IDG Contributor Network: Service insertion—Why it’s so important

One of the major challenges that’s long faced enterprise network is the ability to spin up new network services. SD-WANs make this a lot easier through service insertion and service chaining.Suppose for a moment you want to construct a secure perimeter around your compute resources in your data center and Amazon Web Services (AWS) implementation. Normally, you’d introduce a firewall and an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) into each location. That way, should a security incident happen in one location, such as a malware outbreak or a denial of service attack, you would be able to mitigate that event without any reengineering work. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Outlook for iOS speeds up work with third-party add ins

Users of Microsoft's Outlook app for iPhone and iPad can now get work done quicker using third-party integrations.As of Thursday, Outlook for iOS supports add-ins, which let software companies build extensions to their own products that interact with emails in Outlook on a user’s smartphone and tablet. At launch, the app supports add-ins from Evernote, GIPHY, Nimble, Trello and Smartsheet, in addition to those that Microsoft has created.For example, users will be able to translate emails using a Microsoft Translator add-in, add cards to a Trello board straight from their email and quickly reply to an email thread with a funny animated GIF.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NFV Interoperability Testing Needs to Accelerate

To foster NFV interoperability, many initiatives have launched to help organizations determine what NFV software is compatible.

Worth Reading: Lazy thinking and modularity

There are two flaws in the Modularity Always Wins theory. In order to succeed, “disruptive modularity” needs a stable architecture with well-defined and documented boundaries. Module innovators need to be able to slide their creations into place without playing havoc with the rest of the edifice. This is how it worked in the Wintel PC world…sort of. In PC reality, as many of us have experienced, the sliding in and out of modules wasn’t so neat and often landed us in Device Driver purgatory. In the mid-nineties, one Microsoft director told me that the Redmond company actually spent more engineering resources on drivers than on Windows’ core software. —Monday Note

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Memory at the Core of New Deep Learning Research Chip

Over the last two years, there has been a push for novel architectures to feed the needs of machine learning and more specifically, deep neural networks.

We have covered the many architectural options for both the training and inference sides of that workload here at The Next Platform, and in doing so, started to notice an interesting trend. Some companies with custom ASICs targeted at that market seemed to be developing along a common thread—using memory as the target for processing.

Processing in memory (PIM) architectures are certainly nothing new, but because the relatively simple logic units inside of …

Memory at the Core of New Deep Learning Research Chip was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: CRM and contact center are on a collision course

The arcs of two industries, customer relationship management (CRM) and contact center, are about to entangle. More descriptively, these two industries are on a collision course. Consequences include exciting new innovations in customer experience and dramatic market-wide change.Changing times Propelled in an age of big data and artificial intelligence (AI), CRM is entering the industry’s platinum age. At the same time, contact center is facing disruption as newer communications protocols come to broader acceptance, old guard companies face transitions, and ways of deploying applications—cloud for one—accelerate in adoption.  + Also on Network World: How to conquer a CRM monster + The two industries have existed in the same universe, that of the key ways that customers interact with an enterprise, but for the most part it's as if they have occupied different dimensions. As CRM matured, it was embraced by marketing, sales and service delivery. CRM and contact center would occasionally interact, such as when telephony call controls were added to a CRM screen or when a service call turned into an upselling opportunity. However, true synergies have seldom really gelled.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Many Life Sciences Workloads, One Single System

The trend at the high end, from supercomputer simulations to large-scale genomics studies, is to push heterogeneity and software complexity while reducing the overhead on the infrastructure side. This might sound like a case of dueling forces, but there is progress in creating a unified framework to run multiple workloads simultaneously on one robust cluster.

