6 Reasons Why Internal Data Centers Won’t Disappear
Even with cloud, companies don't want to give up their internal data centers. Why do data centers have such staying power?Network Break 306: Cloudflare Launches Secure NaaS Offering; SonicWall Vulnerability Affects Nearly 800,000 Devices
Today's Network Break examines a new security service from Cloudflare, a SonicWall vulnerability that affects a massive number of its appliances, a fresh funding round for networking startup Alkira, and more nerdy networking news.
The post Network Break 306: Cloudflare Launches Secure NaaS Offering; SonicWall Vulnerability Affects Nearly 800,000 Devices appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Network Break 306: Cloudflare Launches Secure NaaS Offering; SonicWall Vulnerability Affects Nearly 800,000 Devices
Today's Network Break examines a new security service from Cloudflare, a SonicWall vulnerability that affects a massive number of its appliances, a fresh funding round for networking startup Alkira, and more nerdy networking news.How a Customer’s Trust in Cloudflare Led to a Big Win against Bots
Key Points
- Anyone with public-facing web properties is likely to have bot traffic on their website.
- One type of bot that commonly targets eCommerce and online portals is a ‘scraper bot’.
- Some scraper bots are good (such as those used by search engines to assess your website’s content to inform search results, or price comparison sites to help inform consumer decisions), however many are malicious, and will work to scrape not only images but also pricing data from your site for use by a competitor.
- Many Bot Management providers will need to divert your traffic to a dedicated data centre to analyse your traffic and ‘scrub’ it clean from malicious bot traffic before sending it on to your site. While effective this will almost certainly add latency to the traffic’s ‘journey’ resulting in degraded user experience. Look for a technology partner with an expansive network who can scan your traffic in real time as it passes through any data centre on their network.
- Good and bad scraper bots behave in largely the same way, making it difficult for bot protection systems to differentiate between the two. A common challenge with Bot Management solutions is that they can return a high Continue reading
New on ipSpace.net: Virtualizing Network Devices Q&A
A few weeks ago we published an interesting discussion on network operating system details based on an excellent set of questions by James Miles.
Unfortunately we got so far into the weeds at that time that we answered only half of James' questions. In the second Q&A session Dinesh Dutt and myself addressed the rest of them including:
- How hard is it to virtualize network devices?
- What is the expected performance degradation?
- Does it make sense to use containers to do that?
- What are the operational implications of running virtual network devices?
- What will be the impact on hardware vendors and networking engineers?
And of course we couldn’t avoid the famous last question: “Should network engineers program network devices?”
You’ll need Standard or Expert ipSpace.net subscription to watch the videos.
6G: New Generations of Wireless and the Impact on Measurement
Possible 6G use cases include tactile holographic communications, digital twins, Industrial IoT, and a pervasive use of AI to merge communications and computing with society.Worth Reading: Does your hammer own you?
My friend Marjan Bradeško wrote a great article describing how we tend to forget common sense and rely too much on technology. I would strongly recommend you read it and start thinking about the choices you make when building a network with magic software-intent-defined-intelligent technology from your preferred vendor.
One more (Zero Trust) thing: Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System
Today, we’re very excited to announce our plans for Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System, a new product that monitors your network and alerts when an attack is suspected. With deep integration into Cloudflare One, Cloudflare Intrusion Detection System gives you a bird’s eye view of your entire global network and inspects all traffic for bad behavior, regardless of whether it came from outside or inside your network.
Analyze your network without doing the legwork
Enterprises build firewall rules to keep their networks safe from external and internal threats. When bad actors try to attack a network, those firewalls check if the attack matches a rule pattern. If it does, the firewall steps in and blocks the attack.
Teams used to configure those rules across physical firewall appliances, frequently of different makes and models, deployed to physical locations. Yesterday, we announced Magic Firewall, Cloudflare’s network-level firewall delivered in our data centers around the world. Your team can write a firewall rule once, deploy it to Cloudflare, and our global network will protect your offices and data centers without the need for on-premises hardware.
This is great if you know where attacks are coming from. If you don’t have that level Continue reading
Zero-Touch Provisioning with Nornir
In early 2018 I described how Hans Verkerk implemented zero-touch provisioning with Ansible. Recently he rewrote his scripts as a Python-only solution using Nornir. Enjoy!
Using Social Media Content for Screening in Recruitment and Selection: Pros and Cons for Employers
Social media has become a popular tool these days. Many organizations use social media content for screening in recruitment and selection to scan and shortlist the job candidates. They do it by learning more about them through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many more platforms. They search for the candidates on these platforms to learn about their lifestyles, interests, and hobbies. In this way, they can deduce whether these candidates can serve as an asset to the organization or not. Thus, it has become a common recruitment process these days.
Just like everything has its pros and cons, using social media content for screening in recruitment and selection: pros and cons are present too. There has been a long debate on the pros and cons of this screening method. Let’s take a look at them below.
Pros of Using Social Media For Screening
· Insight into the Informal Life of the Job Candidate
The candidate tries to be as formal as possible during the job interview. They are pretending to be something they are actually not, because they want to impress the interviewer to land that job. Therefore, employers are not able to deduce what the candidate is actually Continue reading
In Africa, Strengthening Digital Infrastructure for a Safe Return to Schools
When COVID-19 struck Africa, governments imposed temporary or full shutdowns of education systems to contain its spread. At least 53 out of the 54 African countries took measures that canceled or partially closed schools. Kenya, for example, canceled the 2020 academic year in March, before changing its directives six months later to allow schools to reopen.
