Gartner says the current paucity of skilled IT workers is foiling the adoption of cloud, edge computing, and automation technologies.In its "2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap" based on surveying 437 global firms, Gartner found that IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant barrier to deploying emerging technologies, including compute infrastructure and platform services, network security, digital workplace, IT automation, and storage.To read this article in full, please click here
Palo Alto Networks has rolled out a Wi-Fi based package that the company says provides remote workers with enterprise-class security features.Called Okyo Garde, the bundle incuds Wi-Fi-6-based hardware and mobile application-security software that includes threat-intelligence updates, and sells the hardware and software to enterprises as a customizable subscription. The package also offers malware and ransomware prevention, phishing protection, infected device detection, and suspicious-activity monitoring and control, the company said.Linux security: Cmd provides visibility, control over user activity Workers’ homes are becoming enterprise “branches of one” with multiple devices without IT teams or a deep set of cybersecurity protections, yet they face the same threat landscape as any enterprise, said Mario Queiroz, executive vice president of Palo Alto Networks. Threat actors may even see them as more vulnerable and therefore attractive entry points into the corporate network, Queiroz said.To read this article in full, please click here
The business value of the network has never been higher, and this is driven by digital transformation as borne out businesses accelerating their digital initiatives by as much as seven years due to the pandemic. This is had a profound impact on the enterprise network as most of the enabling technologies such as cloud, mobility and IoT are network centric.This intense focus on digital transformation has exposed many flaws with legacy networks. They are rigid, require intensive manual processes, and lack the agility and intelligence to meet the demands of digital business. Organizations need to make network modernization a priority if they are to maximize their investments in other technologies. Here are five steps that all businesses should consider when modernizing the network.To read this article in full, please click here
Juniper Networks continues to grow its enterprise cloud-security family with a new product that promises to protect application workloads in any cloud or on-premises environment.The company rolled out Juniper Cloud Workload Protection package--a lightweight software agent that the company says controls application execution and monitors application behavior to help businesses spot and fix anomalies.Backup lessons from a cloud-storage disaster The idea is to provide protection from attackers looking to exploit application vulnerabilities, said Kate Adam, senior director of security product marketing for Juniper Networks. To read this article in full, please click here
Work-from employees will no longer be treated as a second-class citizen, which means they will get best-in-class technology including SD-WAN appliances, cellular backup alternatives, zero trust security support and maybe even battery backup.That’s at least part of the plan for hybrid workers now and moving forward, said Cisco’s Todd Nightingale, executive vice president and general manager of the company’s Enterprise Networking & Cloud business. “The ‘return-to-office’ concept is a myth--it’s a world we have left behind.”To read this article in full, please click here
Enterprises can look for more transparency from software vendors after the Biden Administration’s recent mandate that software bills of materials be provided by companies attempting to do business with the federal government.Software bills of materials, frequently abbreviated to SBOMs, aren’t a new concept. The idea comes from the manufacturing sector, where it’s often crucial for buyers to fully understand the components and materials that were used to make a particular piece of equipment.The 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networking 2021 For example, a train engine might contain parts that aren’t rated for certain levels of vibration stress, making it unsuitable for use on a particular type of track. The goal of an SBOM is similar, listing all the proprietary, open source, and licensed components being used in a particular piece of software, so that a buyer can review it and check whether any of those components are outdated or insecure.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM continues to fine-tune its mainframe to keep it attractive to enterprise users interested in keeping the Big Iron in their cloud and AI-application development plans.The company released a new version of the mainframe operating system—z/OS V2.5—that includes beefed-up support for containers, AI, and security.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years According to IBM, applications are at the heart of transactional and batch workloads running on z/OS. Fundamentally, developing new applications while modernizing existing applications is part of the digital transformation occurring in many enterprises.To read this article in full, please click here
