Obama-led sanction accidentally hampered U.S. tech firms in Russia

Sanctions imposed by former President Obama on Russia for hacking during the U.S. election had an unintended side effect: they essentially barred U.S. tech firms from selling new IT products in the country.Part of last month's sanction order was designed to block U.S. companies from doing business with Russia’s Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB, because of its suspected role in influencing last year’s election.But the FSB isn’t just an intelligence agency. It’s also a crucial regulator in Russia that clears new IT products, including smartphones and tablets, for sale in the country.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Obama-led sanction accidentally hampered U.S. tech firms in Russia

Sanctions imposed by former President Obama on Russia for hacking during the U.S. election had an unintended side effect: they essentially barred U.S. tech firms from selling new IT products in the country.Part of last month's sanction order was designed to block U.S. companies from doing business with Russia’s Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB, because of its suspected role in influencing last year’s election.But the FSB isn’t just an intelligence agency. It’s also a crucial regulator in Russia that clears new IT products, including smartphones and tablets, for sale in the country.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

100G & 25G Plugfests: What we learned

Howdy.

Happy Chinese New Year Y’all!!!

I wanted to take the time and talk about the 25/100G trend we find ourselves in. With more and more platforms being added (Cumulus Linux supports 9 of these platforms with the 3.2 release and we have plans to add more over the next few months), and more customers making the switch to 25/100G as a way to future-proof their networks given the economics of 25/100G open networking switches being on par with their 10/40G counterparts, it’s clear that the 25/100G trend is picking up speed. It was a long journey to get to this point, and we learned a lot on the way. I’d like to take this opportunity to take a look back, analyze the situation and highlight a few things we learned as an industry.

Setting the stage: A short history of the 25G and 100G rush

I don’t know if y’all remember the 100G race between vendors in 2015 to deliver the first 100G switch based on the new 28 GHz standard; everyone had to be first in the market. We even had a handful of 100G switch submissions to OCP by mid 2015. Plus, for the first time Continue reading

Microsoft asks Trump administration for travel ban exceptions

Microsoft today asked the U.S. government to create a mechanism for granting exemptions to last week's executive order on immigration that would meet "the pressing needs of real people," including scores of company employees and their families.In the letter to the heads of the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security, Brad Smith, Microsoft's chief legal officer, asked for exemptions that would apply to people with non-immigrant work visas, student visas or family members. The exceptions would let them come to and go from the U.S. for business trips and family emergencies, those trips not to exceed two weeks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SSL or IPsec: Which is best for IoT network security?

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are soon expected to outnumber end-user devices by as much as four to one. These applications can be found everywhere—from manufacturing floors and building management to video surveillance and lighting systems.However, security threats pose serious obstacles to IoT adoption in enterprises or even home environments for sensitive applications such as remote healthcare monitoring. IoT security can be divided into the following three distinct components: Application service End device Transport Although all three are critical for systemwide security, this post will address only transport security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SSL or IPsec: Which is best for IoT network security?

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are soon expected to outnumber end-user devices by as much as four to one. These applications can be found everywhere—from manufacturing floors and building management to video surveillance and lighting systems.However, security threats pose serious obstacles to IoT adoption in enterprises or even home environments for sensitive applications such as remote healthcare monitoring. IoT security can be divided into the following three distinct components: Application service End device Transport Although all three are critical for systemwide security, this post will address only transport security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SSL or IPsec: Which is best for IoT network security?