No Internet, No Schools
Across the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Nigeria, and South Africa, where governments imposed partial closure, the few students with access to the Internet, mobile devices, and computers continue learning. But for the majority, there is no schooling. Most can’t afford the cost of Internet data, and very few have access to smartphones and computers. They must improvise to learn, thus widening disparities between learners with Internet access and those without. How can Africa close this gap and offer equal learning opportunities to everyone?
As we gear up towards resuming formal education, there is general panic among parents about the implications resulting from the major learning disruptions. Could COVID-19 lead to a lost generation of students?
Solutions for a Safe Return
Fortunately, African decision-makers are shifting their positions on schools as we learn to live with COVID-19. Governments across the Continue reading
How our network powers Cloudflare One
Earlier this week, we announced Cloudflare One™, a unified approach to solving problems in enterprise networking and security. With Cloudflare One, your organization’s data centers, offices, and devices can all be protected and managed in a single control plane. Cloudflare’s network is central to the value of all of our products, and today I want to dive deeper into how our network powers Cloudflare One.
Over the past ten years, Cloudflare has encountered the same challenges that face every organization trying to grow and protect a global network: we need to protect our infrastructure and devices from attackers and malicious outsiders, but traditional solutions aren’t built for distributed networks and teams. And we need visibility into the activity across our network and applications, but stitching together logging and analytics tools across multiple solutions is painful and creates information gaps.
We’ve architected our network to meet these challenges, and with Cloudflare One, we’re extending the advantages of these decisions to your company’s network to help you solve them too.
Distribution
Enterprises and some small organizations alike have team members around the world. Legacy models of networking forced traffic back through central choke points, slowing down users and constraining network scale. Continue reading
Heavy Networking 544: Building Effective Network Monitoring Solutions With Codilime (Sponsored)
Monitoring and visibility are critical to network operations. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking show, we talk with sponsor Codilime about custom development and integration of network monitoring and management tools for the data center and cloud. Our guests from Codilime are are Monika Antoniak, Head of R&D; and Edyta Kałka, Senior Project Manager.Heavy Networking 544: Building Effective Network Monitoring Solutions With Codilime (Sponsored)
Monitoring and visibility are critical to network operations. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking show, we talk with sponsor Codilime about custom development and integration of network monitoring and management tools for the data center and cloud. Our guests from Codilime are are Monika Antoniak, Head of R&D; and Edyta Kałka, Senior Project Manager.
The post Heavy Networking 544: Building Effective Network Monitoring Solutions With Codilime (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Imposters Among Us
Have you been playing Among Us? If you haven’t, your kids definitely have. I found out about it a few weeks ago because my children suddenly became Batman-level detectives and knew how to ask the kinds of interview questions that would make the FBI proud. In short, the game is all about finding the imposters in your midst based on their behavior and voting them out of the group to win. Sometimes you get it right. Other times you get it wrong and vote out someone who was doing legitimate tasks. It’s all a matter of perception.
Now, let’s look at another situation where we see this kind of behavior in a different light. You probably guessed where this is going already. We’re going to talk about Imposter Syndrome in our non-gaming lives and how it affects us. We may even make reference to pop culture along the way.
Where You Need To Be
I was thinking about this because something I said a few years ago at Security Field Day 1 popped back up in my feed. I was giving a speech at the beginning of the first day to the delegates and I wanted them to know that Continue reading
Introducing Magic Firewall
Today we’re excited to announce Magic Firewall™, a network-level firewall delivered through Cloudflare to secure your enterprise. Magic Firewall covers your remote users, branch offices, data centers and cloud infrastructure. Best of all, it’s deeply integrated with Cloudflare One™, giving you a one-stop overview of everything that’s happening on your network.
Cloudflare Magic Transit™ secures IP subnets with the same DDoS protection technology that we built to keep our own global network secure. That helps ensure your network is safe from attack and available and it replaces physical appliances that have limits with Cloudflare’s network.
That still leaves some hardware onsite, though, for a different function: firewalls. Networks don’t just need protection from DDoS attacks; administrators need a way to set policies for all traffic entering and leaving the network. With Magic Firewall, we want to help your team deprecate those network firewall appliances and move that burden to the Cloudflare global network.
Firewall boxes are miserable to manage
Network firewalls have always been clunky. Not only are they expensive, they are bound by their own hardware constraints. If you need more CPU or memory, you have to buy more boxes. If you lack capacity, the entire network suffers, directly Continue reading
Video: Simplify Device Configurations with Cumulus Linux
The designers of Cumulus Linux CLI were always focused on simplifying network device configurations. One of the first features along these lines was BGP across unnumbered interfaces, then they introduced simplified EVPN configurations, and recently auto-MLAG and auto-BGP.
You can watch a short description of these features by Dinesh Dutt and Pete Lumbis in Simplify Network Configuration with Cumulus Linux and Smart Datacenter Defaults videos (part of Cumulus Linux section of Data Center Fabrics webinar).
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.
IPv6 Buzz 062: Reviewing DNS Flag Day 2020
DNS Flag Day is a community effort by service providers and DNS software vendors to address DNS issues. In this week's IPv6 Buzz episode, Ed and Scott speak with guest Andrew Wertkin about the DNS flag day for 2020, which took place October 1st. They discuss what this year's DNS Flag Day addressed, plus DNS behavior that listeners should look for that might indicate they aren’t current with their DNS settings and configurations.
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