Welcome to CIO Week 2023
When you are the Chief Information Officer (CIO), your systems need to just work. A quiet day when users go about their job without interruption is a celebration. When they do notice, something has probably fallen apart.
We understand. CIOs own some of an organization's most mission-critical challenges. Your security counterparts expect safety to be robust while your users want it to be unintrusive. Your sales team continues to open offices in new locations while those new hires need rapid connectivity to your applications. You own a budget that never seems to grow fast enough to match price increases from point solution vendors. On top of that, CIOs must support their organizations' shifts to new remote and hybrid work models, which means modernizing applications and infrastructure faster than ever before.
Today marks the start of CIO Week, our celebration of the work that you and your teams accomplish every day. We’ve assembled this week to showcase features, stories, and tools that you can use to continue to deliver on your mission while also improving the experience of your users and administrators. We’ve even included announcements to help on the budget front.
We’re doing this because we’ve been in the Continue reading
Azure Host-Based Networking: VFP and AccelNet Introduction
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an architecture where the network’s control plane is decoupled from the data plane to centralized controllers. These intelligent, programmable controllers manage network components as a single system, having a global view of the whole network. Microsoft’s Azure uses a host-based SDN solution, where network virtualization and most of its services (Firewalls, Load balancers, Gateways) run as software on the host. The physical switching infrastructure, in turn, offers a resilient, high-speed underlay transport network between hosts.
Figure 1-1 shows an overview of Azure’s SDN architecture. Virtual Filtering Platform (VFP) is Microsoft’s cloud-scale software switch operating as a virtual forwarding extension within a Hyper-V basic vSwitch. The forwarding logic of the VFP uses a layered policy model based on policy rules on Match-Action Table (MAT). VFP works on a data plane, while complex control plane operations are handed over to centralized control systems. VFP layers, such as VNET, NAT, ACL, and Metering, have dedicated controllers that programs policy rules to MAT using southbound APIs.
Software switches switching processes are CPU intensive. To reduce the burden of CPU cycles, VFP offloads data forwarding logic to hardware NIC after processing the first packet of the flow and creating the flow Continue reading
s SP 800-207 [Zero Trust Architecture] as the hot new thing, but the fact is, zero trust network models have been around for over a decade. Problem Replication or Why Do We Need to Break It Again?
There was a tweet the other day that posited that we don’t “need” to replicate problems to solve them. Ultimately the reason for the tweet was that a helpdesk refused to troubleshoot the problem until they could replicate the issue and the tweeter thought that wasn’t right. It made me start thinking about why troubleshooters are so bent on trying to make something happen again before we actually start trying to fix an issue.
The Definition of Insanity
Everyone by now has heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. While funny and a bit oversimplified the reality of troubleshooting is that you are trying to make it do something different with the same inputs. Because if you can make it do the same thing over and over again you’re closer to the root cause of the issue.
Root cause is the key to problem solving. If you don’t fix what’s actually wrong you are only dealing with symptoms and not issues. However, you can’t know what’s actually wrong until you can make it happen more than once. That’s because you have to narrow the actual issue down Continue reading
Tangoe Simplifies and De-risks Mobile Device Management
Managing mobile devices is significantly more complicated than managing PCs and laptops. This makes mobile device management and lifecycle management all the more important.Kubernetes Unpacked 016: Taking On Kubernetes As A New Engineer
On today's Kubernetes Unpacked podcast we talk about taking on Kubernetes as a young engineer. As all IT pros know, learning Kubernetes isn’t the easiest thing, especially when you’re first entering the field. Guest Alero Awani, a college student, talks about her transition from Data Engineering to cloud and DevOps, and how and why she came to learn Kubernetes.
The post Kubernetes Unpacked 016: Taking On Kubernetes As A New Engineer appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Kubernetes Unpacked 016: Taking On Kubernetes As A New Engineer
On today's Kubernetes Unpacked podcast we talk about taking on Kubernetes as a young engineer. As all IT pros know, learning Kubernetes isn’t the easiest thing, especially when you’re first entering the field. Guest Alero Awani, a college student, talks about her transition from Data Engineering to cloud and DevOps, and how and why she came to learn Kubernetes.BGP in 2022 – The Routing Table
This past year marks a significant point in the evolution of the Internet where the strong growth numbers that were a constant feature of the past thirty years are simply not present in the data. The Internet’s growth is slowing down significantly. Have we got to the point of market saturation and there is no more demand capacity to fuel further growth? Or are we reeling from the combinations of a global pandemic, turmoil in energy markets and the signs of increased climate instability so that we are no longer as interested to throw more resources into more network infrastructure investment? Let’s take a look at the BGP view of 2022 and see how these larger economic and social considerations are reflected in the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system.Case study: How Mulligan Funding built a SOC 2-compliant fintech SaaS platform with Calico Cloud
The rise of fintech has pushed traditional financial institutions to provide online-based services and launch fintech applications. But these services must be secure and meet certain regulatory requirements, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or SOC 2.
When our customer, Mulligan Funding, needed to launch a new fintech SaaS platform, they had to ensure that all communication to and from the application would be secure and SOC 2 compliant, since the platform would handle sensitive personal and financial data. To achieve this, Mulligan Funding decided to standardize on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and chose Calico Cloud for its security and compliance needs.
Case study highlights
Mulligan Funding faced two major challenges when it came to achieving SOC 2 compliance:
- Ensure compliance and be notified of any control changes 24/7 in a way that’s scalable
- Gain visibility into clusters to immediately pinpoint issues that require troubleshooting
Read the case study to learn:
- How Mulligan Funding bolstered its security posture at scale through unified security policy management.
- Why deploying Calico Cloud not only helped Mulligan Funding achieve compliance, but also helped the company reduce service distributions and optimize troubleshooting.
Read Continue reading