How Veritas is getting its cloud on

Bill Coleman, a 25-year veteran of the tech industry, became Veritas Technologies' CEO a little over a year ago. He's been leading the charge to help the software vendor transition from selling legacy point storage products to creating an integrated information-management platform. The goal is to provide something that's agnostic -- will work in the cloud or on-premises or both -- and that won't require customers to invest in a constant stream of upgrades to get there.I want to spend some more time talking about the cloud strategy and go into a little more depth on that. Before we do that, when you are finished rolling out this data management platform, how will that change the competitive landscape? Who will you view as your competitors at that point and how will it change the existing competitive relationships?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

9 things your service provider wants you to know

The relationship between enterprise IT and service providers can be difficult. IT has frustrations in achieving optimal service levels. Service providers, as it turns out, have an equal number of bugaboos when it comes to their enterprise clients' readiness for and acceptance of provider intervention.We asked providers across a range of services what advice they can offer to smooth out some typical bumps in the road for their clients. Here's a look at what they had to say.1. Focus on the business users' needs, not the technology. One of the biggest mistakes that enterprise IT makes when engaging a service provider is focusing too much on finding technology to solve the problem instead of fully understanding the problem that needs to be solved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

9 things your service provider wants you to know

The relationship between enterprise IT and service providers can be difficult. IT has frustrations in achieving optimal service levels. Service providers, as it turns out, have an equal number of bugaboos when it comes to their enterprise clients' readiness for and acceptance of provider intervention.We asked providers across a range of services what advice they can offer to smooth out some typical bumps in the road for their clients. Here's a look at what they had to say.1. Focus on the business users' needs, not the technology. One of the biggest mistakes that enterprise IT makes when engaging a service provider is focusing too much on finding technology to solve the problem instead of fully understanding the problem that needs to be solved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Foiled! 15 tricks to hold off the hackers

Malicious hackers have outsize reputations. They are über-geniuses who can guess any password in seconds, hack any system, and cause widespread havoc across multiple, unrelated networks with a single keystroke—or so Hollywood says. Those of us who fight hackers every day know the good guys are usually far smarter. Hackers simply have to be persistent.Each year, a few hackers do something truly new. But for the most part, hackers repeat the tried and true. It doesn’t take a supergenius to check for missing patches or craft a social engineering attack. Hacking by and large is tradework: Once you learn a few tricks and tools, the rest becomes routine. The truly inspired work is that of security defenders, those who successfully hack the hackers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Foiled! 15 tricks to hold off the hackers

Malicious hackers have outsize reputations. They are über-geniuses who can guess any password in seconds, hack any system, and cause widespread havoc across multiple, unrelated networks with a single keystroke—or so Hollywood says. Those of us who fight hackers every day know the good guys are usually far smarter. Hackers simply have to be persistent.Each year, a few hackers do something truly new. But for the most part, hackers repeat the tried and true. It doesn’t take a supergenius to check for missing patches or craft a social engineering attack. Hacking by and large is tradework: Once you learn a few tricks and tools, the rest becomes routine. The truly inspired work is that of security defenders, those who successfully hack the hackers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Federal CIOs tackle the next phase of cloud migration

The cloud has been the default setting in federal government IT for long enough now that most agencies have migrated over some basic operations like email, but that still leaves the hard work undone.After some quick wins -- moving relatively lightweight applications over to a cloud environment -- many federal CIOs are now trying to figure out what comes next. That requires a more challenging calculus and a nuanced evaluation of the agency's IT portfolio to determine what applications and systems really belong in the cloud."Agencies are struggling with that idea of how do they really in an affirmative sort of way adopt cloud technologies," Bill Zielinski, director of the Office of Strategic Programs at the General Services Administration, said during a recent panel discussion hosted by Federal News Radio. "It's one thing to find those kind of freestanding, low-hanging brand-new sorts of things to put in -- quote unquote -- the cloud, but when you really start talking about constituting your IT enterprise with a significant portion of it being cloud, they're struggling."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 ways to achieve ROI on a network solution

Measuring ROIImage by ThinkstockWith the advent of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), WLAN network access to customers and visitors and virtualized systems, the demand for IP addresses has exploded. Small companies might have to manage more than 1,000 IP addresses and it is not unusual for larger companies to have 10,000 or more spread across many locations. Setting up and protecting the network infrastructure is a major challenge and needs to be even more sophisticated and dynamic than ever before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Managing data by business objectives

Storage vendors pitch new systems in innumerable ways. Whether they tout performance claims about IOPS and low latency, protection, reliability, and security features or sell on convenience, capacity, cost, or even brand reputation, there are many options vendors can offer an IT team looking to fix a problem.Although these various abilities have been around for many years, they have long been confined to a storage-centric ecosystem. With the advent of advanced data management software, it finally becomes possible to shift to a data-centric architecture that enables IT admins to automatically align data with storage that meets enterprises’ business objectives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 ways to achieve ROI on a network solution

