Archive

Category Archives for "Networking"

Marketing Wins

Off-topic post for today …

In the battle between marketing and security, marketing always wins. This topic came to mind after reading an article on using email aliases to control your email—

For example, if you sign up for a lot of email newsletters, consider doing so with an alias. That way, you can quickly filter the incoming messages sent to that alias—these are probably low-priority, so you can have your provider automatically apply specific labels, mark them as read, or delete them immediately.

One of the most basic things you can do to increase your security against phishing attacks is to have two email addresses, one you give to financial institutions and another one you give to “everyone else.” It would be nice to have a third for newsletters and marketing, but this won’t work in the real world. Why?

Because it’s very rare to find a company that will keep two email addresses on file for you, one for “business” and another for “marketing.” To give specific examples—my mortgage company sends me both marketing messages in the form of a “newsletter” as well as information about mortgage activity. They only keep one email address on file, Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Fortinet Secures Work-From-Anywhere With SD-WAN And ZTNA (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we explore the evolution of SD-WAN to encompass Zero Trust Network Access, or ZTNA. Our sponsor is Fortinet and we’ll dig into how Fortinet’s SD-WAN and FortiClient combine to support work from anywhere with zero trust.

The post Tech Bytes: Fortinet Secures Work-From-Anywhere With SD-WAN And ZTNA (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 348: Ransomware Bedevils Cyber Insurance; TSMC To Raise Chip Prices

This week's Network Break examines how ransomware has insurers rethinking premiums and coverage limits, discusses the pros and cons of ISPs sharing flow records with security companies, digs into Arista's efforts to tackle the router market, pontificates on TSMC chip price hikes, and more tech news analysis.

The post Network Break 348: Ransomware Bedevils Cyber Insurance; TSMC To Raise Chip Prices appeared first on Packet Pushers.

IBM updates its mainframe processor to help AI

IBM has introduced a new CPU for its Z Series mainframe that’s designed for transactions like banking, training, insurance, customer interactions, and fraud detection.The Telum processor was unveiled at the annual Hot Chips conference and has been in development for three years to provide high-volume, real-time inferencing needed for artificial intelligence.The Telum design is very different from its System z15 predecessor. It features 8 CPU cores, on-chip workload accelerators, and 32MB of what IBM calls Level 2 semi-private cache. The L2 cache is called semi-private because it is used to build a shared virtual 256MB L3 connection between the cores on the chip. This is a 1.5x growth in cache size over the z15.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM updates its mainframe processor to help AI

IBM has introduced a new CPU for its Z Series mainframe that’s designed for transactions like banking, training, insurance, customer interactions, and fraud detection.The Telum processor was unveiled at the annual Hot Chips conference and has been in development for three years to provide high-volume, real-time inferencing needed for artificial intelligence.The Telum design is very different from its System z15 predecessor. It features 8 CPU cores, on-chip workload accelerators, and 32MB of what IBM calls Level 2 semi-private cache. The L2 cache is called semi-private because it is used to build a shared virtual 256MB L3 connection between the cores on the chip. This is a 1.5x growth in cache size over the z15.To read this article in full, please click here

What is firewall as a service?

So what’s firewall as a service? Firewall as a service, or FWaaS, relies on technology in the cloud. A user or application connects to the FWaaS via the internet, and the service applies domain rules, URL filtering, and other security that physical firewall appliances use. The idea is to replace the multitude of hardware firewalls you’d need to secure all of your business’ traffic from all of its different operational sites with secure internet connections to the service.What’s wrong with firewall appliances? Possibly nothing. Physical firewalls are still quite popular, particularly for businesses without a lot of different locations and without a lot of remote workers. They even have some advantages over FWaaS, like different cost profiles. On-prem firewalls are a capex expenditure up-front but tend to be cheaper over time. They also have lower latency.To read this article in full, please click here

Private 5G: Tips on how to implement it, from enterprises that already have

We hear a lot about private 5G, meaning 5G networks deployed and owned by individual enterprises. A lot online, anyway; of 177 enterprises I've talked with this year, only three said they even knew how to build a private 5G network, and these three learned by doing it. The three discovered an important, but usually unrecognized, question, which is, “What do I it run on?” 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises One reason private 5G gets a lot of attention is that vendors have to talk about something, and one choice is to say something exciting and, well, maybe less than factual. The other is to say something factual and utterly uninteresting. Guess which gets said? The three enterprises that built private 5G networks had to educate themselves with a material from a variety of sources, including the O-RAN alliance, and one of the three characterized this as learning another language, with a dozen or Continue reading

Private 5G: Tips on how to implement it, from enterprises that already have

We hear a lot about private 5G, meaning 5G networks deployed and owned by individual enterprises. A lot online, anyway; of 177 enterprises I've talked with this year, only three said they even knew how to build a private 5G network, and these three learned by doing it. The three discovered an important, but usually unrecognized, question, which is, “What do I it run on?” 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises One reason private 5G gets a lot of attention is that vendors have to talk about something, and one choice is to say something exciting and, well, maybe less than factual. The other is to say something factual and utterly uninteresting. Guess which gets said? The three enterprises that built private 5G networks had to educate themselves with a material from a variety of sources, including the O-RAN alliance, and one of the three characterized this as learning another language, with a dozen or Continue reading

Sharing Failure as a Learning Model

Earlier this week there was a great tweet from my friends over at Juniper Networks about mistakes we’ve made in networking:

It got some interactions with the community, which is always nice, but it got me to thinking about how we solve problems and learn from our mistakes. I feel that we’ve reached a point where we’re learning from the things we’ve screwed up but we’re not passing it along like we used to.

Write It Down For the Future

Part of the reason why I started my blog was to capture ideas that had been floating in my head for a while. Troubleshooting steps or perhaps even ideas that I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget down the line. All of it was important to capture for the sake of posterity. After all, if you didn’t write it down did it even happen?

Along the way I found that the posts that got significant traction on my site were the ones that involved Continue reading