Your next digital security guard should be more like RoboCop
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.
Humans are clearly incapable of monitoring and identifying every threat on today’s vast and complex networks using traditional security tools. We need to enhance human capabilities by augmenting them with machine intelligence. Mixing man and machine – in some ways, similar to what OmniCorp did with RoboCop – can heighten our ability to identify and stop a threat before it’s too late.
The “dumb” tools that organizations rely on today are simply ineffective. There are two consistent, yet still surprising things that make this ineptitude fairly apparent. The first is the amount of time hackers have free reign within a system before being detected: eight months at Premera and P.F. Chang’s, six months at Nieman Marcus, five months at Home Depot, and the list goes on.
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Beyond Alerts: Using orchestration to realize network self-healing
Managing modern networked systems and applications is daunting because infrastructure is complex and things can go wrong in so many parts of the technology stack -- servers, storage, network devices, applications, hypervisors, APIs, DNS, etc. How can you address the challenge?
A good place to start: problems that can solve themselves, should.
This is called “self-healing” in the systems management space. As our systems are increasingly virtualized, the opportunity to have our systems work around and self-correct issues has grown greatly in recent years.
The simplest example of self-healing is automatically restarting a service or process that stops or otherwise becomes unresponsive. It is important to keep in mind that this is a workaround and that automated activity of all sorts needs to be logged and monitored, in turn. If an application leaks memory such that it needs to be automatically restarted several times a day, that restart is not the fix, it’s a Band-Aid that is mitigating the impact while the developers responsible fix the application.
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New Cisco CEO Shuffles the Executive Lineup
Chuck Robbins is starting fresh with his executive inner circle, as Warrior, Elfrink, Overbeek, and possibly Christie are out.
Open Networking for the Whole of Your Data Center Network
In the past, I’ve designed, deployed and operated networks of various sizes, needs and scopes. One of the perennial design points common to all of them is how to approach the out-of-band (OOB) network. When it comes to making sure your production network operates in the face of issues, the OOB network is often a critical component. But it also raises the question of how to build it, what components to use and how much they affect the “day job” of running the production network. These decisions haven’t always been easy.
Generally, there is a spectrum of approaches. On one end is the choice to go with the same gear that you are deploying in the production network. On the other end is the decision to just build the OOB network out of what you can get from the local or online electronics superstore. One can cause you budget problems; the other raises the question if your OOB network will be there when you most need it. All too often the most frugal designs win, and this can cause you to have to troubleshoot the OOB network before you can troubleshoot the production network. So the issue is more than just the initial acquisition cost, Continue reading
Elegance and Simplicity in Subnetting
Simplicity and subnetting often, at least early in the career of a networking professional, are not found in the same sentence. LearningPushing For The Next Level
Drew Conry-Murray joins the Packet Pushers as employee number 1.
Author information
The post Pushing For The Next Level appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Drew Conry-Murray.
Cisco ACI in the CNPES Cert (Engineering Specialist)
Cisco’s current network programmability certs uses two exams per cert, with the second exam focusing on ACI. That represents the first ACI-focused specialist exams from Cisco, and a great reason to learn about ACI and validate that knowledge. Today’s post looks at the ACI-focused exam for the Cisco CNPES Cert exam: the 600-512 NPENGACI exam. We’ll look at both the exam and a related video course.
Other posts in this series:
- Introduction to Cisco’s SDN Certifications
- Cisco Network Programmability (SDN) Intro Course
- The Cisco CNPES Cert: The First Exam and Course
Overview
First, to set the stage, Cisco rolled out their network programmability (read: SDN) certifications over a period of months, mostly in 2014. Figure 1 shows these four certs, with the engineering specialist cert focusing on engineering and implementation.
Figure 1: Overview of Cisco SDN Certifications
Today’s post focuses on the second exam: the 600-512 NPENGACI exam. The name itself is a bit of a mouthful:
Network Programmability ENGineering with ACI
Basically, the NPENG 600-504 exam covers SDN implementation excluding ACI, NPENGACI 600-512 exam includes ACI.
This list provides the links for more details – for the certification, each of the two exams, and each of Cisco’s two Continue reading
Cloning Remote Linux Machines
Recently, I have been asked to find a way how to clone Linux machines running in a remote virtual lab. The machines have single disks, theyAvi Networks’ ADC Now Integrates with Cisco ACI
Cisco and Avi Networks are covering the whole SDN stack now, as the two announce an integration between Avi and Cisco's ACI.