Humans are (still) the weakest cybersecurity link

Humans remain the weak link in corporate data protection, but you might be surprised hat it isn't only rank-and-file employees duped by phishing scams who pose risks. Some companies are lulled into a false sense of cybersecurity by vendors. You read that right:Some enterprises believe the shiny new technologies they've acquired will protect them from anything.Just ask Theodore Kobus, leader of BakerHostetler’s Privacy and Data Protection team. BakerHostetler Theodore Kobus, BakerHostetler’s Privacy and Data Protection team.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Face-off: ServiceNow vs. Zendesk for IT service management

Face-off: ServiceNow vs. Zendesk for IT service management To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Cisco certifications target business professionals eyeing software roles

Trying to keep business professionals ahead of the rapidly changing technology environment, Cisco this week rolled out new business certificate and training packages.The package includes a certification-level offering for what’s known as a client advocate or a Customer Success Manager. The other certification has to do with helping business professionals learn how to build and transform corporations into the digital environment.+More on Network World: DHS warns on immigration spoofing scam+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Game of nodes

There’s a whirlwind of information on the topic of network commoditization. Seriously. Just search in your favorite search engine for “SDN,” “NFV,” or “telco cloud.” You will find dozens of open source projects, communities, forums, architectural definitions, standards, standard bodies, news articles, press releases, and blog sites dedicated to the aforementioned. With such a myriad of information, you’d think people out there would have a deep understanding of why these topics are creating so much noise. I make it a point to ask everyone I meet this simple question: “In a few sentences, what does telco cloud, NFV, or SDN mean to you?” In many cases, people generally just quote a bunch of buzz words — most of which I’m programmed to forget. Others jump into the “What” and “How” of these trends. Only a very few understand the “Why” and that there’s a fundamental challenge to the current business models in their industry. Something has to change. —New Stack

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A vigilante hacker may have built a computer worm to protect the IoT

Is a vigilante hacker trying to secure your IoT device from malware? The mysterious developer behind a growing computer worm wants people to think so. The worm, known as Hajime, has infected tens of thousands of easy-to-hack products such as DVRs, internet cameras, and routers. However, the program so far hasn't done anything malicious.Instead, the worm has been preventing a notorious malware known as Mirai from infecting the same devices. It's also been carrying a message written from its developer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RESPONSE: 3 Hidden Lessons Behind Top Podcasts to Help Yours Stand Out

Thoughts from the Content Marketing Institute for budding podcasters were shared here. Here’s my response to the points that stood out to me.

CMI’s big idea #1.

“At first, format trumps talent.” And then later…“Avoid the race to the bottom of simply booking the biggest guests in your niche and meandering through an unplanned episode. Instead, find your format.”

Response. To record an effective show people will listen to, you need a plan, agreed. However, the article cites an example of a 15 minute long episode carved into blocks of minutes and seconds.

Perhaps that’s what you need when working against an ultra-tight timeline. However, an outline that provides structure should be adequate. Overly structuring a podcast is burdensome and can serve to stifle interesting conversation. Freedom is one of the benefits of podcasting.

Podcasting is NOT a digital regurgitation of radio, although many try to shoehorn podcasts into a radio format, because the radio business is what they understand. However, podcast content is different. Distribution is different. Listener consumption is different. Monetization is different.

And perhaps most importantly, timelines are fluid. 15 minute long podcasts are being created under an artificial time constraint that begs the question…why?

On the other hand, Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Unite and conquer your storage silos

If you’re a storage admin, it might seem like there’s a new flash storage system being pitched at your inbox every week. Maybe a few times a week, in fact. Perhaps you’re also investigating the cloud, and whether your enterprise would want to go with a hybrid, private or public cloud implementation. Chances are you already have a lot of storage in your infrastructure from past purchases, and when you add it all up, you could be sitting on quite a diverse collection of resources—and those resources may be significantly underutilized today.The diversity of storage types presents many options, which creates a real challenge for admins—but only because all those different resources could not be seamlessly connected until now. With storage solutions that deliver ultra-fast performance, such as all-flash arrays, some that save with low cost, cloud capacity for cold (inactive) data, and numerous other shared storage resources, most enterprise IT teams have the right resources to serve a wide variety of different data demands. The challenge is knowing what data needs which resource, then continually aligning data to the right resource as its needs change over time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, Continue reading

Riverbed Expands Reach with Xirrus Deal

Harman Uses Watson’s AI Capabilities for Voice-Controlled Devices

Harman is demonstrating the technology at IBM's Watson IoT headquarters in Munich.

Riverbed Acquires Xirrus to ‘Supercharge’ SD-WAN

Xirrus' access points provide Riverbed with data from the edge.

Amazon Web Services Embraces Container Networking

Currently, networking on AWS occurs at the host level, not at the container level.