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are soon expected to outnumber end-user devices by as much as four to one. These applications can be found everywhere—from manufacturing floors and building management to video surveillance and lighting systems.However, security threats pose serious obstacles to IoT adoption in enterprises or even home environments for sensitive applications such as remote healthcare monitoring. IoT security can be divided into the following three distinct components: Application service End device Transport Although all three are critical for systemwide security, this post will address only transport security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RSA 2017: Anticipating network security chatter

Earlier this week, I  wrote about my expectations for endpoint security at the upcoming RSA Conference. Similarly, here’s what I anticipate hearing about regarding network security:1. DDoS protection. While data breaches get front page, above-the-fold headlines, DDoS attacks remain relatively invisible by comparison. This is puzzling because DDoS attacks happen almost daily. A quick review of the news shows that the Trump hotel website, Sonic (ISP in CA), Emsisoft and Lloyd’s Bank have all been hit with DDoS attacks over the past few weeks. These are relatively pedestrian attacks compared to the now infamous Mirai botnet DDoS attack on Dyn back in October and the subsequent attack on French hosting provider OVH a week later. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RSA 2017: Anticipating network security chatter

Earlier this week, I posted a blog about my expectations for endpoint security at the upcoming RSA Conference.  Similarly, here’s what I anticipate hearing about network security: 1.      DDoS protection.  While data breaches get front page, above the fold headlines, DDoS attacks remain relatively invisible by comparison.  This is puzzling since DDoS attacks happen almost daily.  A quick review of the news shows that the Trump hotel website, Sonic (ISP in CA), Emsisoft, and Lloyd’s Bank have all been hit with DDoS attacks over the past few weeks.  These are relatively pedestrian attacks compared to the now infamous Mirai botnet DDoS attack on Dyn back in October and the subsequent attack on French hosting provider OVH a week later.  These particular DDoS attacks generated between 60mbps and 1tbps worth of traffic!  It’s also worth noting that we are also seeing a rise in stealthy application-layer DDoS attacks as well as blended threats of DDoS and ransomware together.  DDoS attacks are still a tad on the geeky side to play a starring role at RSA, but I do expect a lot more DDoS chatter.  Good thing because a lot of security Continue reading

BT readies a global dynamic WAN

Global WAN powerhouse BT is out to turn its sprawling network into dynamic beast that can accommodate today’s rapidly evolving needs. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix talked about the plans with Keith Langridge, Vice President of Network Services at BT Global Services, and Sunil Khandekar, Founder and CEO of Nuage Networks from Nokia, a critical new supplier that will enable some of the change. BT Keith Langridge, Vice President of Network Services at BT Global ServicesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BT readies a global dynamic WAN

Global WAN powerhouse BT is out to turn its sprawling network into dynamic beast that can accommodate today’s rapidly evolving needs. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix talked about the plans with Keith Langridge, Vice President of Network Services at BT Global Services, and Sunil Khandekar, Founder and CEO of Nuage Networks from Nokia, a critical new supplier that will enable some of the change. BT Keith Langridge, Vice President of Network Services at BT Global ServicesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Beware of the legacy public cloud

Legacy is a scary and bad word in the computing industry. Most enterprises have "legacy" technologies, and all who do wish that they did not.Now everyone thinks of public clouds as the next greatest thing, which means they cannot possibly be "legacy." While the major public cloud vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) currently drive a great deal of innovation, they might also be trapping themselves and their customers into legacy situations.So, there is a real risk that the current public cloud leaders (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) could become legacy vendors. To understand this risk, we need to understand what creates legacy technologies and vendors and analyze the strategies of the public cloud vendors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Beware of the legacy public cloud

Legacy is a scary and bad word in the computing industry. Most enterprises have "legacy" technologies, and all who do wish that they did not.Now everyone thinks of public clouds as the next greatest thing, which means they cannot possibly be "legacy." While the major public cloud vendors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) currently drive a great deal of innovation, they might also be trapping themselves and their customers into legacy situations.So, there is a real risk that the current public cloud leaders (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) could become legacy vendors. To understand this risk, we need to understand what creates legacy technologies and vendors and analyze the strategies of the public cloud vendors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s next for Azure Site Recovery?

When Microsoft first showed off its disaster recovery service on Azure in 2014, it was called Hyper-V Recovery Manager and was an extension of a System Center tool for failing over Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) to another location, using the public cloud to coordinate testing and managing recovery between your data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)