Microsoft’s new Windows 10 S will take on Chrome OS

Microsoft hopes a new Windows 10 operating system called Windows 10 S will usurp Chromebook's domination in education and provide a better way for students to learn.The new version of Windows, announced at an event in New York Tuesday, is targeted at teachers, students, artists and creators. It's got features very similar to that of Chrome OS in Chromebooks, which dominates the education market.It has a traditional Windows 10 desktop look, and will only run applications downloaded from the Windows App store. That means all applications will be verified and secure.Windows 10 acts like a "container" that will run secure apps. A version of Microsoft's Office Suite will also come to Windows 10 S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Myth of Pure Cloud

Despite the movement to cloud, data centers will still be around for the foreseeable future.

Review: Acer R11 Chromebook—Average Chromebook, awesome emulation laptop

I'm not much of a ChromeOS user these days. Almost every aspect of Google's services has been removed from my life (Google Search, GMail, etc.), and, well, I just don't have much need for a system centered entirely around Google at this point.But I had the chance to use the Acer Chromebook R11 (the CB5-132T-C9KK model), so I decided to see just how useful it could be for someone like me—someone who really doesn't use Google other than for YouTube and the occasional Hangouts video chat (for the friends I can't seem to persuade to use anything else).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The move toward enterprise security technology integration

Last week, I wrote about the move toward cybersecurity vendor and technology consolidation, along with a growing emphasis on technology integration in the enterprise. Here’s some additional data that reinforces those conclusions. As part of a recent ESG research project, 176 cybersecurity and IT professionals were presented with several statements and asked whether they agreed or disagreed with each one. Here are the results:  82% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: "My organization is actively building a security architecture that integrates multiple individual product." This is likely part of a SOAPA (security operations and analytics platform architecture) project. 81% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: "Cybersecurity product integration has become an important consideration of our security procurement criteria." In other words, stand-alone point tools don’t make the purchasing cut in most cases. 78% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: "The security products my organization buys are regularly qualified on their integration capabilities." This aligns with the previous point.  73% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: "My organization tends to select best-of-breed products." Once again, the data reflects that Continue reading

The move toward enterprise security technology integration

Last week, I wrote about the move toward cybersecurity vendor and technology consolidation, along with a growing emphasis on technology integration in the enterprise. Here’s some additional data that reinforces those conclusions. As part of a recent ESG research project, 176 cybersecurity and IT professionals were presented with several statements and asked whether they agreed or disagreed with each one. Here are the results:  82% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: "My organization is actively building a security architecture that integrates multiple individual product." This is likely part of a SOAPA (security operations and analytics platform architecture) project. 81% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: "Cybersecurity product integration has become an important consideration of our security procurement criteria." In other words, stand-alone point tools don’t make the purchasing cut in most cases. 78% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: "The security products my organization buys are regularly qualified on their integration capabilities." This aligns with the previous point.  73% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: "My organization tends to select best-of-breed products." Once again, the data reflects that Continue reading

Toward Enterprise Security Technology Integration

Last week, I posted a blog about the move toward cybersecurity vendor and technology consolidation along with a growing emphasis on technology integration in the enterprise. Here’s some additional data that reinforces these conclusions.  As part of a recent ESG research project, 176 cybersecurity and It professionals were presented with several statements and asked whether they agreed or disagreed with each one (note: I am an ESG employee).  Here are the results:  82% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: ‘My organization is actively building a security architecture that integrates multiple individual product.’  This is likely part of a SOAPA (i.e. security operations and analytics platform architecture) project. 81% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: ‘Cybersecurity product integration has become an important consideration of our security procurement criteria.’  In other words, stand-alone point tools don’t make the purchasing cut in most cases. 78% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: ‘The security products my organization buys are regularly qualified on their integration capabilities.  This aligns with the previous point.  73% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: ‘My organization Continue reading

