BrandPost: Discover the Four Key Capabilities for Better IT Management

Management has always struggled how to optimize and oversee IT resources, tasks and operations. This challenge is becoming more complex due to “digital disruption”. As a result less tech-savvy companies are more likely to fall behind the competition and not able to attract top talent.Most of the times it is not that managers do not see the dangers of digital disruption coming. They do understand the challenges as well as the opportunities, and they know the competition sees them as well. Unfortunately, top management decisions often tend to focus on who is responsible for IT and where IT should be located, rather than the how.Generally, the assumption is that the right people will do the right work, either internally or in another company. However, this assumption is flawed. In that regard, an important reminder is that digital transformation is more about how companies do things, and less about who or where those tasks are performed. Digital disruption changes entire industries so fast that companies lack a structured process or the capabilities to handle it. IT management should offer not only the resources (people and equipment), but also the processes and capabilities to eliminate the risks, tackle the problems Continue reading

Introducing Single Sign-On for the Cloudflare Dashboard

Introducing Single Sign-On for the Cloudflare DashboardIntroducing Single Sign-On for the Cloudflare Dashboard

The Challenge of Managing User Access to SaaS Applications

As the  number of SaaS services people use everyday grows, it has become more challenging to juggle the number of password and multi-factor authentication combinations users have to keep track of to get online.

Adopting identity services have allowed companies to centralize employee authentication. With Cloudflare Access, companies can ensure employees use a company managed identity provider when accessing websites behind Cloudflare. Last week, Sam published a blog on how Cloudflare has made it easier to connect Cloudflare Access to the Atlassian suite of tools.

Since Cloudflare has simplified access control for corporate applications, many enterprise customers have commonly asked for the ability to extend the same ease of access and control to the Cloudflare dashboard itself.

Single Sign-On for the Cloudflare Dashboard

Today, we are announcing support for enterprise customers to use single sign-on (SSO) through their identity provider to access the Cloudflare dashboard.

Cloudflare is a critical piece of infrastructure for customers, and SSO ensures that customers can apply the same authentication policies to access the Cloudflare dashboard as other critical resources.

Introducing Single Sign-On for the Cloudflare Dashboard


Once onboarded for SSO, all company user logins to the Cloudflare dashboard redirect to the customer’s identity provider. Once all required authentication checks complete successfully, the user is seamlessly redirected back to dash.cloudflare.com and logged in.

Leveraging Access & Workers to Build SSO

At Cloudflare, we  dogfood our own services as both a way to make them better for our customers and to make developing new services more efficient and robust. With SSO, this is no different. Authentication configurations are managed through Access, which allows us to launch with support for the same identity providers available in Access today, including SAML.

Cloudflare is 8 years old and we built our user authentication system way before Cloudflare Access existed. In order to connect Access to our existing authentication system, we built a Cloudflare Worker that converts Access authentication tokens to our own authentication tokens. This greatly simplified the code changes required in our system, and results in faster SSO logins because the Worker runs at the network edge and reduces the number of round trips required to authenticate users.

In addition to leveraging Cloudflare services to build Single Sign-On, we are moving all Cloudflare employees to use SSO through our existing G Suite setup. This ensures Cloudflare can uniformly enforce multi-factor authentication policies for the services we protect with Cloudflare itself.

How to Start using SSO for the Cloudflare Dashboard

Cloudflare Enterprise customers can reach out to their Customer Success Manager to learn how to start using SSO to log-in to the Cloudflare dashboard. If you are interested in using SSO yourself and becoming a Cloudflare Enterprise customer, then please get in touch.

A Tour Inside Cloudflare’s G9 Servers

A Tour Inside Cloudflare's G9 Servers

Cloudflare operates at a significant scale, handling nearly 10% of the Internet HTTP requests that is at peak more than 25 trillion requests through our network every month. To ensure this is as efficient as possible, we own and operate all the equipment in our 154 locations around the world in order to process the volume of traffic that flows through our network. We spend a significant amount of time specing and designing servers that makes up our network to meet our ever changing and growing demands. On regular intervals, we will take everything we've learned about our last generation of hardware and refresh each component with the next generation…

If the above paragraph sounds familiar, it’s a reflecting glance to where we were 5 years ago using today’s numbers. We’ve done so much progress engineering and developing our tools with the latest tech through the years by pushing ourselves at getting smarter in what we do.

Here though we’re going to blog about muscle.