5 ways to keep virtual assistants from sharing your company’s secrets

Virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Now have the potential to make enterprise workers more productive. But do “always listening” assistants pose a serious threat to security and privacy, too?Nineteen percent of organizations are already using intelligent digital assistants, such as Siri and Cortana, for work-related tasks, according to Spiceworks’ October 2016 survey of 566 IT professionals in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The survey also found that 46 percent of organizations plan to adopt intelligent assistants within five years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 ways to keep virtual assistants from sharing your company’s secrets

Virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Now have the potential to make enterprise workers more productive. But do “always listening” assistants pose a serious threat to security and privacy, too?Nineteen percent of organizations are already using intelligent digital assistants, such as Siri and Cortana, for work-related tasks, according to Spiceworks’ October 2016 survey of 566 IT professionals in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The survey also found that 46 percent of organizations plan to adopt intelligent assistants within five years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SnapLogic’s AI simplifies enterprise software connections

SnapLogic wants to make it easier for users of its enterprise software integration platform to connect components of their business systems. The company has unveiled a new feature that uses machine learning to suggest what users may want to do.The idea behind the new feature, announced this week, is to make it easier to connect and move data between enterprise software systems. SnapLogic's service lets companies take a data source like a Concur instance, and synchronize that with information an ERP system like Microsoft Dynamics. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HyTrust Helps Feds Meet Cloud Security Mandate

It's a 'Swiss Army Knife' for federal cloud security compliance.

ICSA Labs Certifies NSX Micro-segmentation Capabilities

VMware NSX  has achieved ICSA labs Corporate Firewall Certification.

With the release of NSX for vSphere® 6.3, VMware has not only introduced several key security features such as Application Rule Manager and Endpoint Monitoring, which provide deep visibility into the application, and enable a rapid zero-trust deployment, but has also achieved Corporate Firewall Certification in independent testing performed by ICSA labs, a leading third-party testing and certification body and independent division of Verizon.

VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3 has been tested against an industry-accepted standard to which a consortium of firewall vendors, end users and ICSA labs contributed, and met all the requirements in the Baseline and Corporate module of the ICSA Module Firewall Certification Criteria version 4.2.
NSX is the only true micro-segmentation platform to achieve ICSA Firewall certification — with the NSX Distributed Firewall providing kernel-based, distributed stateful firewalling, and the Edge Services Gateway providing services such as North-South firewalling, NAT, DHCP, VPN, load balancing and high availability. VMware NSX provides security controls aligned to the application and enables a Zero-Trust model, independent of network topology.

The ICSA Firewall Certification criteria focus on several key firewall aspects, including stateful services, logging and persistence. ICSA also validates Continue reading

Docker wants to help put old enterprise apps into containers

Docker is offering enterprises an easier on-ramp to using containers with a new consulting program aimed at taking a legacy application and migrating it to a container in five days.The idea behind the program is to show companies the concrete benefits of moving older applications over to containers, without asking them to undergo a massive transformation effort. Docker is working with Cisco, Avanade, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the Modernize Traditional Applications program, which will focus on migrating an application to modern infrastructure and getting it set up inside a containerized environment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DHS warns on immigration spoofing scam

You could probably see this one and others like it coming, given the current immigration quagmire that is the United States immigration environment. Today the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a fraud alert saying criminals have been using the agency’s Hotline as part of a spoofing scam to steal personal information.+More on Network World: DARPA to eliminate “patch & pray” by baking chips with cybersecurity fortification+The DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) said perpetrators of the scam represent themselves as employees with “U.S. Immigration” and can alter caller ID systems to make it appear that the call is coming from the DHS OIG Hotline telephone number (1-800-323-8603).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DHS warns on immigration spoofing scam

You could probably see this one and others like it coming, given the current immigration quagmire that is the United States immigration environment. Today the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a fraud alert saying criminals have been using the agency’s Hotline as part of a spoofing scam to steal personal information.+More on Network World: DARPA to eliminate “patch & pray” by baking chips with cybersecurity fortification+The DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) said perpetrators of the scam represent themselves as employees with “U.S. Immigration” and can alter caller ID systems to make it appear that the call is coming from the DHS OIG Hotline telephone number (1-800-323-8603).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed absorbs WIFi vendor Xirrus, reaches for the edge of the network

Network management company Riverbed Technology today announced its intent to acquire enterprise Wi-Fi equipment vendor Xirrus for an undisclosed fee.Riverbed touted that the acquisition, which it expects to close by the end of the month, will expand its software-defined WAN solution, and integrate Xirrus’ robust Wi-Fi products into the broader Riverbed ecosystem.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: New FCC web portal opens for 5G experimenters + Trump's cybersecurity mystery: 90 days in, where's the plan?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here