Transforming IT Security in Three Key Steps

Several years ago, the CEO of a Fortune 100 company remarked: “If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company.”

Today, these words are more true than ever—but so is the reality that the digital transformation in business has also given rise to significant changes across the IT landscape and, in turn, significant new challenges for IT security.

As people, devices, and objects become more connected, protecting all these connections and environments has become a top priority for many IT organizations. At the same time, it’s also become one of their biggest challenges. Securing each and every interaction between users, applications, and data is no easy feat—especially when you consider that securing these interactions needs to be done across environments that are constantly changing and increasingly dynamic.

So how do you mitigate risk in a world where IT complexity and “anytime, anywhere” digital interactions are growing exponentially? For organizations that are embracing cloud and virtualized environments, three common-sense steps—enabled by a ubiquitous software layer across the application infrastructure and endpoints that exists independently of the underlying physical infrastructure—are proving to be key for providing Continue reading

What SDN is and where it’s going

Forrester analyst Andre Kindness says a lot of clients ask him how they should think about software-defined networking (SDN), which has been heralded for years as the next great thing in the industry.SDN – which is an architecture approach, not a specific product - has traditionally been thought of as virtualizing data center networks. This typically means separating the management of the control plane of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic. Using a software-defined system to control this disaggregation brings many benefits, including increased network management flexibility and being able to more easily implement fine-grained security policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What SDN is and where it’s going

Forrester analyst Andre Kindness says a lot of clients ask him how they should think about software-defined networking (SDN), which has been heralded for years as the next great thing in the industry.SDN – which is an architecture approach, not a specific product - has traditionally been thought of as virtualizing data center networks. This typically means separating the management of the control plane of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic. Using a software-defined system to control this disaggregation brings many benefits, including increased network management flexibility and being able to more easily implement fine-grained security policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What SDN is and where it’s going?

Forrester analyst Andre Kindness says a lot of clients ask him how they should think about software-defined networking (SDN), which has been heralded for years as the next great thing in the industry.SDN – which is an architecture approach, not a specific product - has traditionally been thought of as virtualizing data center networks. This typically means separating the management of the control plane of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic. Using a software-defined system to control this disaggregation brings many benefits, including increased network management flexibility and being able to more easily implement fine-grained security policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What SDN is and where it’s going?

Forrester analyst Andre Kindness says a lot of clients ask him how they should think about software-defined networking (SDN), which has been heralded for years as the next great thing in the industry.SDN – which is an architecture approach, not a specific product - has traditionally been thought of as virtualizing data center networks. This typically means separating the management of the control plane of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic. Using a software-defined system to control this disaggregation brings many benefits, including increased network management flexibility and being able to more easily implement fine-grained security policies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

3 ways to track people using location-based services

There are lots of motivations driving organizations to install location-tracking technologies. The obvious driver is to find things, especially things on wheels, such as medical equipment in a hospital. It can also be smart to keep tabs on things in transit, such as a container. But the biggest reason to track things is simply because we can. We can also use these technologies to track people. Some solutions such as facial recognition can literally track people, but usually we just track a device someone might be carrying. We can now literally track the customer’s journey (through a retail store). There’s a popular misconception that global positioning satellites (GPS) are usable inside, but they range from worthless to unhelpful. GPS satellite signals require a direct line of sight to multiple satellites. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Ethernet Getting back on Moore’s Law

It would be ideal if we lived in a universe where it was possible to increase the capacity of compute, storage, and networking at the same pace so as to keep all three elements expanding in balance. The irony is that over the past two decades, when the industry needed for networking to advance the most, Ethernet got a little stuck in the mud. —The Next Platform

The post Worth Reading: Ethernet Getting back on Moore’s Law appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Oracle beefs up cloud sales team with 1,000 EMEA openings

Oracle is the latest legacy software vendor looking to reorganise its sales teams to be more focused on cloud services, as it announces 1,000 job openings in EMEA.Oracle is targeting "people from diverse backgrounds and profiles with between two to six years work experience", the official press release states.This follows some positive financial results for Oracle, as it posted a 66 percent year-on-year growth in cloud revenues for Q4 2016. That figure comes in at $1.4 billion and includes PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, which has been boosted by the recent NetSuite acquisition. By comparison AWS posted revenues of $3.66 billion in its latest results back in April.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

An Introduction to oVirt Ansible Roles

Today I would like to share with you some of the integration work with Ansible 2.3 that was done in the latest oVirt 4.1 release. The Ansible integration work was quite extensive and included Ansible modules that can be utilized for automating a wide range of oVirt tasks, including tiered application deployment and virtualization infrastructure management.

While Ansible has multiple levels of integrations, I would like to focus this article on oVirt Ansible roles. As stated in the Ansible documentation: “Roles in Ansible build on the idea of include files and combine them to form clean, reusable abstractions – they allow you to focus more on the big picture and only dive into the details when needed.”

