Network, Security, and Cloud – 3 Key Takeaways from VMware Explore 2023

In August, I attended VMware Explore Las Vegas. I always enjoy interacting with our customers and partners, and this year was no exception. The show was fantastic, energy was high, and excitement was rampant with a wide range of innovations that brought enhanced simplicity, security and agility for our customer IT environments.

Explore 2023 was a whirlwind of activity. I spoke to hundreds of attendees throughout my four days! Now that I’m back, I’ve had some time to reflect on all things Explore. Here are my top observations from the week:

1. VMware has simplified the adoption of the cloud, strengthening the private cloud stack and expanding our multi-cloud offering

It was gratifying to hear customer commentary on the richness of the VMware private cloud stack and the innovations we’ve brought about to create consistency across a multi-cloud deployment. The broad array of innovations across multiple business units reflected the deep    customer focus we have coupled with reducing the friction for consumption.That’s

This has made it simpler for customers to engage with VMware solutions than dealing with 4-5 other vendors to stitch together their stack for the cloud, which leads to complexity and cost escalations and prolongs proof of Continue reading

Cloudflare One for Data Protection

Cloudflare One for Data Protection

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Cloudflare One for Data Protection

Data continues to explode in volume, variety, and velocity, and security teams at organizations of all sizes are challenged to keep up. Businesses face escalating risks posed by varied SaaS environments, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and the exposure and theft of valuable source code continues to keep CISOs and Data Officers up at night.

Over the past few years, Cloudflare has launched capabilities to help organizations navigate these risks and gain visibility and controls over their data — including the launches of our data loss prevention (DLP) and cloud access security broker (CASB) services in the fall of 2022.

Announcing Cloudflare One’s data protection suite

Today, we are building on that momentum and announcing Cloudflare One for Data Protection — our unified suite to protect data everywhere across web, SaaS, and private applications. Built on and delivered across our entire global network, Cloudflare One’s data protection suite is architected for the risks of modern coding and increased usage of AI.

Specifically, this suite converges capabilities across Cloudflare’s DLP, CASB, Zero Trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), remote Continue reading

What’s next for Cloudflare One’s data protection suite

What’s next for Cloudflare One’s data protection suite
What’s next for Cloudflare One’s data protection suite

Today, we announced Cloudflare One for Data Protection — a unified suite to protect data everywhere across web, SaaS, and private applications. This suite converges capabilities including our data loss prevention (DLP), cloud access security broker (CASB), Zero Trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), remote browser isolation (RBI), and cloud email security services. The suite is available and packaged now as part of Cloudflare One, our SASE platform.

In the announcement post, we focused on how the data protection suite helps customers navigate modern data risks, with recommended use cases and real-world customer examples.

In this companion blog post, we recap the capabilities built into the Cloudflare One suite over the past year and preview new functionality that customers can look forward to. This blog is best for practitioners interested in protecting data and SaaS environments using Cloudflare One.

DLP & CASB capabilities launched in the past year

Cloudflare launched both DLP and CASB services in September 2022, and since then have rapidly built functionality to meet the growing needs of our organizations of all sizes. Before previewing how these services will evolve, it is worth recapping the many enhancements added Continue reading

Case Study: BGP Routing Policy

Talking about BGP routing policy mechanisms is nice, but it’s even better to see how real Internet Service Providers use those tools to implement real-life BGP routing policy.

Getting that information is incredibly hard as everyone considers their setup a secret sauce. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions; Pim van Pelt described the BGP Routing Policy of IPng Networks in great details. The article is even more interesting as he’s using Bird2 configuration language that looks almost like a programming language (as compared to the ancient route-maps used by vendors focused on “industry-standard” CLI).

Have fun!

Case Study: BGP Routing Policy

Talking about BGP routing policy mechanisms is nice, but it’s even better to see how real Internet Service Providers use those tools to implement real-life BGP routing policy.

Getting that information is incredibly hard as everyone considers their setup a secret sauce. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions; Pim van Pelt described the BGP Routing Policy of IPng Networks in great details. The article is even more interesting as he’s using Bird2 configuration language that looks almost like a programming language (as compared to the ancient route-maps used by vendors focused on “industry-standard” CLI).

Have fun!

Just How Big – Or Small – Is The Quantum Computing Racket?

There is no question in our minds here at The Next Platform that quantum computing, in some fashion, will be part of the workflow for solving some of the peskiest computational problems the world can think of.

The post Just How Big – Or Small – Is The Quantum Computing Racket? first appeared on The Next Platform.

Just How Big – Or Small – Is The Quantum Computing Racket? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

What’s new in Calico Enterprise 3.18: Major workload-centric WAF updates and more

This release, we’re really excited about major improvements to Calico’s workload-centric WAF. We’ve made it much easier for users to configure and deploy the WAF in just a few clicks and we’ve also made it much easier to review and manage WAF alerts through our new Security Events feature.

Why do we need a new WAF for microservices?

Application security teams have deployed perimeter-based WAFs for decades to protect against common web attacks, with a focus on browser-based and client-side attacks. But with the rise of microservice architecture, there’s now a significant amount of HTTP traffic related to internal APIs. Moreover, with the growing use of open source and third-party software, all deployed within your Kubernetes cluster, you can no longer trust that the software running in your cluster is safe or secure. With this growing attack surface within your cloud environment, it’s critical to employ a workload-based WAF.

