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Category Archives for "Networking"

Threat detection automation won’t solve all your problems

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.A recent Network World article argued that automated threat detection (TD) is more important than automated incident response (IR). But the piece was predicated on flawed and misguided information.The article shared an example of a financial institution in which analysts investigated 750 alerts per month only to find two verified threats. The piece claimed that, in this scenario, automated IR could only be applied to the two verified threat instances, therefore making automated threat detection upstream a more important capability by “orders of magnitude.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft fixes 55 vulnerabilities, 3 exploited by Russian cyberspies

Microsoft released security patches Tuesday for 55 vulnerabilities across the company's products, including for three flaws that are already exploited in targeted attacks by cyberespionage groups.Fifteen of the vulnerabilities fixed in Microsoft's patch bundle for May are rated as critical and they affect Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and the malware protection engine used in most of the company's anti-malware products.System administrators should prioritize the Microsoft Office patches because they address two vulnerabilities that attackers have exploited in targeted attacks over the past two months. Both of these flaws, CVE-2017-0261 and CVE-2017-0262, stem from how Microsoft Office handles Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) image files and can lead to remote code execution on the underlying system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft fixes 55 vulnerabilities, 3 exploited by Russian cyberspies

Microsoft released security patches Tuesday for 55 vulnerabilities across the company's products, including for three flaws that are already exploited in targeted attacks by cyberespionage groups.Fifteen of the vulnerabilities fixed in Microsoft's patch bundle for May are rated as critical and they affect Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and the malware protection engine used in most of the company's anti-malware products.System administrators should prioritize the Microsoft Office patches because they address two vulnerabilities that attackers have exploited in targeted attacks over the past two months. Both of these flaws, CVE-2017-0261 and CVE-2017-0262, stem from how Microsoft Office handles Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) image files and can lead to remote code execution on the underlying system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

57% off J5 Tactical V1-Pro Ultra Bright 3 Mode Flashlight – Deal Alert

Heavy duty, compact and tough as nails. Perhaps the last flashlight you'll ever need. That's how J5 Tactical describes their V1-Pro. A super bright 300 lumens LED produces an intense beam of light up to 600 feet with high, low and strobe modes. It can take a beating, is weather resistant, and works for hours on a single AA battery. With over 11,600 reviews on Amazon, it averages 4.6 out of 5 stars (read reviews). Its typical list price of $29.95 has been reduced by 57% to $12.95. See the discounted J5 Tactical V1-Pro flashlight now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell EMC Ethernet Switching Update

I’m at the Dell EMC World 2017 conference in Las Vegas this week, and I’ve been enjoying catching up on what the network group has been up to. In my previous experience, the legacy Dell Networking products have unfortunately been seen as those things that get thrown in when you buy a rack of servers. In other words, they lacked credibility or worse, the rack would come with another vendor’s switches in them, reinforcing the idea that Dell’s own products weren’t up to the job.

Dell EMC Logo

It’s my belief though, that two things in recent years have dramatically changed that perspective. The first is Dell EMC’s OS10, a modular network operating system which by all accounts is actually pretty capable. Previous OS incarnations were of varying quality, as has been the case with many vendor-branded switches, and with the release of OS10, Dell Networks (as it was at the time) put a stake in the ground and showed that they wanted things to be different.

The second element is disaggregation. Dell identified the opportunity to use what was becoming ubiquitous merchant silicon like the Broadcom Trident II chipset to be able to play at the exact same level as everybody Continue reading

Did cloud kill backup?

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.With enterprises rapidly adopting hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure and migrating traditional workloads to the cloud, distributed architectures have become de-facto standard, but traditional backup and recovery strategies have not kept pace. A new cloud-first approach to data protection is required.According to IDC, 70% of CIOs have a cloud-first strategy, and it is safe to assume most enterprises have a multi-cloud infrastructure, deploying applications on the best suited cloud whether private, public or managed. This evolution to multi-cloud has created two transformative shifts that are disrupting the application tier of the infrastructure world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Edward Snowden loves open source

Infamous government hacker Edward Snowden believes open source is a fundamentally better way to use technology compared to proprietary technology that he believes disempowers users.Snowden was interviewed at the open source cloud computing project OpenStack Summit in Boston via video from a non-descript location and spoke about his personal use of open source technology. In 2013 Snowden, then a government contractor, leaked classified information about government surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, which brought him worldwide fame.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Deep dive comparison of Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud storage +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon taps into open source, white box fervor with new CPE offering

