IDG Contributor Network: Zero Trust Networking (ZTN): don’t trust anything

John Kindervag, a former analyst from Forrester Research, was the first to introduce the Zero-Trust model back in 2010. The focus then was more on the application layer. However, once I heard that Sorell Slaymaker from Techvision Research was pushing the topic at the network level, I couldn’t resist giving him a call to discuss the generals on Zero Trust Networking (ZTN). During the conversation, he shone a light on numerous known and unknown facts about Zero Trust Networking that could prove useful to anyone. The traditional world of networking started with static domains. The classical network model divided clients and users into two groups – trusted and untrusted. The trusted are those inside the internal network, the untrusted are external to the network, which could be either mobile users or partner networks. To recast the untrusted to become trusted, one would typically use a virtual private network (VPN) to access the internal network.To read this article in full, please click here

Nokia Will Slash 500 Jobs in Illinois by Year-End

The job cuts will impact employees of the former Motorola Solutions infrastructure business that Nokia purchased in 2011.

Scale Computing, APC partner to offer micro data center in a box

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendor Scale Computing and power management specialist APC (formerly American Power Conversion, now owned by Schneider Electric) have partnered to offer a range of turnkey micro data centers for the North American market.The platform combines Scale’s hyperconverged software, HC3 HyperCore, running on top of its own hardware and built on APC’s ready-to-deploy racks for a micro data center. Micro will sell the platform as a single SKU.The pre-packaged platform is entirely turnkey, with automated virtualization, power management resources, and built-in redundancy. This makes it well-suited for remote edge locations, such as cell phone towers, where staff is not immediately available to maintain the equipment.To read this article in full, please click here

Scale Computing, APC partner to offer micro data center in a box

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendor Scale Computing and power management specialist APC (formerly American Power Conversion, now owned by Schneider Electric) have partnered to offer a range of turnkey micro data centers for the North American market.The platform combines Scale’s hyperconverged software, HC3 HyperCore, running on top of its own hardware and built on APC’s ready-to-deploy racks for a micro data center. Micro will sell the platform as a single SKU.The pre-packaged platform is entirely turnkey, with automated virtualization, power management resources, and built-in redundancy. This makes it well-suited for remote edge locations, such as cell phone towers, where staff is not immediately available to maintain the equipment.To read this article in full, please click here

How to list repositories on Linux

A Linux repository is a storage location from which your system retrieves and installs OS updates and applications. Each repository is a collection of software hosted on a remote server and intended to be used for installing and updating software packages on Linux systems. When you run commands such as “sudo apt update” or “sudo apt upgrade”, you may be pulling package information and package updates from a number of repositories.Repositories contain thousands of programs. Standard repositories provide a high degree of security, since the software included is thoroughly tested and built to be compatible with a particular distribution and version. So, you can expect the updates to occur with no unexpected "side effects."To read this article in full, please click here

5 Reasons to Attend DockerCon

Are you ready to get started with Docker and containers or level up your current use?

Join the Docker team, the container ecosystem, contributors and maintainers, developers, IT professionals and executives at DockerCon Barcelona December 3-5. DockerCon is the must attend conference to learn, network and innovate with the container industry.

Besides Barcelona being a beautiful city with delicious food, here are our top 5 reasons to attend DockerCon:

1. Think big. Docker containers and our container platform are being used everywhere for everything. Your possibilities are endless, from sending rockets to space to literally save the earth from asteroids, to running intensive genomics analysis to find cures for diseases or keeping e-commerce running smoothly for black Friday shoppers. Come to DockerCon and imagine your digital future.
2. Start small. The promise of containerization is big, but the sheer volume of options can be intimidating. If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry. DockerCon has a path for you for each stage of the journey: from getting started, to launching your first project, to scaling out your environment, to building some new and innovating.
3. The. Best. Content. DockerCon is known for its amazing speakers who deliver real takeaways and lessons learned. Continue reading

Sponsored Post: Twitch, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Stream, Scalyr, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

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Fun and Informative Events

• Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services

• InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use language for importing data, and supports standard SQL for querying data. http://InMemory.Net

• For heads of IT/Engineering responsible for building an analytics infrastructure, Etleap is an ETL solution for creating perfect data pipelines from day one. Unlike Continue reading

How we did it: 10 hot hybrid-cloud startups to watch

The selection process for our 10 hot hybrid-cloud startups to watch roundup began with 42 recommendations and nominations that came to me via HARO, LinkedIn, Twitter and subscribers to my Startup50 email newsletter.For this roundup, we focused on hybrid-cloud infrastructure and hybrid-cloud-enabling technologies. Thus, cloud-delivered applications that don’t enable clouds but, rather, rely on them, were eliminated. We also eliminated cloud security startups because they belong in their own roundup or in a security roundup.[ Now read 20 hot jobs ambitious IT pros should shoot for. ] This left me with 23 startups. The next set of cuts were the easiest ones. Startups that were slow to respond to questions – missing deadlines and forcing me to chase them down just to get answers to my questions – were eliminated.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Complexity and Network Automation

Network automation of complex configurations is much, much harder than automation of simple configurations. What makes a configuration complex and what is required in an automation system to handle complex configurations? — Terry Slattery @Netcarftsmen

Solving Container Security Requires New Tools and Processes

This eBrief from SDxCentral delves into the latest developments in container security and looks at the techniques companies are using to ensure their container environments are secure and not vulnerable to breaches.

Is predictive maintenance the ‘gateway drug’ to the Industrial IoT?

