Palo Alto grows SD-WAN platform buy snapping-up CloudGenix for $420M

With an eye towards significantly bolstering its edge networking offerings, Palo Alto has entered into an agreement to buy cloud-based SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix for $420 million in cash.Palo Alto said upon the completion of the acquisition it will integrate CloudGenix's cloud-managed SD-WAN products to accelerate the intelligent onboarding of remote branches and retail stores into its Prisma Access package. More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method •  SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN? Announced in May 2019, Palo Alto’s Prisma is a cloud-based security package that includes access control, advanced threat protection, user behavior monitoring and  other services that promise to protect enterprise applications and resources.To read this article in full, please click here

Palo Alto grows SD-WAN platform by snapping-up CloudGenix for $420M

With an eye towards significantly bolstering its edge networking offerings, Palo Alto has entered into an agreement to buy cloud-based SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix for $420 million in cash.Palo Alto said upon the completion of the acquisition it will integrate CloudGenix's cloud-managed SD-WAN products to accelerate the intelligent onboarding of remote branches and retail stores into its Prisma Access package. More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method •  SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN? Announced in May 2019, Palo Alto’s Prisma is a cloud-based security package that includes access control, advanced threat protection, user behavior monitoring and  other services that promise to protect enterprise applications and resources.To read this article in full, please click here

FuzzyWuzzy was a Python Module

An example of using the fuzzywuzzy Python module to match data sets with similar but not exact data - fuzzy matches! I was recently given a list of locations that I had to analyze. For the analysis, I needed data that was not in the original list (lets call that the source list). Luckily I READ MORE

The post FuzzyWuzzy was a Python Module appeared first on The Gratuitous Arp.

Routing Security – Nathalie Trenaman, Routing Security Programme Manager @ RIPE NCC

Nathalie Trenaman is the Routing Security Programme Manager at RIPE NCC. Rick & Melchior ask her everything about what RIPE NCC does, why should we care about Routing Security, RPKI and of course we talk about if and how we can get IPv4 address space.

Listen below or subscribe on the homepage!

How and why become CTO of Juniper Networks – Raj Yavatker, CTO @ Juniper Networks

In this first episode of The Routing Table Podcast Rick & Melchior ask the new Juniper Networks CTO Raj about his career, why he joined Juniper and what his 100 days plan looks like.

Listen below or subscribe on the homepage!

Palo Alto Folds CloudGenix in $420M SASE Play

Cisco Scores SD-WAN Win With NTT East

HPE’s Roshan Thekkekunnel: For Full Network Automation, The Industry Must Collaborate

Microsoft Fumbles COVID-19 Cloud Stat

768K day: the importance of adaptable software in the growing Internet

The Internet is big. Moreover, the Internet is bigger now than when that first sentence was written, and keeps increasing in size. The growth of the Internet from its humble beginnings as a DARPA research project was unprecedented and almost entirely unexpected. This—as well as the widespread usage of older routers and switches as crucial connection points in the Internet—has resulted in real-world scaling issues.

One of these issues, known commonly as “512K day,” occurred on Aug. 12, 2014. On that day, Verizon, a large United States-based Internet provider and Internet exchange point (IXP), submitted an extra 15,000 routes to the global BGP routing table. As these routes propagated across the network, they were accepted by some routers—the ones that had new firmware, or were configured to only store a subset of the global routing table.

But in other routers, this additional route load overran the 512,000 route maximum expected by the firmware designers, causing widespread Internet outages and degradation of service. In many cases, the issue was resolved quickly, but not as quickly as it could have been. Proprietary vendors were required to push out firmware updates for hundreds of router and switch models—a process that can take months. Continue reading

Encryption Helps America Work Safely – And That Goes for Congress, Too

This opinion piece was originally published in The Hill.

Over the past month, Americans across the country have adapted to a new reality of life, which includes social distancing to curb the spread of COVID-19. For those fortunate enough to be able to do so, that means learning to work, attend educational classes and socialize from afar using the Internet. For a huge number of Americans, social distancing means little to no work – and even greater uncertainty. Businesses, schools and government entities everywhere are asking the same question, “can we perform our work online and, just as importantly, can it be done securely?” 