Measuring ROIImage by ThinkstockWith the advent of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), WLAN network access to customers and visitors and virtualized systems, the demand for IP addresses has exploded. Small companies might have to manage more than 1,000 IP addresses and it is not unusual for larger companies to have 10,000 or more spread across many locations. Setting up and protecting the network infrastructure is a major challenge and needs to be even more sophisticated and dynamic than ever before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 ways to achieve ROI on a network solution

Measuring ROIImage by ThinkstockWith the advent of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), WLAN network access to customers and visitors and virtualized systems, the demand for IP addresses has exploded. Small companies might have to manage more than 1,000 IP addresses and it is not unusual for larger companies to have 10,000 or more spread across many locations. Setting up and protecting the network infrastructure is a major challenge and needs to be even more sophisticated and dynamic than ever before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Managing data by business objectives

Storage vendors pitch new systems in innumerable ways. Whether they tout performance claims about IOPS and low latency, protection, reliability, and security features or sell on convenience, capacity, cost, or even brand reputation, there are many options vendors can offer an IT team looking to fix a problem.Although these various abilities have been around for many years, they have long been confined to a storage-centric ecosystem. With the advent of advanced data management software, it finally becomes possible to shift to a data-centric architecture that enables IT admins to automatically align data with storage that meets enterprises’ business objectives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Latest OWASP Top 10 looks at APIs, web apps

The new release of the OWASP Top 10 list is out for public comment from the Open Web Application Security Project, and while most of it remains the same there are a couple of new additions, focusing on protections for web applications and APIs.To make room for the new items, a couple of older ones were either removed or merged into new items.The fact that the list hasn't changed much since its first release in 2003 is both good and bad, said Jeff Williams, CTO and co-founder at Contrast Security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Latest OWASP Top 10 looks at APIs, web apps

The new release of the OWASP Top 10 list is out for public comment from the Open Web Application Security Project, and while most of it remains the same there are a couple of new additions, focusing on protections for web applications and APIs.To make room for the new items, a couple of older ones were either removed or merged into new items.The fact that the list hasn't changed much since its first release in 2003 is both good and bad, said Jeff Williams, CTO and co-founder at Contrast Security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sysadmins: Say No to Compulsive Tuning Disorder

BlackBerry KeyOne to launch in US and Canada in late May

The BlackBerry KeyOne, an Android-based smartphone with a hardware keyboard, will be available in the U.S. and Canada from May 31, the phone's maker said Thursday.TCL Communications, the Chinese company that acquired rights to produce BlackBerry-brand handsets, originally had said the phone would go on sale in April, so the delay may disappoint potential users. This could be a bad time to test the patience of potential buyers, as Samsung and LG are both heavily promoting their new flagship handsets, the S8 and G6.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BlackBerry KeyOne to launch in US and Canada in late May

The BlackBerry KeyOne, an Android-based smartphone with a hardware keyboard, will be available in the U.S. and Canada from May 31, the phone's maker said Thursday.TCL Communications, the Chinese company that acquired rights to produce BlackBerry-brand handsets, originally had said the phone would go on sale in April, so the delay may disappoint potential users. This could be a bad time to test the patience of potential buyers, as Samsung and LG are both heavily promoting their new flagship handsets, the S8 and G6.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top techies giving 2017 college commencement speeches

Tomorrow's leadersImage by ThinkstockWith today’s push across the education landscape for more emphasis on STEM studies, it’s not surprising that top leaders and innovators in technology would be a draw as college commencement speakers. Here’s a roundup of some of the bigger names.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top techies giving 2017 college commencement speeches

Tomorrow's leadersImage by ThinkstockWith today’s push across the education landscape for more emphasis on STEM studies, it’s not surprising that top leaders and innovators in technology would be a draw as college commencement speakers. Here’s a roundup of some of the bigger names.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Who Moved My Control Plane?

Jordan Martin published a nice summary of what I’ve been preaching for years: centralized control plane doesn’t work (well) while controller-based network orchestration makes perfect sense.

While I totally agree with what he wrote he got the hype angle wrong:

Update: VMware NSX in Redundant L3-only Data Center Fabric

Short update for those that read the original blog post: it turns out that the answer to the question “Is it possible to run VMware NSX on redundantly-connected hosts in a pure L3 data center fabric?” is still NO.

VTEPs from different ESXi hosts can be in different subnets, but while a single ESXi host might have multiple VTEPs, the only supported way to use them is to put them in the same subnet. I removed the original blog post.

A huge thank you to everyone who pushed me with their comments and emails to find the correct answer.