Verizon this week said it would begin offering x86-based servers with OpenStack software aimed at customers looking to support all manner of advanced cloud, software defined networking and network functions virtualization-based enterprises.+More on Network World: Extreme offers glimpse of integrated Avaya, Brocade technology future+According to Verizon, letting customers use a combination of off the shelf hardware over a distributed deployment of OpenStack will let them decouple hardware from software and frees them from proprietary hardware. OpenStack is developed by some 150 companies from AT&T to IBM and Red Hat to Cisco, Dell EMC and others. The open software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, managed typically through a single dashboard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon taps into open source, white box fervor with new CPE offering

Verizon this week said it would begin offering x86-based servers with OpenStack software aimed at customers looking to support all manner of advanced cloud, software defined networking and network functions virtualization-based enterprises.+More on Network World: Extreme offers glimpse of integrated Avaya, Brocade technology future+According to Verizon, letting customers use a combination of off the shelf hardware over a distributed deployment of OpenStack will let them decouple hardware from software and frees them from proprietary hardware. OpenStack is developed by some 150 companies from AT&T to IBM and Red Hat to Cisco, Dell EMC and others. The open software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, managed typically through a single dashboard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

3 Ways Organizations Use NSX for Application Continuity

Five example customers using NSX to enable application continuity for their business

No one looks forward to data center outages. Not the business leaders who fear revenue loss from applications being down, nor the heroic IT admin whose pager is going off at 3:00 AM. Therefore many critical data centers have a sister location and some form of a disaster recovery plan, should something go awry. At the same time, infrastructure teams are under pressure to be more agile and more responsive to the business, across the board, while still lowering costs and making the most out of what they already have. So what exactly happens in the case of a disaster?

The Ponemon Institute reports the average cost of a data center outage to be $740,357, but with massive variance – some known examples going up to $150 million. As businesses move to accelerate to keep up with changes in their industry, each minute lost to downtime can have an impact not only on company resources but also on brand reputation. This is why enabling business continuity or application continuity in a manner that doesn’t require new infrastructure is vital. VMware NSX can offer companies a competitive edge through networking and security Continue reading

Time to Overhaul Your Campus Network

Over the last few years cloud service providers have steadily adopted white-box Ethernet switches and modern, flexible Network Operating Systems into their ecosystems. Mega data center operators, such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, have replaced their proprietary gear with white boxes in their production environments. The major benefit of this paradigm shift is significantly reduced CapEx and OpEx, a more reliable environment, and customized traffic flows for efficiency.  According to IDC, the worldwide ODM direct Ethernet switch (white box) market was $677 million in 2016 and is expected to exceed $900 million in 2017. That’s a growth rate of 33%, and the trend is accelerating.

The shift in white-box adoption started as early as 2012, but has been limited to data centers for many reasons. Even though Enterprise IT executives are motivated to adopt white-boxes, the migration has been slow and challenging. Essentially, the Enterprise network is distinctly different from data center network in many ways.

overhaul_campus_network

  • The data center network is usually homogeneous, while the Enterprise network is heterogeneous. Typically, Enterprises require a variety of speeds ranging from 100Mbps to 100Gbps, and run over different cables, including various types of copper and fiber. The increasingly deployed Power over Ethernet (PoE) Continue reading

JNCIE-DC : The Awesome story of Joao

Hello, I'm very proud to post the story of Joao. He passed recently JNCIE-DC and became one of the firsts JNCIE x4. Joao is a "Juniper Fan" like me. I'm currently preparing JNCIE-DC as well, so I was so happy to read his experience. Enjoy Reading. David...

JNCIE-DC : The Awesome story of Joao

Hello, I'm very proud to post the story of Joao. He passed recently JNCIE-DC and became one of the firsts JNCIE x4. Joao is a "Juniper Fan" like me. I'm currently preparing JNCIE-DC as well, so I was so happy to read his experience. Enjoy Reading. David...

Troubleshooting: Models

How well can you know each of these four systems? Can you actually know them in fine detail, down to the last packet transmitted and the last bit in each packet? Can you know the flow of every packet through the network, and every piece of information any particular application pushes into a packet, or the complete set of ever changing business requirements?

Obviously the answer to these questions is no. As these four components of the network combine, they create a system that suffers from combinatorial explosion. There are far too many combinations, and far too many possible states, for any one person to actually know all of them.

How can you reduce the amount of information to some amount a reasonable human can keep in their minds? The answer—as it is with most problems related to having too much information—is abstraction. In turn, what does abstraction really mean? It really means you build a model of the system, interacting with the system through the model, rather than trying to keep all the information about every subsystem, and how the subsystems interact, in your head. So for each subsystem of the entire system, you have a model you are Continue reading