First Subsea Cable Across South Atlantic Activated

Yesterday marked the first time in recent Internet history that a new submarine cable carried live traffic across the South Atlantic, directly connecting South America to Sub-Saharan Africa.  The South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) built by Angola Cables achieved this feat around midday on 18 September 2018.

Our Internet monitoring tools noticed a change in latency between our measurement servers in various Brazilian cities and Luanda, Angola, decreasing from over 300ms to close to 100ms.  Below these are measurements to Angolan telecoms TVCABO (AS36907) and Movicel (AS37081) as the SACS cable came online yesterday.

A race to be first

In the past decade there have been multiple submarine cable proposals to full this gap in international connectivity, such as South Atlantic Express (SAEx) and South Atlantic Inter Link (SAIL) cables.

In recent weeks, the SAIL cable, financed and built by China, announced that they had completed construction of their cable and it was the first cable connecting Brazil to Africa (Cameroon). However, since we haven’t seen any changes in international connectivity for Cameroon, we don’t believe this cable is carrying any traffic yet.

What’s the significance?

In addition to directly connecting Brazil to Portuguese-speaking Angola, the cable offers Continue reading

ICANN sets plan to reinforce internet DNS security

In a few months, the internet will be a more secure place. That’s because the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has voted to go ahead with the first-ever changing of the cryptographic key that helps protect the internet’s address book – the Domain Name System (DNS). [ Now see: The hidden cause of slow internet and how to fix it. ] The ICANN Board at its meeting in Belgium this week, decided to proceed with its plans to change or "roll" the key for the DNS root on Oct. 11, 2018. It will mark the first time the key has been changed since it was first put in place in 2010.To read this article in full, please click here

ICANN sets plan to reinforce internet DNS security

In a few months, the internet will be a more secure place. That’s because the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has voted to go ahead with the first-ever changing of the cryptographic key that helps protect the internet’s address book – the Domain Name System (DNS). [ Now see: The hidden cause of slow internet and how to fix it. ] The ICANN Board at its meeting in Belgium this week, decided to proceed with its plans to change or "roll" the key for the DNS root on Oct. 11, 2018. It will mark the first time the key has been changed since it was first put in place in 2010.To read this article in full, please click here

Prep for Cisco, CompTIA, and More IT Certifications With This $39 Bundle

Large companies need to maintain a robust IT infrastructure if they want to thrive in the digital age, and they can’t accomplish this without certified IT professionals. Luckily, traditional schooling isn’t necessary to land an IT job; IT professionals simply need to pass their certification exams, and they can do so thanks to the wealth of training courses available. One such resource is this Ultimate IT Certification Training Bundle, which is currently on sale for $39.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing general availability of VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.3.0

With this release, NSX-T 2.3 continues to enable VMware’s vision of delivering consistent, pervasive connectivity and intrinsic security for applications and data across any environment. These new advancements help customers implement a more secure, end-to-end software-based network architecture – a Virtual Cloud Network – that supports their multi-cloud enterprises and advanced security in new and compelling ways.

NSX-T Data Center 2.3 extends advanced multi-cloud networking and security capabilities to AWS, in addition to Microsoft Azure and on-premises environments, and adds support for bare metal hosts as well.

Here are a few highlighted features among what’s new in this release.

Extending NSX-T Data Center support for Bare-Metal

NSX-T Data Center 2.3 introduces support for bare metal hosts, in addition to hypervisor and container environments. This includes Linux-based workloads running on bare-metal servers, as well as containers running on bare-metal servers without a hypervisor. To support this new capability, NSX-T leverages the Open vSwitch, allowing any Linux host to be an NSX-T transport node.

Bare-Metal Server Support

This release introduces support for Bare-Metal native compute workloads running RHEL 7.4, 7.5, CentOS 7.4, and Ubuntu 16.0.4 operating systems that allows users to network Bare-Metal compute Continue reading

Hybrid IoT communications could be the best option

Using a sole communications technology doesn’t make sense in many Internet of Things (IoT) implementations, says connectivity vendor Sigfox.In fact, the company, which provides Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks, says one could use a hybrid that includes an unlicensed LPWA network along with a licensed, cellular LTE narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) or LTE Cat M1 network solution instead. That way you can support cheap, unlicensed IoT short messaging close up, as is offered by Sigfox and others, and then offload the sensor traffic to more expensive, licensed LTE cellular mobile networks as the devices move off home base, such as what happens in asset tracking, Sigfox says.To read this article in full, please click here

Hybrid IoT communications could be the best option

Using a sole communications technology doesn’t make sense in many Internet of Things (IoT) implementations, says connectivity vendor Sigfox.In fact, the company, which provides Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networks, says one could use a hybrid that includes an unlicensed LPWA network along with a licensed, cellular LTE narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) or LTE Cat M1 network solution instead. That way you can support cheap, unlicensed IoT short messaging close up, as is offered by Sigfox and others, and then offload the sensor traffic to more expensive, licensed LTE cellular mobile networks as the devices move off home base, such as what happens in asset tracking, Sigfox says.To read this article in full, please click here

How do you explain the unreasonable effectiveness of cloud security?

With the enormous attack surface of cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, why aren't there more security problems? Data breaches and cyber attacks occur daily. How do you explain the unreasonable effectiveness of cloud security?

Google has an ebook on their security approach; Microsoft has some web pages. Both are the equivalent of that person who is disgustingly healthy and you ask them how they do it and they say "I don't know. I just eat right, exercise, and get plenty of sleep." Not all that useful. Most of us want a hack, a trick to good health. Who wants to eat right? 

I'm sure Amazon also eats right, exercises, and gets plenty of sleep (probably not the people who work there), but AWS also has a secret that when that disgustingly healthy person starts talking about at a party, you just can't help leaning in and listening. 

What's the trick to 6-pack security? Proving systems correct. Does your datacenter do that? I didn't think so. AWS does. 

Dr. Byron Cook gave an enthusiastic talk on Formal Reasoning about the Security of Amazon Web Service. He's clearly excited about finally applying his research in a Continue reading

BrandPost: Security and the Cloud Go Hand-in-Hand: Are You Prepared?

Just because you’ve tapped into the vast resources of a cloud service provider to replace previously on-premises IT assets doesn’t lessen your management or cybersecurity burden. In fact, cloud migration creates new issues for network admins to focus on: migrations are inherently risky from a cyber perspective – data on the move is data that can be exploited in transit.Cloud providers are prone to proclaiming that their security is better than any single business can achieve, simply because they have more resources to apply to the issue. By now, we all know that simply throwing money at the challenge is no guarantee of success, so maybe take that with a dose of skepticism.To read this article in full, please click here

1 … 1,489 1,490 1,491 1,492 1,493 … 3,870