Calico’s workload-centric WAF

We know that security teams are struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of software development in their organizations, so we wanted to simplify the way that security teams secure application traffic. Further, we wanted to ensure that security teams can secure all workloads, not just their Continue reading

Day Two Cloud 209: Cloud Essentials – Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs)

Today's Day Two Cloud kicks off an occasional series on cloud essentials. For the first episode we discuss the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). A VPC is an fundamental construct of a public cloud. It's essentially your slice of the shared cloud infrastructure, and you can launch and run other elements within a VPC to support your workload. Ned Bellavance walks through key VPC components including regions and AZs, networking and IP addressing, paid add-ons, data egress and associated charges, monitoring and troubleshooting, and basic security controls.

Day Two Cloud 209: Cloud Essentials – Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs)

Today's Day Two Cloud kicks off an occasional series on cloud essentials. For the first episode we discuss the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). A VPC is an fundamental construct of a public cloud. It's essentially your slice of the shared cloud infrastructure, and you can launch and run other elements within a VPC to support your workload. Ned Bellavance walks through key VPC components including regions and AZs, networking and IP addressing, paid add-ons, data egress and associated charges, monitoring and troubleshooting, and basic security controls.

The post Day Two Cloud 209: Cloud Essentials – Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

10 questions to ask about secure service edge (SSE)

In 2019, Gartner created the term secure access service edge (SASE) to describe a cloud-based service that combines networking and security in order to give remote workers safe access to internet-based resources.Gartner had put its finger on a new set of challenges that enterprise IT faced as employees shifted to remote work during Covid and applications migrated to the cloud. But Gartner overshot the runway a bit; vendors were caught flatfooted and scrambled to cobble together full suites of SASE features.On the customer side, a recent Gartner survey of CISOs revealed that “a majority of buyers are planning for a two-vendor strategy for SASE,” with security and networking teams making separate buying decisions rather than opting for single-vendor SASE.To read this article in full, please click here

10 questions to ask about secure service edge (SSE)

In 2019, Gartner created the term secure access service edge (SASE) to describe a cloud-based service that combines networking and security in order to give remote workers safe access to internet-based resources.Gartner had put its finger on a new set of challenges that enterprise IT faced as employees shifted to remote work during Covid and applications migrated to the cloud. But Gartner overshot the runway a bit; vendors were caught flatfooted and scrambled to cobble together full suites of SASE features.On the customer side, a recent Gartner survey of CISOs revealed that “a majority of buyers are planning for a two-vendor strategy for SASE,” with security and networking teams making separate buying decisions rather than opting for single-vendor SASE.To read this article in full, please click here

10 questions to ask about secure service edge (SSE)

In 2019, Gartner created the term secure access service edge (SASE) to describe a cloud-based service that combines networking and security in order to give remote workers safe access to internet-based resources.Gartner had put its finger on a new set of challenges that enterprise IT faced as employees shifted to remote work during Covid and applications migrated to the cloud. But Gartner overshot the runway a bit; vendors were caught flatfooted and scrambled to cobble together full suites of SASE features.On the customer side, a recent Gartner survey of CISOs revealed that “a majority of buyers are planning for a two-vendor strategy for SASE,” with security and networking teams making separate buying decisions rather than opting for single-vendor SASE.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Always-on networking for always-on SMBs

By: Amol Mitra, Vice President and General Manager, Global Small and Medium Business at HPE Aruba Networking.Soaring user expectations for mobile connectivity no matter where individuals live, work, educate, shop, recreate, or dine has many small and mid-sized businesses searching for fast, reliable, flexible, and secure Wi-Fi solutions that are delivered affordably and require little or no technology expertise to manage.Until recently, finding such a solution was a challenge. Fortunately, there are now options that provide entities like yours with modern networking infrastructure to fit SMB requirements, ensuring you can mobilize employees, deliver guest Wi-Fi to customers, and stay competitive in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Always-on networking for always-on SMBs

By: Amol Mitra, Vice President and General Manager, Global Small and Medium Business at HPE Aruba Networking.Soaring user expectations for mobile connectivity no matter where individuals live, work, educate, shop, recreate, or dine has many small and mid-sized businesses searching for fast, reliable, flexible, and secure Wi-Fi solutions that are delivered affordably and require little or no technology expertise to manage.Until recently, finding such a solution was a challenge. Fortunately, there are now options that provide entities like yours with modern networking infrastructure to fit SMB requirements, ensuring you can mobilize employees, deliver guest Wi-Fi to customers, and stay competitive in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace.To read this article in full, please click here

Layer-3 WAN Handoff (L3Out) in VXLAN/EVPN Fabrics

I got a question from a few of my students regarding the best way to implement end-to-end EVPN across multiple locations. Obviously there’s the multi-pod and multi-site architecture for people believing in the magic powers of stretching VLANs across the globe, but I was looking for something that I could recommend to people who understand that you have to have a L3 boundary if you want to have multiple independent failure domains (or availability zones).

Layer-3 WAN Handoff (L3Out) in VXLAN/EVPN Fabrics

I got a question from a few of my students regarding the best way to implement end-to-end EVPN across multiple locations. Obviously there’s the multi-pod and multi-site architecture for people believing in the magic powers of stretching VLANs across the globe, but I was looking for something that I could recommend to people who understand that you have to have a L3 boundary if you want to have multiple independent failure domains (or availability zones).