To put this into context from a precision medicine angle, Dr. Michael McManus shared his insights about the years he spent designing infrastructure for life sciences companies and research. Those fields have changed dramatically in just the last five years alone in terms of data …

Many Life Sciences Workloads, One Single System was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

50% off Watch Dogs 2, Playstation 4 – Deal Alert

Explore the birthplace of the tech revolution as Marcus Holloway, a brilliant young hacker who has fallen victim to ctOS 2.0's predictive algorithms and accused of a crime he did not commit. In Marcus' quest to shut down ctOS 2.0 for good, hacking is the ultimate weapon. Players can not only hack into the San Francisco Bay Area's infrastructure but also every person and any connected device they possess to trigger unpredictable chains of events in this vast open world. Watch Dogs 2 for the Playstation 4 is currently discounted 50% off its list price on Amazon, so you can pick it up for just $29.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista enables visibility at cloud speed

You can’t manage what you can’t see. That phrase that has been used over and over again with network managers as they look to get a better handle on the goings on in their networks. The problem is pervasive visibility is hard. Collecting information from multiple systems, rolling it up into an aggregated view and then trying to do some kind of manual machine learning on it is next to impossible. I suppose if Mr. Spock were running the network, things might be OK. But the last time I checked, the U.S. wasn’t accepting H1-Bs from Vulcan, so humans will have to do. + Also on Network World: Cloud monitoring: Users review 5 top tools + The need for visibility has created a rising tide in the network packet broker market, and most of these do a fine job in the enterprise space, but the RISC-based processers that some of them use do not operate at cloud speeds when there are multiple 100 Gig-E connections that need to be tapped. I want to be clear that I’m making distinction between an enterprise monitoring cloud traffic and an actual cloud provider monitoring its internal traffic. The latter is Continue reading

Arista enables visibility at cloud speed

You can’t manage what you can’t see. That phrase that has been used over and over again with network managers as they look to get a better handle on the goings on in their networks. The problem is pervasive visibility is hard. Collecting information from multiple systems, rolling it up into an aggregated view and then trying to do some kind of manual machine learning on it is next to impossible. I suppose if Mr. Spock were running the network, things might be OK. But the last time I checked, the U.S. wasn’t accepting H1-Bs from Vulcan, so humans will have to do. + Also on Network World: Cloud monitoring: Users review 5 top tools + The need for visibility has created a rising tide in the network packet broker market, and most of these do a fine job in the enterprise space, but the RISC-based processers that some of them use do not operate at cloud speeds when there are multiple 100 Gig-E connections that need to be tapped. I want to be clear that I’m making distinction between an enterprise monitoring cloud traffic and an actual cloud provider monitoring its internal traffic. The latter is Continue reading

IBM Watson wants to do your tax returns

If anyone can make sense of the over 74,000 pages of the US tax code, IBM’s Watson can. Or at least that’s the plan as Big Blue has teamed up its Watson cognitive supercomputer with the tax return specialists at H&R Block to help customers with tax filing options.As part of the first phase of the collaboration, H&R Block and IBM development teams trained tax language Watson, first applying the technology to the myriad questions and topics discussed during the return filing process.The service uses cloud-based Watson services to understand context, interpret intent and draw connections between clients’ statements and relevant areas of their return, the companies said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM Watson wants to do your tax returns

If anyone can make sense of the over 74,000 pages of the US tax code, IBM’s Watson can. Or at least that’s the plan as Big Blue has teamed up its Watson cognitive supercomputer with the tax return specialists at H&R Block to help customers with tax filing options.As part of the first phase of the collaboration, H&R Block and IBM development teams trained tax language Watson, first applying the technology to the myriad questions and topics discussed during the return filing process.The service uses cloud-based Watson services to understand context, interpret intent and draw connections between clients’ statements and relevant areas of their return, the companies said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fighting ire with hire: Tech firms say immigration boosts employment

U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to channel populist anger to stem immigration, but tech companies want him to know that hiring immigrants is necessary for the country's economy and boosts overall employment.Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet are said to be writing Trump a letter expressing their concern about the order on immigration he signed last Friday, and other changes to immigration policy he may plan.The letter, a draft of which has been published by a number of media outlets, including Recode.net, highlights the companies' dependence on immigrants for their success, and warns that the new policy could affect many visa holders already contributing to the U.S. economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Orchestrating HPC Engineering in the Cloud

Public clouds have proven useful to a growing number of organizations looking for ways to run their high-performance computing applications to scale without having to limit themselves to whatever computing capabilities they have in-house or to spending a lot of money to build up their infrastructure to meeting their growing needs.