We used the above logic as a guideline for developing the oVirt Ansible roles. We will cover three of the many Ansible roles available for oVirt:

For each example, I will describe the role's purpose and how it is used.

oVirt Infra

The purpose of this role is to automatically configure and manage an oVirt datacenter. It will take a newly deployed- but not yet configured- oVirt engine (RHV-M for RHV users), hosts, and storage and Continue reading

2 reasons to migrate off of Microsoft Exchange Server

A few weeks back, I wrote that “choosing Microsoft Windows for your organization should get you fired.”It’s a statement that, while certainly a bit on the inflammatory side, I completely stand by—mostly due to the known insecure nature of running Windows as a server operating system.What I didn’t do was give specific examples of what to move your existing Windows-based infrastructure to. Sure, the obvious answer for most SysAdmins is simply “migrate the servers over to Linux.” But what about specific server applications that your organization might already rely upon? That’s a whole other can of worms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

2 reasons to migrate off of Microsoft Exchange Server

A few weeks back, I wrote that “choosing Microsoft Windows for your organization should get you fired.”It’s a statement that, while certainly a bit on the inflammatory side, I completely stand by—mostly due to the known insecure nature of running Windows as a server operating system.What I didn’t do was give specific examples of what to move your existing Windows-based infrastructure to. Sure, the obvious answer for most SysAdmins is simply “migrate the servers over to Linux.” But what about specific server applications that your organization might already rely upon? That’s a whole other can of worms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Get $100 off Amazon Echo When You Buy 2 Right Now – Deal Alert

Put 2 Echo devices in your cart and Amazon will credit you back $100 right now, effectively pricing each one at $129.99 vs. the typical $179.99 list price. But you'll have to use a special code at checkout, to activate the discount: ECHO2PACK. Amazon Echo is a hands-free speaker you control with your voice. Echo connects to the Alexa Voice Service to play music, provide information, news, sports scores, weather, and more—instantly. All you have to do is ask. Echo has seven microphones and beam forming technology so it can hear you from across the room—even while music is playing. Echo is also an expertly tuned speaker that can fill any room with 360° immersive sound. When you want to use Echo, just say the wake word “Alexa” and Echo responds instantly. If you have more than one Echo or Echo Dot, Alexa responds intelligently from the Echo you're closest to with ESP (Echo Spatial Perception), so it makes a lot of sense to pick up 2 right now with this discount.  See the Amazon Echo on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Trials And Tribulations Of IBM Systems

IBM is a bit of an enigma these days. It has the art – some would say black magic – of financial engineering down pat, and its system engineering is still quite good. Big Blue talks about all of the right things for modern computing platforms, although it speaks a slightly different dialect because the company still thinks that it is the one setting the pace, and therefore coining the terms, rather than chasing markets that others are blazing. And it just can’t seem to grow revenues, even after tens of billions of dollars in acquisitions and internal investments over …

The Trials And Tribulations Of IBM Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Docker Spearheads OCI Release of v1.0 Runtime and Image Format Specifications

Today marks an important milestone for the Open Container Initiative (OCI) with the release of the OCI v1.0 runtime and image specifications – a journey that Docker has been central in driving and navigating over the last two years. It has been our goal to provide low-level standards as building blocks for the community, customers and the broader industry. To understand the significance of this milestone, let’s take a look at the history of Docker’s growth and progress in developing industry-standard container technologies.

The History of Docker Runtime and Image Donations to the OCI

Docker’s image format and container runtime quickly emerged as the de facto standard following its release as an open source project in 2013. We recognized the importance of turning it over to a neutral governance body to fuel innovation and prevent fragmentation in the industry. Working together with a broad group of container technologists and industry leaders, the Open Container Project was formed to create a set of container standards and was launched under the auspices of the Linux Foundation in June 2015 at DockerCon. It became the Open Container Initiative (OCI) as the project evolved that Summer.

Docker contributed runc, a reference implementation for the Continue reading

Demystifying the Open Container Initiative (OCI) Specifications

The Open Container Initiative (OCI) announced the completion of the first versions of the container runtime and image specifications this week. The OCI is an effort under the auspices of the Linux Foundation to develop specifications and standards to support container solutions. A lot of effort has gone into the building of these specifications over the past two years. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the myths that have arisen over the past two years.

OCI

Myth #1: The OCI is a replacement for Docker

Standards are important, but they are far from a complete production platform. Take for example, the World Wide Web. It  has evolved over the last 25 years and was built on core dependable standards like TCP/IP, HTTP and HTML. Using TCP/IP as an example, when enterprises coalesced around TCP/IP as a common protocol, it fueled the growth of routers and in particular – Cisco. However, Cisco became a leader in its market by focusing on differentiated features on its routing platform. We believe the parallel exists with the OCI specifications and Docker.

Docker is a complete production platform for developing, distributing, securing and orchestrating container-based solutions. The OCI specification is used Continue reading

Tools for TE with EIGRP

In response to my article about what would cause a directly connected route to be overridden, Matt Love (@showflogi) made a good observation:

What Matt is saying is that longest prefix match (LPM) is a mechanism that can be used to steer traffic around the network in order to meet a technical or business need. This type of traffic steering is called traffic engineering (TE).

LPM refers to how route lookups work on a Layer 3 device: the longest, most-specific match is always chosen. Like I explained in the prior post, if the routing table contains 10.10.10.0/24 and 10.10.10.64/26, the latter route will be used to forward traffic to 10.10.10.100 (as an example) because a /26 is longer (ie, has a longer prefix length) and is therefore more specific. We can use this behavior to direct traffic towards 10.10.10.100 over a specific interface or via a specific path (ie, a path with Continue reading

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