer look at a few key elements of that sentence: “Windows”, “same data center”, and “sitting in a directory”.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM has launched the Power Private Cloud (PPC) Rack solution, a converged infrastructure product that migrates on-premises apps running on its POWER9/AIX systems to the cloud.The solution consists of three POWER System S922 servers with 20 CPU cores, 256GB of RAM, and 3.2TB of NVMe local storage, plus a new storage enclosure, the FlashSystem 5200, with a minimum of 9.6TB and a pair of SAN24B-6 switches with 24 Fibre Channel ports.To read this article in full, please click here
The server market is fairly slow to change in all things, and that includes its processor platforms. But lately it's clear AMD's comeback is getting very real.Left for dead four years ago, AMD already has won over the gamers. Its Ryzen series of processors are the go-to choice for system builders on YouTube, whose specialty is building a high-end gaming rig in 15 minutes. But the server market is also taking note.The latest sign came from Mercury Research, which follows the semiconductor market, in particular CPU sales. For the fourth quarter of 2020, Intel held 92.9% market share to AMD's 7.1%, but Intel was down from 95.5% one year earlier in Q4 2019 and AMD was way up from 4.5%. For the server market, that's some rapid growth.To read this article in full, please click here
There was once a time when hard drives that spun at 10,000 and 15,000 RPMs were considered fast storage. Then came the SSD and blew that all away. But there are some old servers out there still using them, and they could use a more modern approach.HPE has announced an SSD replacement option for SATA-connected disk drives in its Apollo, ProLiant and Synergy servers called Very Read-Optimized (VRO). These 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SSDs use SATA interfaces and are plug-in replacements for the drives in the servers.HPE claimed in a Community Experts blog post this week that the drives will deliver better TCO than 10,000 RPM HDDs, although really, that's not a hard claim to make. Based on HPE's own testing, you can get 70,000 read IOPS on an HPE SATA VRO SSD compared to 400 IOPS on the fastest HPE 10K HDD. It's not even close. HPE argues that the upgrade pays for itself. It says the SSDs are up to three times more energy efficient than the 10K drives.To read this article in full, please click here
If you need to generate a list of names and addresses to test an application or a script that you're working on, Linux can make that surprisingly easy. There's a command called "rig" that will create name, address and phone number listings. As far as I can tell, out of the box, it only works with U.S. addresses and area codes. However, if this is indeed the case, you might be able to work around this problem.To use the rig command, you can just type "rig" on the command line, and a single name and address will be generated. You will see something like this:$ rig
Mavis English
1015 Tulip St
Anderson, IN 46018
(317) xxx-xxxx
To generate a list with many addresses, use the -c option and specify the number of addresses that you want to see.To read this article in full, please click here
More than 18,000 new IT jobs sprang up in January as the overall outlook for tech hiring substantially improved over the past several months, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and research firm Janco Associates.Between that new hiring and adjustments made to the job market totals in the latest BLS numbers, the IT sector has now recouped 53,600 of the roughly 100,000 jobs it lost due to the COVID-19 crisis, according to Janco principal M. Victor Janulaitis.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
What’s more, the upward trajectory seems likely to continue, as the changing IT jobs market grows and changes, according to his projections. “IT job-market growth will expand by almost 11% in the post-COVID era,” he said. “Most of the growth in the IT job market will be with software developers, quality assurance, and testers. This will be driven by [work from home] as it is embraced by more enterprises in normal operations and internet-centric applications are developed and deployed.”To read this article in full, please click here
Network slicing technology has large parts of the wireless networking community excited, and it’s easy to understand why: It can deliver multiple logical networks over a single physical infrastructure and give each network the unique set of characteristics required to meet specific user needs.The idea of re-using scarce radio-frequency spectrum to create more value for providers that own the infrastructure, in addition to the ability to offer over-the-top services beyond mere connectivity, has the telecom giants interested, particularly those deploying 5G cellular services.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco AppDynamics is making it easier for customers to integrate security features with application development to help customers detect threats, identify non-standard application behavior, and block attacks.The company is adding software, called Cisco Secure Application, to the AppDynamics platform to correlate security and application information by scanning code execution for known exploits. Vulnerability data is shared with application and security operations teams so that together they can prioritize, execute, and track remediation efforts.
Read more: How AI can create self-driving data centersTo read this article in full, please click here
The surprise announcement that Jeff Bezos will leave later this year and hand over the reins to AWS leader Andy Jassy marks a remarkable rise for Jassy. He began as a marketing manager in 1997 and started AWS in 2003.