Since the last time we blogged about our G4 servers, we’ve iterated one generation each of the past 5 years. Our latest generation is now the G9 server. From a G4 server comprising 12 Intel Continue reading

Worth Reading: Network Troubleshooting

Approach a problem with an open mind, distill the “signal from the noise”, and test your hypothesis. A well-defined problem description is essential to moving forward towards final resolution. When a sports team wins the championship (you pick your favorite activity), it is not by accident. Behind every team is a coach, who leads by experience — with a game plan. Plans are built upon communication between team members. @IPSpace

History Of Networking – Jana Iyengar – QUIC

In this History of Networking episode, Jana Iyengar comes on to talk about the creation of QUIC and why he believes we need another transport protocol.
Jana Iyengar
Guest
Russ White
Host
Donald Sharp
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Jana Iyengar – QUIC appeared first on Network Collective.

Red Hat Ansible Network Automation Updates

With the recent success of the largest AnsibleFest to date I wanted to take a minute to reflect with a network automation perspective on the colossal enhancements the engineering team at Red Hat has done for the Ansible Engine 2.6 release, the Ansible Tower 3.3 release and the recent Ansible Engine 2.7 release. As a reminder for all Ansible lovers there is a porting guide for every release to make upgrades as easy as possible!

For this blog post I am going to cover the following topics:

  • The httpapi connection plugin
  • Support for Arista eAPI and Cisco NX-API
  • New network automation modules
    • net_get and net_put
    • netconf_get, netconf_rpc and netconf_config
    • cli_command and cli_config
  • Improved Ansible Tower User Experience
  • Ansible Tower credential management for network devices
  • Custom Ansible Environment Support for Ansible Tower 


    • The HTTPAPI connection plugin

    Connection plugins allow Ansible to connect to target hosts so it can execute tasks on them. With the Ansible 2.5 release the network_cli connection plugin was introduced, removing the requirement for the provider parameter and standardizing network modules to allow playbooks to look, feel and operate just like they do on Linux hosts. This also allowed Red Hat Ansible Tower to Continue reading

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet

    The following is a guest post by Jacob Hands, Creator of FactorioMaps.com. He is building a community site for the game Factorio centered around sharing user creations.

    Factorio is a game about building and maintaining factories. Players mine resources, research new technology and automate production. Resources move along the production line through multiple means of transportation such as belts and trains. Once production starts getting up to speed, alien bugs start to attack the factory requiring strong defenses.

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet
    A Factorio factory producing many different items.

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet
    A Factorio military outpost fighting the alien bugs.

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet
    A Factorio map view of a small factory, that’s still too big to easily share fully with screenshots.

    At FactorioMaps.com, I am building a place for the community of Factorio players to share their factories as interactive Leaflet maps. Due to the size and detail of the game, it can be difficult to share an entire factory through a few screenshots. A Leaflet map provides a Google Maps-like experience allowing viewers to pan and zoom throughout the map almost as if they are playing the game.

    Hosting

    Leaflet maps contain thousands of small images for X/Y/Z coordinates. Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage are Continue reading

    Retail IoT: Walmart’s IoT patent filing might be the creepiest ever

    At this point, most people are aware that cameras may be watching them wherever they go in public — especially in retail establishments. But if a recent Walmart patent application becomes reality, watching your every move is far from the most intrusive way shoppers will be monitored.According to the patent, the idea is to put biometric sensors in shopping-cart handles. These sensors would track the shoppers’ heart rates, temperatures, grip strength, and stress levels, not to mention the cart’s weight, speed and idle time. Next, that info would be sent to a server where the data could be analyzed and compared against baselines obtained when the customer first grabbed the cart.To read this article in full, please click here

    Africa Is on a Steady Journey to Digital Transformation

    The world has seen Africa’s digital future advancing by leaps and bounds in the adoption and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the private and public sectors. What makes this more interesting and promising, is the level of investment and growth of women Engineers in recent years making headlines.

    The Gambia has seen much of these developments in recent years with examples of inspiring women Engineers like Mrs Anna Secka Saine who has contributed in building many backbone Networks in Africa such as, Internet eXchange Points (IXPs), National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), and, as well helped trained many young and Professionals engineers.

    We have also seen rise in the number of Computer Science clubs, after school coding, summer coding camps, Robotic clubs among others, which all projects the level of awareness and interest.

    In August, two brilliant young Gambian High School science students, Sera Momodou Ndure and Ajie Isatou Ceesay from Marina International School (MIS) and West African International School (WAIS) respectively represented The Gambia at the Africa Girls Can Code Initiative (AGCCI2018) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

    The Africa Girls Can Code Initiative (AGCCI) 2018-2022 is an Africa Wide Initiative being developed and implemented by the U Continue reading

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