IDG Contributor Network: HPE acquisitions bring hyperconvergence, hybrid IT into the mainstream

A little over a week ago, HPE announced its agreement to purchase SimpliVity for $650 million in cash. Predictably, tech industry followers erupted into an uproar of opinion about stock price implications and how it would impact support for SimpliVity customers.Less than a week later, HPE announced another purchase: Cloud Cruiser, a 7-year-old startup that provides consumption-based infrastructure analytics. Interestingly, this transaction received much less attention.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: HPE acquisitions bring hyperconvergence, hybrid IT into the mainstream

A little over a week ago, HPE announced its agreement to purchase SimpliVity for $650 million in cash. Predictably, tech industry followers erupted into an uproar of opinion about stock price implications and how it would impact support for SimpliVity customers.Less than a week later, HPE announced another purchase: Cloud Cruiser, a 7-year-old startup that provides consumption-based infrastructure analytics. Interestingly, this transaction received much less attention.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

50% off Fallout 4 – Deal Alert

Bethesda Game Studios, the award-winning creators of Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, welcome you to the world of Fallout 4 – their most ambitious game ever, and the next generation of open-world gaming.  As the sole survivor of Vault 111, you enter a world destroyed by nuclear war. Every second is a fight for survival, and every choice is yours. Only you can rebuild and determine the fate of the Wasteland.  Currently Amazon has the PC and XBOX ONE versions discounted by 50% and the PS4 is 43% off.  Check out these deals on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PeeringDB & Internet Exchange peering Part 3: generating router configurations

The post PeeringDB & Internet Exchange peering Part 3: generating router configurations appeared first on Noction.

Questions to ask your recovery vendor before you buy

At ShmooCon 2017, CSO's Steve Ragan chats with Marc Langer, president of Recovery Point, about the questions that many companies often miss when choosing a data recovery system or process.

How most hackers get into systems

In part two of CSO's interview with Gabe Bassett from Verizon Enterprise Solutions at ShmooCon 2017, Steve Ragan and Bassett discuss why vulnerabilities are not the major vectors that hackers use to get into a company's infrastructure.

Managing risk by understanding attack surfaces

At ShmooCon 2017, CSO's Steve Ragan sits down with Gabe Bassett, senior information security data Scientist at Verizon Enterprise Solutions. The two discuss how attack surfaces work within the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) and how companies can use those to assess their risk profiles.

IT service providers prepare for potential H-1B visa changes

While new U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent proclamations related to immigration have centered on his plans for a Mexican border wall and bans on Syrian refugees, the IT outsourcing industry is anticipating details on his strategy for reforming the H-1B visa program.Trump railed against the shifting of U.S. jobs overseas during his campaign and called for raising the minimum salary for H-1B holders to $100,000 per year, from the current threshold of $60,000 per year.ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: 8 ways to jumpstart your career A purported draft of an executive order recently published called for an investigation into the impact of such nonimmigrant visa programs on American workers and directed the Department of Homeland Security to "consider ways to make the process for allocating H-1B visas more efficient and ensure that beneficiaries of the program are the best and the brightest.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Booted up in 1993, this server still runs — but not for much longer

In 1993, President Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency, Windows NT 3.1 and Jurassic Park were both released, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, and Phil Hogan, an IT application architect, booted up a brand-new Stratus Technologies fault tolerant server.A lot has changed in 24 years, but one thing hasn't: The Stratus server is still in operation and Hogan -- who works at steel products maker Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn Mich. -- continues to keep it that way.This is a fault tolerant server, which means that hardware components are redundant. Over the years, disk drives, power supplies and some other components have been replaced but Hogan estimates that close to 80% of the system is original.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Booted up in 1993, this server still runs — but not for much longer

In 1993, President Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency, Windows NT 3.1 and Jurassic Park were both released, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, and Phil Hogan, an IT application architect, booted up a brand-new Stratus Technologies fault tolerant server.A lot has changed in 24 years, but one thing hasn't: The Stratus server is still in operation and Hogan -- who works at steel products maker Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn Mich. -- continues to keep it that way.This is a fault tolerant server, which means that hardware components are redundant. Over the years, disk drives, power supplies and some other components have been replaced but Hogan estimates that close to 80% of the system is original.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Booted up in 1993, this system still runs — but not for much longer

In 1993, President Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency, Windows NT 3.1 and Jurassic Park were both released, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, and Phil Hogan, an IT application architect, booted up a brand-new Stratus Technologies fault tolerant server. A lot has changed in 24 years, but one thing hasn't: The Stratus server is still in operation and Hogan -- who works at steel products maker Great Lakes Works EGL in Dearborn Mich. -- continues to keep it that way. This is a fault tolerant server, which means that hardware components are redundant. Over the years, disk drives, power supplies and some other components have been replaced but Hogan estimates that close to 80% of the system is original.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US tech industry says immigration order affects their operations