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: When it comes to the Internet of Things (IoT), the consumer market gets all the attention, but the real action may be in industrial applications, the so-called Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).The IIoT is a huge market, and it’s based more on clearly defined cost savings than the always-fickle consumer preferences that seem to rule the consumer market. It also requires highly available infrastructure to connect everything and avoid expensive downtime — one reason why investment in IIoT firms has been hot this summer, with investments in companies such as Seeq, Element Analytics, Trendminer, Falkonry, and Toumetis.To read this article in full, please click here

Third Summit on Community Networks in Africa a Success

Last week was an exceptionally exciting week for the African Regional Bureau as we successfully held, in partnership with the Association for Progressive Community (APC), the 3rd Summit on Community Networks in Africa from 2-7 September 2018, at Wild Lubanzi Trail Lodge, Eastern Cape, South Africa.

The objective of the Summit was to promote the creation and growth of community networks, increase collaboration between community network operators in Africa and to provide an opportunity for them to engage with other stakeholders.

The event was attended by more than 100 participants from at least 18 countries worldwide, 13 from Africa (Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, DRC, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia, Cameroon, Tanzania, Sudan, Egypt, and Ethiopia) and 5 from Spain, Germany, Argentina, India, and the U.S. The formal opening of the Summit was addressed by representatives from the Ministry of Telecommunications and Postal Services of South Africa.

This year’s Summit turned out to be very special as 12 established community networks in Africa and 18 other communities (particularly from rural South Africa interested to replicate initiatives) attended and contributed to the discussions held throughout the 6 days.

The week started with 2 days of training, which provided community network operators with clear Continue reading

AWS ABC’s – EC2 Instance Type Cheat Sheet

Continuing on with the theme of previous cheat sheet articles, this article will help decode the format for Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types.

An EC2 instance type provides the definition for the size and certain capabilities of the instance:

• Amount of RAM
• Number of vCPUs
• Clock speed of the vCPUs
• Presence/absence of GPUs and FPGAs
• Network connectivity speed and capabilities
• Presence/absence of local storage

Some of this information can be gleaned from the instance type name. For the information that can’t, refer to the links below in the references section.

Here is an example of an instance type name: c5d.2xlarge

• Family – Each instance type belongs to a family of instance types where the family defines what the type is optimized for.
  • General compute: m, t
  • Compute optimized: c
  • Memory optimized: r, x, z
  • Storage optimized: d, h, i
  • Accelerated computing: f, g, p
• Generation – The generation provides distinction between instance types of the same family but where the technology used for that type has been modified. As an Continue reading

Expanding DNSSEC Adoption

Cloudflare first started talking about DNSSEC in 2014 and at the time, Nick Sullivan wrote: “DNSSEC is a valuable tool for improving the trust and integrity of DNS, the backbone of the modern Internet.”

Over the past four years, it has become an even more critical part of securing the internet. While HTTPS has gone a long way in preventing user sessions from being hijacked and maliciously (or innocuously) redirected, not all internet traffic is HTTPS. A safer Internet should secure every possible layer between a user and the origin they are intending to visit.

As a quick refresher, DNSSEC allows a user, application, or recursive resolver to trust that the answer to their DNS query is what the domain owner intends it to be. Put another way: DNSSEC proves authenticity and integrity (though not confidentiality) of a response from the authoritative nameserver. Doing so makes it much harder for a bad actor to inject malicious DNS records into the resolution path through BGP Leaks and cache poisoning. Trust in DNS matters even more when a domain is publishing record types that are used to declare trust for other systems. As a specific example, DNSSEC is helpful for preventing Continue reading

BrandPost: Where the Adaptive Network Is Headed in CALA

Ciena Fabio Medina, General Manager and Vice President of Sales – Latin America With the move toward autonomous networking underway across the CALA region, as well as the rest of the world, one thing is very clear—the current modes of operation won’t cut it in the future. Fabio Medina, Ciena's General Manager for Caribbean and Latin America explains how the Adaptive Network is the solution to remaining competitive and on the cutting-edge.To read this article in full, please click here

Self-Creating Neural Networks That Explain Themselves

On the hardware side, the next frontier for deep learning innovation will be in getting the performance, efficiency, and accuracy needed for inference at scale. …

Self-Creating Neural Networks That Explain Themselves was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

10 hot hybrid-cloud startups to watch

As the cloud matures, many businesses are finding that not every application belongs in public clouds. Due to regulatory issues, security risks, data ownership concerns, and fears of cloud lock-in, many applications are stubbornly rooted in on-premises architectures.The startups in this roundup understand that, and rather than trying to sweet talk enterprises into forklift upgrades, these startups are willing to work under hybrid-cloud constraints.[ Now see After virtualization and cloud, what's left on premises?] The startups below federate data, making it available from any cloud to any application; provide application virtualization software, which enables enterprises to move workloads to and from various clouds at will; provide cloud file systems that optimize and mobilize data, and much more.To read this article in full, please click here

Hyped to Death: AI Must Avoid Becoming a Cliché

Data Point: Why Automation Won’t Replace Humans

Here’s a bit of good news for those of you scared of network automation replacing your jobs: even Elon Musk didn’t manage to pull it off, so I don’t think a networking vendor dabbling in intent will manage to do it (particularly considering the track record of networking vendors’ network management and orchestration systems).

AWS ABCs — EC2 Instance Type Cheat Sheet

Continuing on with the theme of previous cheat sheet articles, this article will help decode the format for Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types.