Survey: Enterprise IoT faces skills shortage, security challenges

A survey of technology decision-makers at mid- to large-scale enterprises found that IoT adoption is coming to the vast majority of businesses within the next two years, but many of those businesses aren’t yet ready to cope with the change.A major part of the problem is a perceived skills gap. Of the 500 IoT-involved technology pros surveyed, just 20% said that they “had all the skills they needed” to successfully implement their organization’s planned IoT projects.The other four out of five respondents to the survey conducted by Vanson Bourne and backed by UK-based satellite communications company Inmarsat said that they had some degree of need for additional IoT skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Coming Soon: Networking Features in Ansible 2.4

Ansible 2.4

Wow, how time flies! Here we go with another Ansible Project release packed full of updates for automating network infrastructure. After spending the last year heavily focused on building much of the foundation for Ansible network integration, this release represents the beginning of the journey towards building more application-aware, declarative-based Ansible modules. This is an exciting time and on behalf of the entire Ansible community, including the Ansible network engineering team. I’m very pleased to share with you the enhancements and updates to network integration included with the forthcoming Ansible 2.4 open source release.

The initial introduction of network support was originally conceived to help operators focus on being able to execute configuration changes on network devices with a set of imperative-based configuration modules.

Today, the Ansible network modules are focused on pushing configuration statements to network devices. It was a small step, but an important one in the journey towards full configuration management of physical network devices.

Since then, we have turned our attention towards how to better help organizations become more agile in actively managing network configurations. Over the course of the Ansible 2.4 release, we have been phasing in a more intelligent approach to building Continue reading

Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric

It is difficult not to be impatient for the technologies of the future, which is one reason that this publication is called The Next Platform. But those who are waiting for the Gen-Z consortium to deliver a memory fabric that will break the hegemony of the CPU in controlling access to memory and to deepen the memory hierarchy while at the same time flattening memory addressability are going to have to wait a little longer.

About a year longer, in fact, which is a bit further away than the founders of the Gen-Z consortium were hoping when they launched

Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Breaking the Internet: Swapping Backhoes for BGP

The term “break[ing] the Internet” has taken hold over the last few years – it sounds significant, and given the role that the Internet has come to play in our daily lives, even a little scary. A Google search for “break the Internet” returns 14.6 million results, while “broke the Internet” returns just under a half million results.

Interestingly, Google Trends shows a spike in searches for the term in November 2014 (arguably representing its entry into mainstream usage), coincident with Kim Kardashian’s appearance in Paper Magazine, and on the magazine’s Web site. (Warning: NSFW) To that end, Time Magazine says “But in the context of viral media content, ‘breaking the Internet’ means engineering one story to dominate Facebook and Twitter at the expense of more newsworthy things.” Presumably in celebration of those efforts, there’s even now a “Break the Internet” Webby Award.

“Breaking the Internet” in this context represents, at best, the failure of a website to do sufficient capacity planning, such as using a content delivery network (CDN) to help improve the scalability and performance of the Web site in the face of increased traffic from a flash crowd from the viral Continue reading

Fly be free: introducing Cumulus in the Cloud

I get really excited watching people use the technology that we develop at Cumulus Networks, and we’re always looking to make it easier for people get their heads and hands wrapped around our products and tools. Our first product, Cumulus Linux, is pretty easy; a curious techie can download our free Cumulus VX virtual machine and use it standalone or in concert with other virtual machines. If they want to see the rubber meet the road with a physical experience, they can buy a switch/license and experiment in a live network.

Cumulus VX

The introduction of Cumulus NetQ and Cumulus Host Pack upped the ante in demonstrability. These products work together to allow for high scale, operationally sane infrastructure. We wanted the curious to be able to explore all of our products in a comfortable setting. Thus was born a project we call Cumulus in the Cloud.

Cumulus in the Cloud

The awesome team here at Cumulus leveraged modern technology to set up a personal mini data center infrastructure complete with four servers and a multi-rack leaf/spine network. Then we put that technology to work in infrastructure related architectures that are meaningful to customers.

Leaf/spine

Our first personalization is a container deployment leveraging Mesos and Docker. An Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Tech enabled disaster response to Hurricane Harvey

Hurricane Harvey has dumped over 50 inches of water across Texas. Thousands of people displaced. Roads flooded. Communication channels disrupted.How are relief efforts coordinated? How are emergency personnel given the information they need? How can data be collected with broken communication channels and little cellular coverage? How can information from multiple sources be aggregated and presented in an actionable form?Here’s how Esri Disaster Response Program is helping first responders and the Texas Division of Emergency Management. Information on local conditions such as water levels, flood gauges, road closures and traffic conditions are essential to coordinate relief efforts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ensuring Good with VMware AppDefense

co-author Geoff Wilmington

Traditional data center endpoint security products focus on detecting and responding to known bad behavior. There are hundreds of millions of disparate malware attacks, with over a million getting added every day.  In addition, there is the threat of zero-day attacks exploiting previously unknown vulnerabilities. It becomes a never-ending race to “chase bad” without ever staying ahead of the threat landscape.  What if we took an opposite approach to security?  What if, instead of  “chasing bad” we started by “ensuring good”?

VMware AppDefense is a new security product focused on helping customers build a compute least privilege security model for data center endpoints and provide automated threat detection, response, and remediation to security events. AppDefense is focused on “ensuring good” versus “chasing bad” on data center endpoints.  When we focus our attention on what a workload is supposed to be doing, our lens for seeing malicious activity is much more focused and as a result, we narrow the exploitable attack surface of the workload down to what we know about.

 

Changing The Way We Secure Compute

AppDefense applies the concept of “ensuring good” by using three main techniques:

Capture

AppDefense starts by capturing Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How business is preparing for the arrival of 5G

As today’s market continues to churn out new technologies which revolutionize entire industries overnight, many business leaders are scrambling to prepare themselves for the next disruptive innovation. Increasingly, astute corporations and bold startups alike are coming to realize that 5G is the next big thing which will reshape how they operate, and they’re taking steps to prepare for it.So how exactly are today’s leading brands and companies preparing themselves for 5G’s arrival? What common pitfalls have these preppers encountered, and how can a savvy businessman avoid making them himself? Is 5G really worth all of the sound and fury?A new type of telecom industry While a market where 5G is ubiquitous will see a plethora of changes, few stand to be revolutionized more than the telecom industry. In the past few years alone, consumers all around the globe have flocked to digital devices like smartphones, tablets, and personal computers en masse, forcing businesses to up their wireless systems and the standards they follow. When 5G inevitably arrives, these same businesses will have an even greater hurdle set before them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How business is preparing for the arrival of 5G

As today’s market continues to churn out new technologies which revolutionize entire industries overnight, many business leaders are scrambling to prepare themselves for the next disruptive innovation. Increasingly, astute corporations and bold startups alike are coming to realize that 5G is the next big thing which will reshape how they operate, and they’re taking steps to prepare for it.So how exactly are today’s leading brands and companies preparing themselves for 5G’s arrival? What common pitfalls have these preppers encountered, and how can a savvy businessman avoid making them himself? Is 5G really worth all of the sound and fury?A new type of telecom industry While a market where 5G is ubiquitous will see a plethora of changes, few stand to be revolutionized more than the telecom industry. In the past few years alone, consumers all around the globe have flocked to digital devices like smartphones, tablets, and personal computers en masse, forcing businesses to up their wireless systems and the standards they follow. When 5G inevitably arrives, these same businesses will have an even greater hurdle set before them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here