What’s the Controversy Over Bitcoin?
Bitcoin – something we have all heard of but never fully understand what the hype is all about. Apart from the hype, there are always news headlines regarding the scandals related to bitcoin. All of this talk in town only leads us to one question: what’s the controversy over Bitcoin?
For starters, you need to know what Bitcoin is. According to the company, they are the pioneers of a peer-to-peer payment network that involves no intermediary. Here , the first controversy begins: governments are highly against cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin simply due to the lack of a middleman during the buying and selling of money or commodities.
Governments and Money: What’s the Relationship?
Governments are the ones who issue currencies to their people. While currencies are merely numbers printed on pieces of paper or metal, the government claims that they have value, and the general population believes them. These notes and coins are then used to make transactions of all kind, and the money flows around through the entire economy.
However, conventional currencies do not have any actual value since they cannot be given back to the government in exchange for commodities. If you want to purchase even something as simple Continue reading
Why IT Leaders Should Make Cloud Training a Top Priority
As IT operations continue drifting into the cloud, it's important to ensure that organization personnel keep pace with the latest skills and practices.Microsoft Azure: Remember Exchange Server?
Recently I joked there’s significant difference between AWS and Azure launching features:
- AWS launches a production-ready feature that you can consume the next day.
- Azure launches a preview that might work in 6 months.
Those with long enough memories shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not the first time Microsoft is using the same tactics.
Microsoft Azure: Remember Exchange Server?
Recently I joked there’s significant difference between AWS and Azure launching features:
- AWS launches a production-ready feature that you can consume the next day.
- Azure launches a preview that might work in 6 months.
Those with long enough memories shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not the first time Microsoft is using the same tactics.
The Hedge 80: Ian Goetz and 5G
Although there are varying opinions 5G—is it real? Is it really going to have extremely low latency? Does the disaggregation of software and hardware really matter? Is it really going to provide a lot more bandwidth? Are existing backhaul networks going to be able to handle the additional load? For network engineers in particular, the world of 5G is a foreign country with its own language, expectations, and ways of doing things.
On this episode of the Hedge, Ian Goetz joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to provide a basic overview of 5G, and inject some reality into the discussion.
How to Implement Network Segmentation with Zero Changes to Your Network
Across industries, network segmentation is quickly becoming a critical capability for enterprises of all sizes. Why? First, network segmentation prevents the lateral spread of threats inside the network. Second, it separates dev, test, and production environments. And lastly, it meets increasingly complex compliance requirements while enabling a Zero Trust security strategy.
However, historically network segmentation has been fraught with operational challenges and limited by platform capabilities, leading to the perception that setting up and configuring segmentation policies requires massive changes to the physical network as well as a complex, bloated, and costly deployment of physical firewall appliances.
Not anymore. VMware takes a distributed, software-based approach to segmentation, eliminating the need to redesign your network in order to deploy security. Instead, segmentation policies are applied at the workload level through NSX Firewall, which is deployed on top of your existing VSphere 7 environments. This allows you to easily create zones in the data center where you can separate traffic by application or environment — providing the quickest and easiest way to achieve your data center segmentation Continue reading
Tech Bytes: Unifying Cloud Automation And Network Infrastructure With Gluware (Sponsored)
In this Tech Byte podcast, sponsored by Gluware, we explore the latest features and capabilities in the Gluware network automation and orchestration platform, including an API-based controller to work with SD-WAN, and Terraform integration to support infrastructure automation across public clouds.
The post Tech Bytes: Unifying Cloud Automation And Network Infrastructure With Gluware (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Tech Bytes: Unifying Cloud Automation And Network Infrastructure With Gluware (Sponsored)
In this Tech Byte podcast, sponsored by Gluware, we explore the latest features and capabilities in the Gluware network automation and orchestration platform, including an API-based controller to work with SD-WAN, and Terraform integration to support infrastructure automation across public clouds.How Fast Object Storage Enables a WFH Backup and DR Strategy
To manage backup needs in a work-from-home world, companies need a way for individuals to do backups without having to deal with centralized IT.Day Two Cloud 094: Essential Concepts Of Zero Trust
Today's Day Two Cloud episode aims to pick apart the marketing fluff around Zero Trust (there's a lot of it) to uncover a workable definition, discuss the rationale for this approach, and develop a framework for how to think about zero trust.
The post Day Two Cloud 094: Essential Concepts Of Zero Trust appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Day Two Cloud 094: Essential Concepts Of Zero Trust
Today's Day Two Cloud episode aims to pick apart the marketing fluff around Zero Trust (there's a lot of it) to uncover a workable definition, discuss the rationale for this approach, and develop a framework for how to think about zero trust.Cloudflare obtains new ISO/IEC 27701:2019 privacy certification and what that means for you
This post is also available in French and German.
Cloudflare is one of the first organisations in our industry to have achieved ISO/IEC 27701:2019 certification, and the first web performance & security company to be certified to the new ISO privacy standard as both a data processor and controller.
Providing transparency into our privacy practices has always been a priority for us. We think it is important that we do more than talk about our commitment to privacy — we are continually looking for ways to demonstrate that commitment. For example, after we launched the Internet's fastest, privacy-first public DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, we didn’t just publish our commitments to our public resolver users, we engaged an independent firm to make sure we were meeting our commitments, and we blogged about it, publishing their report.
Following in that tradition, today we’re excited to announce that Cloudflare has been certified to a new international privacy standard for protecting and managing the processing of personal data — ISO/IEC 27701:2019. The standard is designed such that the requirements organizations must meet to become certified are very closely aligned to the requirements in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). So Continue reading
Response: Hunting down the stuck BGP routes
BGP is not always good - Part 645
If You Haven’t Checked Your Backups, They Probably Aren’t Working
This is a pleasant reminder to check your backups. I don’t mean, “Hey, did the backup run last night? Yes? Then all is well.” That’s slightly better than nothing, but not really what you’re checking for. Instead, you’re determining your ability to return a system to a known state by verifying your backups regularly.
Backups are a key part of disaster recovery, where modern disasters include ransomware, catastrophic public cloud failures, and asset exposure by accidental secrets posting.
For folks in IT operations such as network engineers, systems to be concerned about include network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and VPN concentrators. Public cloud network artifacts also matter. Automation systems matter, too. And don’t forget about special systems like policy engines, SDN controllers, wifi controllers, network monitoring, AAA, and…you get the idea.
Don’t confuse resiliency for backup.
When I talk about backups, I’m talking about having known good copies of crucial data that exist independently of the systems they normally live on.
- Distributed storage is not backup.
- A cluster is not backup.
- An active/active application delivery system spread over geographically diverse data centers is not backup.
The points above are examples of distributed computing. Distributed computing Continue reading
Hunting down the stuck BGP routes
Hunting down the stuck BGP routes
BGP is the glue between all of the thousands of border routers that make up the internet (you can find this post (battleships) and [this post (EvE)](https://blog.b