Access management is critical to IoT success

Onboarding devices has always been kind of a pain, but IT has managed to muddle its way through the process.The bring your own device (BYOD) wave hit created some problems. Still, many organizations allowed employees to bring those devices onto the network by shifting the responsibility to the end user. What happens, though, when there are so many new devices that IT can’t keep up? Or when devices are brought in without IT’s knowledge? That’s the trend businesses are about to face as the Internet of Things (IoT) goes mainstream.[ Read also: Network World's Corporate Guide to Addressing IoT Security. ] The IoT era is here, and it’s about to make IT’s life a lot more difficult The IoT era has arrived, and I say this because more and more companies I talk to are connecting non-traditional IT devices, such as lighting systems and point-of-sale devices, to the internet without uttering the phrase “IoT.” It’s no longer this futuristic thing that we ponder and pontificate over.To read this article in full, please click here

Cost-savings theme pervades IBM storage news

A flurry of storage announcements from IBM share a common theme: Helping customers achieve greater efficiency and wring cost savings from their multitier, multi-cloud storage environments.Anchoring the news is IBM Storage Insights, a new AI and cloud-based storage management platform that’s designed to give users a fast view of storage capacity and performance, as well as make tiering recommendations to help cut storage costs. A single dashboard shows the status of block storage and captures trend information.[ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] “Imagine you have an up-to-the-second event feed where you can see everything happening, not just on one of your arrays but across your entire environment,” said Sam Werner, vice president of offering management for IBM’s software-defined infrastructure (SDI) and storage software.To read this article in full, please click here

Review: Icinga enterprise-grade, open-source network monitoring that scales

Continuing our quest for robust, enterprise-grade open source network monitoring, we tested Icinga Core 2 (version 2.8.1) and the stand-alone Icinga Web 2 interface. Created in 2009 as a fork of the Nagios network monitoring tool, Icinga has come a long way.We found Icinga to be a powerful monitoring tool with many great features. The Core install is straightforward and basic monitoring is easy with either pre-configured templates or plugins. However, we discovered that the Web install is a bit more complicated and could stand to be streamlined. [ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful IoT companies . | Get daily insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Icinga runs on most of the popular Linux distros and the vendor provides detailed installation instructions for Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat (including CentOS and Fedora) and SUSE/SLES. Icinga does not publish specific hardware requirements, but our installation ran well on a quad-core processor with 4 GB RAM and this is probably be a good starting point for a basic installation.To read this article in full, please click here

Review: Icinga enterprise-grade, open-source network monitoring that scales

Continuing our quest for robust, enterprise-grade open source network monitoring, we tested Icinga Core 2 (version 2.8.1) and the stand-alone Icinga Web 2 interface. Created in 2009 as a fork of the Nagios network monitoring tool, Icinga has come a long way.We found Icinga to be a powerful monitoring tool with many great features. The Core install is straightforward and basic monitoring is easy with either pre-configured templates or plugins. However, we discovered that the Web install is a bit more complicated and could stand to be streamlined. [ Don’t miss customer reviews of top remote access tools and see the most powerful IoT companies . | Get daily insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Icinga runs on most of the popular Linux distros and the vendor provides detailed installation instructions for Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat (including CentOS and Fedora) and SUSE/SLES. Icinga does not publish specific hardware requirements, but our installation ran well on a quad-core processor with 4 GB RAM and this is probably be a good starting point for a basic installation.To read this article in full, please click here

Re-coding Black Mirror, Part V

This is the final part of our tour through the papers from the Re-coding Black Mirror workshop exploring future technology scenarios and their social and ethical implications.

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, all of the papers in this workshop can be accessed either by following the links above directly from The Morning Paper blog site, or from the WWW 2018 proceedings page).

Towards trust-based decentralized ad-hoc social networks

Koidl argues that we have ‘crisis of trust’ in social media caused which manifests in filter bubbles, fake news, and echo chambers.

  • “Filter bubbles are the result of engagement-based content filtering. The underlying principle is to show the user content that relates to the content the user has previously engaged on. The result is a content stream that lacks diversification of topics and opinions.”
  • “Echo chambers are the result of content recommendations that are based on interests of friends and peers. This results in a content feed that is strongly biased towards grouped opinion (e.g. Group Think).”
  • “Fake news, and related expressions of the same, such as alternative facts, is Continue reading

5 Network automation tips and tricks for NetOps

Despite what some people say, automation is not for the lazy. This opinion probably comes from the fact that the whole point of automation is to reduce repetitive tasks and make your life easier. Indeed automation can do just that, as well as giving you back hours each week for other tasks.

