IDG Contributor Network: 5 things to know about Cisco and AppDynamics

On Jan. 24, I attended a Cisco Spark event in San Francisco. The day started with a keynote by Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Collaboration. He also ended the day at event receptions. However, my afternoon meeting with Rowan was abruptly canceled with little explanation.As it happens, Rowan had to skip out during his own event to spend $3.7 billion to acquire AppDynamics. Although the news broke before the day’s end, nothing was mentioned at the Cisco Spark event, which was laser-focused on its new Spark Board.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The end of net neutrality is nigh—here’s what’s likely to happen

The concept of net neutrality holds that telecom carriersmay not treat some content differently than other content, depending on who owns it, for example. The idea’s merits have been hotly debated for years, eventually coming to serve as a technological/ideological litmus test. Liberals, typically, favored the concept, believing it is necessary to ensure equal, unfettered access to all kinds of online content. Conservatives mostly disagreed with it, claiming it unfairly and unnecessarily regulated telecom carriers. Late in the Obama administration, net neutrality was codified into policy. But the new chairman of the Federal Communications Comission, Ajit Pai, a former lawyer for Verizon, is an ardent opponent of net neutrality. With the support of the Trump administration and Republican Congress, Pai has already ended enforcement of the rules and is widely expected to scuttle the entire policy as soon as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Study Says 5G Subscribers Will Top 25M by 2021

5G will also generate 30 GB of data per month.

IDG Contributor Network: ForeScout extends to offer AWS security visibility

ForeScout is a security company that specializes in giving organizations agentless visibility and control of both traditional and IoT devices connected to the network. That's probably super-interesting if you're a IT security practitioner, but if you're not, you're probably stifling a yawn about now. But remember, if you will, that the first planned IPO of 2017 -- that of AppDynamics -- got canceled very much at the last minute when the company was acquired by Cisco. So given we're yet to see a 2017 IPO, and that ForeScout is rumored to have confidentially filed its documentation for an IPO recently, anything newsy from ForeScout's HQ gets a little more interesting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ForeScout extends to offer AWS security visibility

ForeScout is a security company that specializes in giving organizations agentless visibility and control of both traditional and IoT devices connected to the network. That's probably super-interesting if you're a IT security practitioner, but if you're not, you're probably stifling a yawn about now. But remember, if you will, that the first planned IPO of 2017 -- that of AppDynamics -- got canceled very much at the last minute when the company was acquired by Cisco. So given we're yet to see a 2017 IPO, and that ForeScout is rumored to have confidentially filed its documentation for an IPO recently, anything newsy from ForeScout's HQ gets a little more interesting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BGP Basics: Internal And External BGP

IT Outages: The Costly Fallout

And This Is Why Relying on Linux Makes Sense

Most networking operating systems include a mechanism to roll back device configuration and/or create configuration snapshots. These mechanisms usually work only for the device configuration, but do not include operating system images or other components (example: crypto keys).

Now imagine using RFC 1925 rule 6a and changing the “configuration rollback” problem into “file system snapshot” problem. That’s exactly what Cumulus Linux does in its newest release. Does it make sense? It depends.

Cisco faces a tougher collaboration rival in updated Prysm

Collaboration has come a long way from projectors, cable adapters and that long wait for the presenter to make the slides fit on the screen.Cisco Systems made a splash last month with the Spark Board, a meeting-room screen that acts like a giant iPad running the company’s cloud-based collaboration service. But other vendors are streamlining meetings too, including Google, Microsoft, and a number of startups.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dozens of iOS apps fail to secure users’ data, researcher says

Dozens of iOS apps that are supposed to be encrypting their users' data don't do it properly, according to a security researcher.Will Strafach, CEO of Sudo Security Group, said he found 76 iOS apps that are vulnerable to an attack that can intercept protected data.The developers of the apps have accidentally misconfigured the networking-related code so it will accept an invalid Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate, Strafach claimed in a Monday blog post.   TLS is used to secure an app’s communication over an internet connection. Without it, a hacker can essentially eavesdrop over a network to spy on whatever data the app sends, such as login information.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dozens of iOS apps fail to secure users’ data, researcher says

Dozens of iOS apps that are supposed to be encrypting their users' data don't do it properly, according to a security researcher.Will Strafach, CEO of Sudo Security Group, said he found 76 iOS apps that are vulnerable to an attack that can intercept protected data.The developers of the apps have accidentally misconfigured the networking-related code so it will accept an invalid Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate, Strafach claimed in a Monday blog post.   TLS is used to secure an app’s communication over an internet connection. Without it, a hacker can essentially eavesdrop over a network to spy on whatever data the app sends, such as login information.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to set up the EVE-NG network emulator on a Linux system

EVE-NG is a graphical network emulator that supports both commercial and open-source router images. It’s graphical user interface runs in a web browser. EVE-NG runs in a virtual machine so it can be set up Windows, Mac OS, or Linux computers.