The big three – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – have rolled out a broad array of compute, networking and storage technologies that companies can leverage when their HPC workloads scale to the point that they can no longer be run on their in-house workstations or …

Orchestrating HPC Engineering in the Cloud was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

ENISA online training material updated and extended — ENISA

Free Training materials on IT Security incident and breach response. Looks quite good.

The new training material provides a step-by-step guide on how to address and respond to incidents, as an incident handler and investigator, teaching best practices and covering both sides of the breach. The material is technical and aims to provide a guided training both to incident handlers and investigators, while providing lifelike conditions. The training material mainly uses open source and free tools.

ENISA online training material updated and extended — ENISA : https://www.enisa.europa.eu/news/enisa-news/enisa-online-training-material-updated-and-extended

The post ENISA online training material updated and extended — ENISA appeared first on EtherealMind.

Why 2017 will be the worst year ever for security

Sony. Anthem. The Office of Personnel Management. Target. Yahoo. The past two years have seen one mega-breach after another—and 2017 promises to be the most catastrophic year yet.Security experts have long warned that most organizations don’t even know they’ve been breached. Attackers rely on stealth to learn about the network, find valuable information and systems, and steal what they want. Only recently have organizations improved their detection efforts and started investing the time, capital, and people needed to uncover vulnerabilities. When they do, the results are often alarming.[ 18 surprising tips for security pros. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security Report newsletter. ] “I think we are going to find more, not less, breaches in 2017,” says Ray Rothrock, CEO of RedSeal, a security analytics firm.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introducing VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3 & VMware NSX-T 1.1 

This past week at VMware has been quite exciting! Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO, reported on the Q4 2016 earnings call that VMware NSX has more than 2,400 customers exiting 2016. Today, we continue that momentum by announcing new releases of our two different VMware NSX platforms – VMware NSX™ for vSphere® 6.3 and VMware NSX-T 1.1.

These releases continue to accelerate digital transformation for organizations through the most critical IT use cases – Security, Automation, and Application Continuity – while expanding support for new application frameworks and architectures.

As more and more customers adopt NSX for vSphere, we continue to add features to make it easier for you to deploy, operate and scale-out your environment. NSX empowers customers on their cloud journey. It is driving value inside the data center today and expanding across datacenters and to the cloud via our Cloud Air Network partnerships, and soon to VMware Cloud on AWS and native public cloud workloads via VMware Cross-Cloud Services.

Let’s take a look at some of the new features in NSX for vSphere 6.3:

Security

Some of the new capabilities delivered in NSX for vSphere 6.3 are the Application Rule Manager (available in NSX Advanced Continue reading

Why 2017 will be the worst year ever for security

Sony. Anthem. The Office of Personnel Management. Target. Yahoo. The past two years have seen one mega-breach after another—and 2017 promises to be the most catastrophic year yet.Security experts have long warned that most organizations don’t even know they’ve been breached. Attackers rely on stealth to learn about the network, find valuable information and systems, and steal what they want. Only recently have organizations improved their detection efforts and started investing the time, capital, and people needed to uncover vulnerabilities. When they do, the results are often alarming.[ 18 surprising tips for security pros. | Discover how to secure your systems with InfoWorld's Security Report newsletter. ] “I think we are going to find more, not less, breaches in 2017,” says Ray Rothrock, CEO of RedSeal, a security analytics firm.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T’s ECOMP: The Enterprise Implications

NANOG – the art of running a network and discussing common operational issues

The North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) is the loci of modern Internet innovation and the day-to-day cumulative network-operational knowledge of thousands and thousands of network engineers. NANOG itself is a non-profit membership organization; but you don’t need to be a member in order to attend the conference or join the mailing list. That said, if you can become a member, then you’re helping a good cause.

The next NANOG conference starts in a few days (February 6-8 2017) in Washington, DC. Nearly 900 network professionals are converging on the city to discuss a variety of network-related issues, both big and small; but all related to running and improving the global Internet. For this upcoming meeting, Cloudflare has three network professionals in attendance. Two from the San Francisco office and one from the London office.

With the conference starting next week, it seemed a great opportunity to introduce readers of the blog as to why a NANOG conference is so worth attending.

Tutorials

While it seems obvious how to do some network tasks (you unpack the spiffy new wireless router from its box, you set up its security and plug it in); alas the global Internet is somewhat more complex. Continue reading