But getting your automation off the ground to begin with can be a challenge. It’s not as if you just decide, “Hey, we’re going to automate our network now!” and then you follow a foolproof, well-defined process to implement network automation across the board. You have to make many decisions that require long discussions, and necessitate ambitious and careful thinking about how you’re going to automate.

Just as with anything else in the IT world, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, and no “best practices” that apply to every situation. But there are some common principles and crucial decision points that do apply to all automation endeavors.

In this post, I’ll give you five network automation tips and tricks to get clarity around your automation decisions and reduce any friction that may be inhibiting (further) adoption of network automation.

1. Choose whether you want flexibility or simplicity

Automating Continue reading

Sovereignty Is More Than a Designation, It Is a Responsibility

The Internet can provide access to healthcare, education, and economic opportunity, but many indigenous communities face challenges to Internet access and inclusion. Brian Tagaban, Director of Government Policy at Sacred Wind Communications and former executive director of the Navajo Nation Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, is at RightsCon this week – the world’s leading conference on human rights in the digital age – to discuss the digital divide in indigenous communities in North America. He’s there as an Internet Society fellow and joined by other fellows Bill Murdoch, an IT specialist at the Manitoba First Nation School System and the First Nations Health & Social Secretariat of Manitoba, and Madeleine Redfern, the mayor of Iqaluit in Nunavut, Canada.

We spoke to Tagaban at the first Indigenous Connectivity Summit. The event was the start of a critical conversation about how indigenous communities can connect themselves to the Internet on their own terms. He detailed the time, diligence, and effort required to build a regulatory framework, and hoped that other Summit participants could “see how things are possible, celebrate success stories, share those success stories so that they can be built upon, and gain exposure to the political circumstances, social circumstances, geographic Continue reading

Forging Composable Infrastructure For Memory-Centric Systems

For years, enterprises have wanted to pool and then carve up the myriad resources of the datacenter to enable them to more efficiently run their workloads, reduce power consumption, and improve utilization rates. It takes what seems like an endless series of technologies advances to move towards this goal. But, ever so slowly, we are getting there.

Virtualization that started in the servers flowed into the storage realm and eventually into the network, and converged systems mashing up virtual compute and virtual networking soon begat hyperconverged infrastructure, which added in virtual storage – one of the fastest growing segments …

Forging Composable Infrastructure For Memory-Centric Systems was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Cisco CEO trumpets Catalyst 9K advances, software business success

Industry bellwether Cisco revealed some important financial numbers this week – its revenues were $12.5 billion, up 4 percent for the third quarter year-over-year, with product revenue up 5 percent.But one of the of the more interesting tidbits is that the company said it was selling some 40 Catalyst 9000 systems a day in and has installed 2,700 of the big boxes this quarter bring the total to 5,800 since its introduction in 2017. The Catalyst 9000 is key to a number of Cisco’s future initiatives – one of the most important being its drive to build out its Network Intuitive plans for intent-based networking.[ Related: Getting grounded in intent-based networking] | The other is that the way its software is sold – via a variety of subscription/feature levels is a key component of its overall strategy to become a more software-oriented company.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco CEO trumpets Catalyst 9K advances, software business success

Industry bellwether Cisco revealed some important financial numbers this week – its revenues were $12.5 billion, up 4 percent for the third quarter year-over-year, with product revenue up 5 percent.But one of the of the more interesting tidbits is that the company said it was selling some 40 Catalyst 9000 systems a day in and has installed 2,700 of the big boxes this quarter bring the total to 5,800 since its introduction in 2017. The Catalyst 9000 is key to a number of Cisco’s future initiatives – one of the most important being its drive to build out its Network Intuitive plans for intent-based networking.[ Related: Getting grounded in intent-based networking] | The other is that the way its software is sold – via a variety of subscription/feature levels is a key component of its overall strategy to become a more software-oriented company.To read this article in full, please click here

1 … 1,552 1,553 1,554 1,555 1,556 … 3,791