In this post, I will show how to set up an EVE-NG virtual machine on an Ubuntu Linux system. I’ll show the basic steps to creating and running a simple lab consisting of emulated Linux nodes.

To support more complex labs using open-source routers and other open-source network appliances in EVE-NG, we need to create custom templates and build router images specifically for use in EVE-NG. I will cover these topics in a future post. In this post, we’ll focus only on getting an EVE-NG virtual machine set up and running on a Linux system.

EVE-NG Overview

EVE-NG is a clientless network emulator that provides a user interface via a browser. Users may create network nodes from a library of templates, connect them together, and configure them. Advanced users or administrators may add software images to the library and build custom templates to support almost any network scenario.

EVE-NG supports pre-configured multiple hypervisors on one virtual machine. It runs Continue reading

BrandPost: Ethernet Ports on PCs Are in for a Long Overdue Speed Boost

Every year, the processing power of the CPUs that drive our computing and gaming devices increases, enabling them to ingest, process, and churn out more data faster. When you look at the increases over time, as the folks at Expert Exchange did in 2015, the progress is nothing short of mind-boggling. They found that an Apple iPhone 5 had 2.7 times the processing power of a 1985 Cray-2 supercomputer. And a pair of 2015 Nintendo gaming systems had about the same processing power as the computer that guided Apollo 11 to the moon. We see it in the new models of workstations, PCs and laptops that come out every year, or even every six months – each one faster and smaller than the last. But, as IDC Research Director Linn Huang points out, the same is not true for the wired Ethernet ports on those machines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper founder, CTO Sindhu cuts role to focus on startup

Founder and current CTO of Juniper Pradeep Sindhu says he will reduce his role at the company to focus on developing technology for a startup he co-founded in 2015 called Fungible.On his Juniper blog Sindhu wrote: I am equally passionate about the success of Juniper Networks, the company I founded in 1996. I believe that the technology I am working on at Fungible, in conjunction with Juniper's technologies, have the potential to revolutionize the industry. This is why Juniper has invested in Fungible. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper founder, CTO Sindhu cuts role to focus on startup

Founder and current CTO of Juniper Pradeep Sindhu says he will reduce his role at the company to focus on developing technology for a startup he co-founded in 2015 called Fungible.On his Juniper blog Sindhu wrote: I am equally passionate about the success of Juniper Networks, the company I founded in 1996. I believe that the technology I am working on at Fungible, in conjunction with Juniper's technologies, have the potential to revolutionize the industry. This is why Juniper has invested in Fungible. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper founder, CTO Sindhu cuts role to focus on startup

Founder and current CTO of Juniper Pradeep Sindhu says he will reduce his role at the company to focus on developing technology for a startup he co-founded in 2015 called Fungible.On his Juniper blog Sindhu wrote: I am equally passionate about the success of Juniper Networks, the company I founded in 1996. I believe that the technology I am working on at Fungible, in conjunction with Juniper's technologies, have the potential to revolutionize the industry. This is why Juniper has invested in Fungible. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US House approves new privacy protections for email and the cloud

The U.S. House of Representatives approved on Monday the Email Privacy Act, which would require law enforcement agencies to get court-ordered warrants to search email and other data stored with third parties for longer than six months. The House approved the bill by voice vote, and it now goes the Senate for consideration.The Email Privacy Act would update a 31-year-old law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Some privacy advocates and tech companies have pushed Congress to update ECPA since 2011. Lax protections for stored data raise doubts about U.S. cloud services among consumers and enterprises, supporters of the bill say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US House approves new privacy protections for email and the cloud

The U.S. House of Representatives approved on Monday the Email Privacy Act, which would require law enforcement agencies to get court-ordered warrants to search email and other data stored with third parties for longer than six months. The House approved the bill by voice vote, and it now goes the Senate for consideration.The Email Privacy Act would update a 31-year-old law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Some privacy advocates and tech companies have pushed Congress to update ECPA since 2011. Lax protections for stored data raise doubts about U.S. cloud services among consumers and enterprises, supporters of the bill say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The key functions to consider when building or buying a log analysis platform

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. “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”  The immortal words of Confucius resonate with anyone who has ever tried to glean useful information from log data. There are consensus-driven definitions of what exactly log analysis is, but a simplified, accessible explanation might be: to organize log entries into a human-friendly display and make business decisions based on what you learn.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The key functions to consider when building or buying a log analysis platform

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.“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”  The immortal words of Confucius resonate with anyone who has ever tried to glean useful information from log data.There are consensus-driven definitions of what exactly log analysis is, but a simplified, accessible explanation might be: to organize log entries into a human-friendly display and make business decisions based on what you learn.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here