The day is coming when enterprise IT professionals will be able to order network infrastructure components from a menu of options, have them designed to fit their business needs, and have the whole thing delivered and running in perhaps hours.The concept is called Network as a Service (NaaS), and it has been around in a number of different forms for a few years, mostly in the service provider arena. Read more about NaaS: NaaS is the future, but it's got challenges Cisco takes its first steps toward network-as-a-service The 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networking How to avoid the network-as-a-service shell game For enterprises, the as-a-service concept took hold as companies started to embrace cloud computing and its model of consumption-based capacity. In the infrastructure space, for example, more than 75% of infrastructure in edge locations and up to 50% of data-center infrastructure will be consumed in the as-a-service model by 2024, according to research firm IDC.To read this article in full, please click here
If your computing environment is subject to a large ransomware attack, you will most certainly be enacting your disaster recovery (DR) plan. But before you begin restoring systems, you must first ensure you have stopped the infection, identified it, and removed it. Jumping too quickly to the restore phase could actually make things worse. To understand why this is the case, it’s important to understand how ransomware works.How ransomware spreads in your environment There are many articles such as this one that describe what ransomware does, but it’s important to emphasize that the goal of ransomware is rarely to infect just one system. Modern ransomware variants will immediately attempt to identify and execute various operating system vulnerabilities to gain administrative access and spread to the rest of your LAN. The attack will be coordinated via command-and-control (C&C) servers, and contacting these servers for instructions is the first thing that every ransomware variant does. They key in responding to an active ransomware attack is stopping further communications with C&C servers, as well as further communications between infected systems and the rest of your network.To read this article in full, please click here
If your enterprise has a website (and one certainly would hope so in 2021!), it also has subdomains. These prefixes of your organization’s main domain name are essential for putting structural order to the content and services on your website, thus preventing online visitors from instantly fleeing in terror, disdain, or confusion.Large enterprises can have thousands of subdomains. IBM, for example, has roughly 60,000 subdomains, while Walmart.com has “only” 2,132 subdomains.What is DNS and how it works Whatever value subdomains bring to enterprises--and they bring plenty--they present more targets for bad actors. Why, just last year the subdomains of Chevron, 3M, Warner Brothers, Honeywell, and many other large organizations were hijacked by hackers who redirected visitors to sites featuring porn, malware, online gambling, and other activities of questionable propriety.To read this article in full, please click here
In compiling this iteration of our list of competitors Cisco can’t kill off, one thing is clear: The competition is fierce amongst the bigger players.Nearly all the networking giant’s competitors have refreshed their product lines or bought into technology to compete more closely with Cisco. But that’s not to say Cisco has been sitting still by any means.The 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networking 2021 The company has expanded and refreshed its core Catalyst, Nexus and Silicon One networking gear and made major strides in security and software. Going forward, it wants to lead the industry in network-as-a-service.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco continues to bulk-up its security portfolio, this week closing the deal on risk-based management company Kenna Security for an undisclosed amount.Kenna’s Risk-Based Vulnerability Management system collects and analyzes security data to provide security teams with information about threats so they can prioritize remediation and better understand risks. 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 The technology will become part of Cisco’s SecureX service that integrates numerous security components. Cisco says the service is an open, cloud-native system to detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. The SecureX dashboard shows operational metrics, triggers alerts to emerging threats, and accelerates threat investigations and incident management by aggregating and correlating global intelligence and local context in one view. To read this article in full, please click here
If yours is like most enterprises, it is under intense competitive pressure to understand faster, decide faster, and act faster in an increasingly dynamic environment.For businesses, that environment is the economy. But for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the environment in which they must leverage technology and tactics against deadly adversaries is more like a battlefield. And all but the most self-aggrandizing sales directors would agree that the stakes on the battlefield are considerably higher than growing revenue and capturing market share. (Not that they are trivial!) Read more: Cisco tool taps telemetry for network, security analyticsTo read this article in full, please click here
If yours is like most enterprises, it is under intense competitive pressure to understand faster, decide faster, and act faster in an increasingly dynamic environment.For businesses, that environment is the economy. But for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the environment in which they must leverage technology and tactics against deadly adversaries is more like a battlefield. And all but the most self-aggrandizing sales directors would agree that the stakes on the battlefield are considerably higher than growing revenue and capturing market share. (Not that they are trivial!) Read more: Cisco tool taps telemetry for network, security analyticsTo read this article in full, please click here
Driven in part by the pandemic, cloud computing adoption has reached new heights. These five articles take a close look at the implications.