As Congress acts to respond to COVID-19, it faces a similar challenge. With some Congressional members and staff testing positive for COVID-19, and others choosing to self-isolate, lawmakers are exploring whether they can perform the most critical aspects of their office remotely – deliberation and voting. For Congress to be able to vote remotely on legislation, measures to ensure the integrity of these communications is critical. If even one vote is changed or blocked by a criminal or foreign adversary, the legitimacy of congressional decisions, and thus Congress as a whole, will be called into question. Any digital voting solution would need to rely on strong encryption to be secure.

Encryption is a critical tool to provide confidentiality and integrity to digital communications. Encryption enables much of the flexibility needed for staff to work from Continue reading

Announcing the Results of the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver Privacy Examination

On April 1, 2018, we took a big step toward improving Internet privacy and security with the launch of the 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver — the Internet's fastest, privacy-first public DNS resolver. And we really meant privacy first. We were not satisfied with the status quo and believed that secure DNS resolution with transparent privacy practices should be the new normal. So we committed to our public resolver users that we would not retain any personal data about requests made using our 1.1.1.1 resolver. We also built in technical measures to facilitate DNS over HTTPS to help keep your DNS queries secure. We’ve never wanted to know what individuals do on the Internet, and we took technical steps to ensure we can’t know.

We knew there would be skeptics. Many consumers believe that if they aren’t paying for a product, then they are the product. We don’t believe that has to be the case. So we committed to retaining a Big 4 accounting firm to perform an examination of our 1.1.1.1 resolver privacy commitments.

Today we’re excited to announce that the 1.1.1.1 resolver examination has been completed Continue reading

Lenovo, Microsoft Push HCI to the Edge

Splunk Dives Into Cloud Native Application Monitoring

Neural computing should be based on insect brains, not human ones

The bumble bee brain is a better model than the human brain for neural networks that might be used to run autonomous robots, an academic team believes.“It is pretty impressive that a bee can fly over five miles, then remember its way home, with a brain the size of a pinhead,” says Professor James Marshall, of the University of Sheffield, quoted by multiple newspapers that were reporting on a presentation Marshall made to the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in February.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] “It makes sense to me that we should try and mimic a bee brain in [autonomous systems], drones and driverless cars.”To read this article in full, please click here

Cloud Automation Example: Create a Virtual Network

One of the first hands-on exercises in our Networking in Public Cloud Deployments asks the attendees to automate something. They can choose the cloud provider they want to work with and the automation tool they prefer… but whatever they do has to be automated.

Most solutions include a simple CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, or Terraform template with a line or two of README.MD, but Eric Auerswald totally astonished me with a detailed and precise writeup. Enjoy!

Nokia Blends AI, Cloud for 5G Automation

New Category of CDNs and Cloud Providers Join MANRS to Improve Routing Security

Today, we’re proud to announce the new MANRS Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Cloud Programme. This new program broadens support for the primary objective of MANRS – to implement crucial fixes needed to eliminate the most common threats to the Internet’s routing system.

The founding participants are: Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Azion, Cloudflare, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix.

Now, let’s back up and explain how we got here.

What Is MANRS?

Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) is a global initiative, supported by the Internet Society, that requires collaboration among participants and shared responsibility for the global Internet routing system. It’s a community of security-minded organizations committed to making routing infrastructure more robust and secure.

Originally designed by and for network operators, the initiative has already been extended once to address the unique needs and concerns of Internet Exchange Points. These two facets of MANRS complement each other – the first secures customer-provider interconnections, while the second creates a safe public peering environment.

How Do CDNs and Cloud Providers Help?

CDNs are a geographically distributed group of servers that work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content across the globe, and today the majority of web traffic Continue reading

Daily Roundup: Microsoft Cloud Usage Spikes 775%

Service Mesh Adds Security, Observability and Traffic Control to Kubernetes

This week and next, The News Stack will be running a series of posts on the value that a service mesh brings to Kubernetes deployments. Here is the first installment. Check back often for more updates. As we explore all the tools and additional infrastructure layers that complement Kubernetes, it’s important to remember: None of this is to imply that Kubernetes is lacking. Kubernetes is a powerful tool to dramatically simplify running containerized applications, but there are many things that it was simply never intended to do. Service meshes are an example of a complementary piece of the infrastructure, handling things that Kubernetes can not and was never intended to do.  “The Kubernetes team at Google and the Istio team at Google were neighbors and were discussing these things,” explained Tetrate and one of the original creators of the William Morgan, CEO of Linkerd. “It’s because Kubernetes is really good but it has a well-defined scope.” A service mesh is Continue reading