Daily Roundup: Coronavirus Cancels Dell, Other Events

Coronavirus cancelled Dell and other events; Cisco won big in Telia SD-WAN deal; and HPE delivered...

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How to Build a Highly Productive Remote Team (or Team of Contractors) with Cloudflare for Teams

How to Build a Highly Productive Remote Team (or Team of Contractors) with Cloudflare for Teams

Much of IT has been built on two outdated assumptions about how work is done. First, that employees all sit in the same building or branch offices. Second, that those employees will work full-time at the same company for years.

Both of these assumptions are no longer true.

Employees now work from anywhere. In the course of writing this blog post, I opened review tickets in our internal JIRA from my dining table at home. I reviewed internal wiki pages on my phone during my commute on the train. And I spent time reviewing some marketing materials in staging in our CMS.

In a past job, I would have suffered trying to connect to these tools through a VPN. That would have slowed down my work on a laptop and made it nearly impossible to use a phone to catch up on my commute.

The second challenge is ramp-up. I joined Cloudflare a few months ago. As a member of the marketing team, I work closely with our product organization and there are several dozen tools that I need to do that.

I’m hardly alone. The rise of SaaS and custom internal applications means that employees need access to all Continue reading

Video: Writing to Enhance your Networking Career.

David Coleman talks about how writing boosted his career in this 30 minute presentation. He chose a path of writing books that led him into bigger career with vendors and wider communities. He had some excellent tip on grammar and style which is rarely discussed. I wrote an ebook about the mechanics of writing blog […]

The post Video: Writing to Enhance your Networking Career. appeared first on EtherealMind.

COVID-19 Pushes Microsoft, Dell, Red Hat to Virtualize Events

All three of those vendors have shifted planned events from a physical setting to a virtual one in...

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Telia Taps Cisco Viptela SD-WAN

The operator says the ability to remotely provision Viptela on customer's existing WAN hardware...

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Mighty Morphin HPE Unleashes Container Platform

Tom Phelan, a fellow for big data and storage organization at HPE, said the container platform’s...

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Tech Bytes: Measuring End User Experience Of SaaS And Web Apps With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes podcast explores end user experience with sponsor ThousandEyes. ThousandEyes offers end point agents that measuring application experience and network performance from the end-user perspective. These agents capture real-time session data or run scheduled synthetic tests to provide visibility into the performance of SaaS applications as well as local network conditions.

Tech Bytes: Measuring End User Experience Of SaaS And Web Apps With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes podcast explores end user experience with sponsor ThousandEyes. ThousandEyes offers end point agents that measuring application experience and network performance from the end-user perspective. These agents capture real-time session data or run scheduled synthetic tests to provide visibility into the performance of SaaS applications as well as local network conditions.

The post Tech Bytes: Measuring End User Experience Of SaaS And Web Apps With ThousandEyes (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Helping Developers Simplify Apps, Toolchains, and Open Source

It’s been an exciting four months since we announced that Docker is refocusing on developers. We have spent much of that time listening to you, our developer community, in meetups, on GitHub, through social media, with our Docker Captains, and in face-to-face one-on-ones. Your support and feedback on our refocused direction have been helpful and positive, and we’re fired-up for the year ahead!

What’s driving our enthusiasm for making developers successful? Quite simply, it’s in recognition of the enormous impact your creativity – manifested in the applications you ship – has on all of our lives. Widespread adoption of smartphones and near-pervasive Internet connectivity only accelerates consumer demand for new applications. And businesses recognize that applications are key to engaging their customers, partnering effectively with their supply chain ecosystem, and empowering their employees.

As a result, the demand for developers has never been higher. The current worldwide population of 18 million developers is growing approximately 20% every year (in contrast to the 0.6% annual growth of the overall US labor force). Yet, despite this torrid growth, demand for developers in 2020 will outstrip supply by an estimated 1 million. Thus, we see tremendous opportunities in helping every developer to Continue reading

Forging A Path to Continuous, Risk-based Security with VMware NSX Service Mesh

The shift to multi-cloud, microservices-based architectures is well underway across enterprises.  VMware NSX has long provided secure connectivity between private and public clouds while offering consistent policy management within hybrid cloud environment with our Service-defined Firewall. More than a year ago, VMware NSX-T expanded beyond just supporting ESX-based VMs to cover workloads running on bare metal servers, multiple hypervisors, and containers.

However, as the adage goes, the only constant is change. So, it goes with application architectures. As enterprises embrace cloud-native architectures, applications are becoming even more distributed and heterogenous. We see this particularly in some of our forward leaning customers – payment providers, financial institutions, retailers, technology vendors, etc. – are they’re driving us to further evolve our security thinking.

Customers are containerizing their new applications with Kubernetes, and exploring solutions such as VMware Tanzu, Project Pacific, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and other platforms and managed services. They leverage a mix of open source and multiple SaaS services for various functions such as observability, analytics, and cost optimization. Yet, they also need to communicate with their existing VM-based applications. These customers want a common framework for identity, policy, and compliance, one that can deal with assets that are Continue reading

Network Break 274: Let’s Encrypt Revokes Millions Of Certificates; Microsoft Pitches SMB Over QUIC

Let's Encrypt revokes millions of digital certs, Microsoft proposes SMB over QUIC for file access without a VPN (and an easier way to get through firewalls), big vendors offer extended free trials of conferencing software for companies considering remote work, Microsoft pays hourly workers full salaries during work slowdowns, and more. We analyze these and other stories on the latest Network Break podcast.