Toward Enterprise Security Technology Integration

Last week, I posted a blog about the move toward cybersecurity vendor and technology consolidation along with a growing emphasis on technology integration in the enterprise. Here’s some additional data that reinforces these conclusions.  As part of a recent ESG research project, 176 cybersecurity and It professionals were presented with several statements and asked whether they agreed or disagreed with each one (note: I am an ESG employee).  Here are the results:  82% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: ‘My organization is actively building a security architecture that integrates multiple individual product.’  This is likely part of a SOAPA (i.e. security operations and analytics platform architecture) project. 81% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: ‘Cybersecurity product integration has become an important consideration of our security procurement criteria.’  In other words, stand-alone point tools don’t make the purchasing cut in most cases. 78% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: ‘The security products my organization buys are regularly qualified on their integration capabilities.  This aligns with the previous point.  73% of survey respondents “strongly agree” or “agree” with the statement: ‘My organization Continue reading

Fitbit Offers Up To 50% off and Free Shipping For Mom’s Day – Deal Alert

Fitbit wants you to motivate the women who motivate you, and they're offering 50% off select gifts, plus free 2-day shipping when you spend $50 or more on Alta, Flex 2, Charge 2, or others. Jump over to Fitbit's site and browse their gift guide and exclusive discounts in honor of Mother's Day.  To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tracking NFV Performance in the Data Center

Virtualizing the data center may make it more efficient and agile but additional processing power may be needed.

IDG Contributor Network: NetOps: Are you ready? How can you start?

NetOps focuses on the philosophies, practices and tools in building and operating the network to deliver and respond quickly to application and user service needs. In my previous post, I described NetOps and why you should care. Ties from NetOps to agile software development and DevOps are essential, as these practices are now the source of many of the requests for network changes.The methods of NetOps can help you to create a network that is not only available with high levels of reliability, performance and security, but is also agile in configuration, capacity and operations. In short, NetOps enables the network to be both available and agile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: NetOps: Are you ready? How can you start?

NetOps focuses on the philosophies, practices and tools in building and operating the network to deliver and respond quickly to application and user service needs. In my previous post, I described NetOps and why you should care. Ties from NetOps to agile software development and DevOps are essential, as these practices are now the source of many of the requests for network changes.The methods of NetOps can help you to create a network that is not only available with high levels of reliability, performance and security, but is also agile in configuration, capacity and operations. In short, NetOps enables the network to be both available and agile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Datacenter Does Not Revolve Around AWS, Despite Its Gravity

If the public cloud computing market were our solar system, then Amazon Web Services would be Jupiter and Saturn together and the remaining five fast-growing big clouds would be like the inner planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,  and that pile of rocks that used to be a planet mixed up with those clouds that are finding growth a bit more challenging  – think Uranus and Neptune and maybe even Pluto if you still want to count it a planet.

This analogy came to us in the wake of Amazon’s reporting of its financial results for the first quarter of …

The Datacenter Does Not Revolve Around AWS, Despite Its Gravity was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Microsoft reportedly will separate Edge from OS updates

It’s no secret that Microsoft’s Edge browser, the revamped browser that shipped with Windows 10 as a replacement for Internet Explorer, is struggling to gain any sort of traction. As IE fades rapidly, Google Chrome has been picking up share, while Edge remains stubbornly at 5 percent share.As I illustrated last week, Edge doesn’t really have one. It’s painfully slow. I should not be able to watch a website load piece by piece in 2017 on a broadband connection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Red Hat kicks off annual Summit by leaning dev-wards

Red Hat’s annual summit opened today with the announcement of three new products aimed with uncharacteristic directness at developers, rather than the company’s usual target of IT operations staff.Openshift.io is the company’s free SaaS development environment, specifically designed for cloud-native apps, that lets geographically far-flung teams work together and automatically containerizes code for easy deployment. The environment builds on open source projects like Kubernetes-focused development platform fabric8, IDE Eclipse Che, and automation server Jenkins.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Red Hat CEO: Open-source innovation is always user-led + Which Linux distros should newbies use?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Red Hat kicks off annual Summit by leaning dev-wards

Red Hat’s annual summit opened today with the announcement of three new products aimed with uncharacteristic directness at developers, rather than the company’s usual target of IT operations staff.Openshift.io is the company’s free SaaS development environment, specifically designed for cloud-native apps, that lets geographically far-flung teams work together and automatically containerizes code for easy deployment. The environment builds on open source projects like Kubernetes-focused development platform fabric8, IDE Eclipse Che, and automation server Jenkins.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Red Hat CEO: Open-source innovation is always user-led + Which Linux distros should newbies use?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

StackStorm: Ghost2logger Pack

Coinciding (roughly) with the version 2.2 release of StackStorm, the Ghost2logger pack has been released.