Sometimes it’s hard to see gradual changes in technology paradigms because they’re gradual. Sometimes it helps to play “Just suppose…” and see where it leads. So, just suppose that the cloud did what some radical thinkers say, and “absorbed the network”. That’s sure an exciting tag line, but is this even possible, and how might it come about?Companies are already committed to a virtual form of networking for their WAN services, based on VPNs or SD-WAN, rather than building their own WANs from pipes and routers. That was a big step, so what could be happening to make WANs even more virtual, to the point where the cloud could subsume them? It would have to be a data-center change.To read this article in full, please click here
The continuous influx of open-source software (OSS) into enterprise IT departments is, in many ways, an enormous boon to both vendors and users. For the former, the ability to use open source components means getting rid of a great deal of duplicative effort—rather than having to design every part of, say, an IoT sensor and monitoring product from scratch, a vendor can adopt a well-understood, well-supported open source library for its networking stack, and focus more of its attention on the sensing and data analysis features that will set the product apart from its competitors.For end-users, one of the chief advantages is—at least in theory—the improved security that’s part of the usual sales pitch for open source software. The idea here is that the open nature of a piece of software—and the fact that anyone can look at it to discover and correct security flaws—means that it’s generally going to be more secure than a proprietary equivalent.To read this article in full, please click here
With increasingly mobile workforces, it’s important to effectively backup corporate data that resides on laptops, which requires a unique set of features not found in traditional backup systems used for desktops attached to corporate LANs.Laptops have all the functionality of desktops, but are readily lost or stolen, have limited bandwidth for connectivity to corporate resources, and can spend unpredictable spans of time disconnected or turned off. So it’s important to find backup options that meet these challenges, which can also include ransomware attacks.Backup lessons from a cloud-storage disaster Backing up laptops properly also makes upgrading them much easier, especially in the world of remote work. A good backup system can restore a user’s profile and data, and makes replacing a laptop much simpler for both the IT department and the person whose laptop is being replaced. With the right system in place, all you have to do is ship them a new laptop. They can restore their own profile and data without IT intervention, saving time, effort, and a lot of money.To read this article in full, please click here
The Center for Internet Security has updated its set of safeguards for warding off the five most common types of attacks facing enterprise networks—web-application hacking, insider and privilege misuse, malware, ransomware, and targeted intrusions.In issuing its CIS Controls V8 this month, the organization sought to present practical and specific actions businesses can take to protect their networks and data. These range from making an inventory of enterprise assets to account management to auditing logs.In part the new version was needed to address changes to how businesses operate since V7 was issued three years ago, and those changes guided the work. “Movement to cloud-based computing, virtualization, mobility, outsourcing, work-from-home, and changing attacker tactics have been central in every discussion,” the new controls document says.To read this article in full, please click here
Palo Alto Networks bolstered its security portfolio with products that target enterprise network users looking to make the move to a zero-trust environment.The new capabilities focus on a number of zero trust mechanisms—including SaaS, cloud and DNS that will be available in June—and will make it significantly easier for organizations to adopt zero-trust security across the enterprise, according to Anand Oswal, senior vice president and general manager with Palo Alto. More about DNS: DNS in the cloud: Why and why not DNS over HTTPS seeks to make internet use more private How to protect your infrastructure from DNS cache poisoning ICANN housecleaning revokes old DNS security key As more people are working from anywhere, they require fast and always-on access to data and applications in the distributed cloud, regardless of location, Oswal said. “An all-encompassing zero-trust approach to network security is critical for safeguarding productivity in the new reality of remote, mobile, and hybrid work,” he said.To read this article in full, please click here