Network Break 274: Let’s Encrypt Revokes Millions Of Certificates; Microsoft Pitches SMB Over QUIC

Let's Encrypt revokes millions of digital certs, Microsoft proposes SMB over QUIC for file access without a VPN (and an easier way to get through firewalls), big vendors offer extended free trials of conferencing software for companies considering remote work, Microsoft pays hourly workers full salaries during work slowdowns, and more. We analyze these and other stories on the latest Network Break podcast.

The post Network Break 274: Let’s Encrypt Revokes Millions Of Certificates; Microsoft Pitches SMB Over QUIC appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: New Bill May Weaken Encryption

Unintended consequences: New legislation in the U.S. Senate to crack down on child exploitation online may lead to limits on encryption, many critics say. The EARN IT Act would give Attorney General William Barr the authority to create new rules to protect children, potentially including encryption backdoors, as Barr as called for, Wired.com reports. The bill put new conditions on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has for years protected websites from lawsuits targeting user-generated content and comments.

Voluntary steps: Meanwhile, Google, Facebook Microsoft, Twitter, Snap, and Roblox have agreed to adopt 11 voluntary principles to prevent online child sexual exploitation, CNet notes, although some critics have also suggested these rules are the first step toward weakening encryption.

Not so fast: In other encryption news, security certificate issuer Let’s Encrypt has delayed a plan to revoke more than 1 million certificates because of a recently discovered bug in its CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) code, Ars Technica reports. But because of confusion over a very short window for websites to renew their certificates, Let’s Encrypt gave them more time.

Bad certificates: Meanwhile, hackers have come up with a way to disguise malware as security certificate updates, Continue reading

Automation Analytics – UX Enhancements

Ansible-blog_analytics-update-3220

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform now includes hosted service offerings, one of which is Automation Analytics.  This application provides a visual dashboard, health notifications and organization statistics for your Ansible Automation.  If you are new to Automation Analytics and want more background information please refer to my previous blog Getting Started with Automation Analytics.

 

Enhanced Filtering 

On the Automation Analytics dashboard there is the ability to filter by Red Hat Ansible Tower cluster and by date.  Red Hat recommends having a cluster local to where the automation is happening, for example if you had a data center in Japan, Germany and the United States you would most likely have an Ansible Tower Cluster in each geographic region.  This allows users to perform drill down filtering to individual clusters to get data relevant for a specific physical site or group. This is helpful if, for example, a company's team in Japan only cared about data relevant to them in the drop down menu.

Analytics update blog 1

Previously, this only affected the top graph, but not sub cards such as Top Templates or Top Modules.  In the following video you can now see that all cards are updated simultaneously.

ux_update blog 2

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Cisco Deploys SDN, Optical Transport for 5G in Asia

Bharti Airtel is preparing to deploy 5G with an “IP over Ethernet over fiber” network that it...

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Cloudflare for Teams Free for Small Businesses During Coronavirus Emergency

Cloudflare for Teams Free for Small Businesses During Coronavirus Emergency
Cloudflare for Teams Free for Small Businesses During Coronavirus Emergency

There are a lot of people and businesses worldwide that are currently suffering, so I don't want to waste any time in getting to the point.

Beginning today, we are making our Cloudflare for Teams products free to small businesses around the world. Teams enables remote workers to operate securely and easily. We will continue this policy for at least the next 6 months. We're doing this to help ensure that small businesses that implement work from home policies in order to combat the spread of the virus can ensure business continuity. You can learn more and apply at: https://www.cloudflare.com/smallbusiness

We've also helped launch an online hub where small businesses can see technology services available to them for free or a substantial discount from multiple companies, during the Coronavirus Emergency: https://openforbusiness.org

To understand more about why we're doing this, read on.

The IT Strain of WFH

We have a team at Cloudflare carefully monitoring the spread of the SARS-Coronavirus-2, which is responsible for the COVID-19 respiratory disease. Like at many other companies, we have heeded the advice of medical professionals and government agencies and are increasingly allowing employees to work from home in impacted regions in order Continue reading

Automation Story: Zero-Touch Provisioning

Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) is a solved problem if you believe the networking vendors… and yet numerous network automation projects involve at least some ZTP functionality. It seems that smart organizations investing in premium people (instead of premium vendors) prefer the Unix way of solving problems: take a number of small versatile tools, and put them together to build a solution that fits your requirements.

Anne Baretta did exactly that and combined Oxidized, FreeZTP, Ansible and custom web UI to build a ZTP solution that addresses the needs of his organization.

Notes

Automation Story: Zero-Touch Provisioning

Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) is a solved problem if you believe the networking vendors… and yet numerous network automation projects involve at least some ZTP functionality. It seems that smart organizations investing in premium people (instead of premium vendors) prefer the Unix way of solving problems: take a number of small versatile tools, and put them together to build a solution that fits your requirements.

Anne Baretta did exactly that and combined Oxidized, FreeZTP, Ansible and custom web UI to build a ZTP solution that addresses the needs of his organization.

Notes