The U.S. tech industry has warned that a temporary entry suspension on certain foreign nationals introduced on Friday by the administration of President Donald Trump will impact these companies' operations that are dependent on foreign workers.The Internet Association, which has a number of tech companies including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft as its members, said that Trump’s executive order limiting immigration and movement into the U.S. has troubling implications as its member companies and firms in many other industries include legal immigrant employees who are covered by the orders and will not be able to return back to their jobs and families in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New Office 365 subscriptions for consumers plunged 62% in 2016

Four years after the introduction of Office 365 for consumers, Microsoft last week said subscriptions to the productivity software had reached nearly 25 million.Subscribers, however, were harder to find last year than in 2015, according to the numbers Microsoft reported: Additions to Office 365's rolls were down 62% in 2016 compared to the year before.During an earnings call with Wall Street analysts last week, CEO Satya Nadella touted revenue increases for the Office products aimed at consumers -- which include Office 365 -- and of the latter said that the company had, "continued to see an increase in ... subscriber base."That it did.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The best office apps for Android

It's 2017. You shouldn't have to worry about whether that old budget spreadsheet will open on your tablet or whether the document in your inbox will look right on your phone. In this day and age, having office apps that work seamlessly and consistently across devices should be a given. Everything should, as the cool kids say, "just work."Yet here we are, in an era where mobile devices are as critical to productivity as desktop computers -- and our virtual office tools are still anything but universal. Features that function smoothly on one product or platform don't always work the same on another. For business users in particular, that can be a serious problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: 3 services for managing all your cloud storage accounts

If you're like most people, you live part -- or most -- of your computing life in the cloud. And odds are that you use more than one cloud-based storage service, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and others. Do you find yourself tearing your hair out when you try to remember on which service you've stored what files? Do you wish you could easily move or copy those files between your cloud services, or between the services and your local storage?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Why IT innovation follows failure

All IT organizations strive for innovation. To succeed in today's digital market you to adapt to the needs of your customers, outflanking your competitors and disrupting the status quo. So what's the most important thing IT leaders of innovative IT companies do that set them apart?"Failure is the most important element of innovation. As an IT leader, it's hard enough to know what you want; then you're taking into account what your competitors are doing, what your customers want and need, what your employees can and cannot accomplish. It's almost impossible not to fail in these high-pressure situations, but that's where innovation sparks," says Tom Willerer, chief product officer for online learning technology and MOOC provider Coursera.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to eliminate insider threats

Insider threats are a major security problemImage by ThinkstockFor years, the primary security objective has been to protect the perimeter—the focus on keeping outsiders from gaining access and doing harm. But statistics prove that more risk exists within an organization. Indeed, many compliance regulations require monitoring of systems to identify and eliminate insider threat. According to Forrester, 58 percent of breaches are caused from internal incidents or with a business partner’s organization. And 55 percent of attacks are originated by an insider as cited in the 2015 IBM Cyber Security Intelligence Index.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to eliminate insider threats

Insider threats are a major security problemImage by ThinkstockFor years, the primary security objective has been to protect the perimeter—the focus on keeping outsiders from gaining access and doing harm. But statistics prove that more risk exists within an organization. Indeed, many compliance regulations require monitoring of systems to identify and eliminate insider threat. According to Forrester, 58 percent of breaches are caused from internal incidents or with a business partner’s organization. And 55 percent of attacks are originated by an insider as cited in the 2015 IBM Cyber Security Intelligence Index.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 Software-Defined Storage Trends

VRF Series Article 3 – Creating a Shared Services VRF

For those following the VRF Series, we currently have a topology built that consists of a segmented Layer 3 first hop network and remotely networked by carrying the isolation from the BrWan router to Main. This article covers, shared services, the next step in our journey to understanding VRFs for Segmented Layer 3 Networks.

The configuration focus is solely on the router Main. The shared services VRF that will be created could serve as a place to connect something that all other VRFs must have access to. Organizations should evaluate their requirements closely before deploying this configuration.

An organization that requires stateful inspection between two areas may choose to connect two or more VRFs together using an L4 or Next Generation Firewall (we will cover this in Article 5). The security ramification of having a shared services VRF, as described in this article, is that devices connected in this area could be used as a proxy into other areas. Therefore, careful planning and proper device level security is important prior to deploying this type of architecture.

The technologies covered here include:

• IGP w/ Route Redistribution (EIGRP)
• BGP w/ Route Redistribution
• VRFs with Route Targets/Route Distinguisher vlaues

The logic of Continue reading