This pack provides in essence a “Syslog sensor” that provides the user a tuple match on a Syslog entry, tuples in this case being:

• Syslog Message (Actual syslog message)
  MANDATORY AND
• Syslog Source (IPv4 address)

The actions can then be anything you so desire, either triggering a sinlge action or full blown workflow with Mistral or Cloudslang.

Getting Started

In terms of using the pack, all that is required from the user is the creation of rules and pointing your syslog source to the Ghost2logger location. Most of the time Ghost2logger will live on the same install as StackStorm, so point it at the IP address StackStorm resides. Worried abut StackStorm load? Don’t be. Syslogs aren’t actually processed by StackStorm, but are processed by the Ghost2logger binary. Only matched entries dispatch triggers. There is some inception going on here. Prepare yourself for this: “Rules will only match what the rules have created the match conditions for”. If you understand this hypothesis correctly, you will understand that this is simple feedback from the rules base back to Ghost2logger.

The pack itself consists of a number Continue reading

Review: More sleep-related devices to help you get more ZZZs

The month of May has been dedicated “Better Sleep Month” by the Better Sleep Council. If you don’t like that group and you prefer to follow the guidelines of the National Sleep Foundation, you just celebrated Sleep Awareness Week (April 23-29, 2017). Either way, there’s no better time to look at some new products that want to help you get a better night’s sleep.I’ve previously written about two other devices – the ASTI Sound+Sleep SE sound machine, which provides 64 different sounds to help provide a white-noise-like effect; and the LIVE sensor by EarlySense, which tracks your heartbeat, breathing, stress levels and sleep stages to give you data about how much (or how little) you’re sleeping.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introducing Docker’s new CEO

Docker has celebrated a number of important milestones lately. March 20th was the fourth anniversary of the launch of the Docker project at PyCon in 2013. April 10th was the fourth anniversary of the day that I joined Solomon and a team of 14 other believers to help build this remarkable company. And, on April 18th, we brought the community, customers, and partners together in Austin for the fourth US-based DockerCon.

March 20th, 2013

Docker Team in 2013

DockerCon was a great opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve seen in the past four years. Docker the company has grown from 15 to over 330 talented individuals. The number of contributors to Docker has grown from 10 to over 3300. Docker is used by millions of developers and is running on millions of servers. There are now over 900k dockerized apps that have been downloaded over 13 billion times. Docker is being used to cure diseases, keep planes in the air, to keep soldiers safe from landmines, to power the world’s largest financial networks and institutions, to process billions in transactions, to help create new companies, and to help revitalize existing companies. Docker has rapidly scaled revenues, building a sustainable Continue reading

IoT Security Anti-Patterns

From security cameras to traffic lights, an increasing amount of appliances we interact with on a daily basis are internet connected. A device can be considered IoT-enabled when the functionality offered by its Embedded System is exposed through an internet connected API.

Internet-of-Things technologies inherit many attack vectors that appear in other internet connected devices, however low-powered hardware-centric nature of embedded systems presents them with unique security threats. Engineers building Internet-of-Things devices must take additional precautions to ensure they do not implement security anti-patterns when addressing new problems, this blog post will investigate four such anti-patterns that have been used by real Internet-of-Things devices.

Atmel ATMEGA8 Microcontroller Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 3.0

HTTP Pub/Sub

Every time your IoT-enabled alarm clock sounds, you may want it to tell your coffee machine to brew some coffee. In order to do this, your coffee machine may subscribe to messages published by your alarm clock. One such way of doing this is to implement the Publish/Subscribe Pattern within the API of the IoT devices, for this example let's assume our alarm clock and coffee machine communicate through HTTP.

In order to subscribe to messages from the alarm clock, the coffee machine sends Continue reading

Using the Collaborative Security Approach to Address Internet of Things Security Challenges