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BrandPost: Closing IT security gaps with Network Access Control

By: Eve-Marie Lanza, Senior Security Solutions Marketing Manager, HPE Aruba Networking.IT security gaps caused by lack of visibility and control into user and device activities persist for many organizations, according to a report recently released by security research firm Ponemon Institute.In the report sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, The 2023 Global Study on Closing the IT Security Gap: Addressing Cybersecurity Gaps from Edge to Cloud, 67% of respondents indicated that identifying and authenticating IoT devices accessing their network is critical to their organizations’ security strategy. Yet nearly the same number of respondents (63%) said their security teams lack visibility and control into all the activity of every device connected to their IT infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here

How to secure Kubernetes workloads using Calico DNS Security Policy

In my previous blog on Kubernetes security foundations, we discussed the growing adoption of cloud-native applications and the security challenges they present. We highlighted the limitations of traditional network firewalls in securing these applications and emphasized the importance of implementing cloud-native security policies to protect network traffic effectively.

In this blog, we will focus on one specific aspect of network security: securing egress traffic from microservices based on fully qualified domain names (FQDNs). Protecting egress traffic is crucial for ensuring the integrity and privacy of data leaving the microservices.

We will explore the challenges associated with safeguarding microservices egress traffic to destinations outside the cluster and discuss how Calico DNS logging and DNS policy can address these challenges. DNS logging allows for the collection and analysis of DNS queries made by microservices, providing valuable insights into their communication patterns and potential security risks. DNS policy enables the enforcement of granular access controls on domain names located outside the cluster, allowing only authorized requests and preventing malicious activities.

By implementing Calico DNS logging and DNS policy, organizations can gain better visibility into their microservices’ egress traffic, detect anomalies or security breaches, and establish stricter controls to protect their valuable data. This Continue reading

Structured for Success: 4 Architectural Pillars of Cyber Resilience

When built on a solid architectural foundation, cyber resilience can dependably manage unanticipated ransomware hazards and other threats to recoverability.

Supply-chain constraints spike data-center outages

Shortages due to supply-chain problems has faded from the headlines, but they persist and are actually getting worse in some sectors.A report from AFCOM, an organization of data-center professionals, found that 44% of data-center operators surveyed had suffered downtime or an outage because they couldn’t get needed parts.In the report “State of the Data Center 2023,” 94% of respondents said that they have had supply-chain issues of one kind or another. The most commonly cited items in short supply (59%) are basic IT equipment such as servers and switches, followed by power systems (51%) including generators and UPSes.But even acquiring security systems (34%) such as secure doors and cameras and building materials like concrete (35%) were an issue for many respondents.To read this article in full, please click here

Supply-chain constraints spike data-center outages

Shortages due to supply-chain problems has faded from the headlines, but they persist and are actually getting worse in some sectors.A report from AFCOM, an organization of data-center professionals, found that 44% of data-center operators surveyed had suffered downtime or an outage because they couldn’t get needed parts.In the report “State of the Data Center 202,” 94% of respondents said that they have had supply-chain issues of one kind or another. The most commonly cited items in short supply (59%) are basic IT equipment such as servers and switches, followed by power systems (51%) including generators and UPSes.But even acquiring security systems (34%) such as secure doors and cameras and building materials like concrete (35%) were an issue for many respondents.To read this article in full, please click here

Are you measuring what matters? A fresh look at Time To First Byte

Today, we’re making the case for why Time To First Byte (TTFB) is not a good metric for evaluating how fast web pages load. There are better metrics out there that give a more accurate representation of how well a server or content delivery network performs for end users. In this blog, we’ll go over the ambiguity of measuring TTFB, touch on more meaningful metrics such as Core Web Vitals that should be used instead, and finish on scenarios where TTFB still makes sense to measure.

Many of our customers ask what the best way would be to evaluate how well a network like ours works. This is a good question! Measuring performance is difficult. It’s easy to simplify the question to “How close is Cloudflare to end users?” The predominant metric that’s been used to measure that is round trip time (RTT). This is the time it takes for one network packet to travel from an end user to Cloudflare and back. We measure this metric and mention it from time to time: Cloudflare has an average RTT of 50 milliseconds for 95% of the Internet-connected population.

Whilst RTT is a relatively good indicator of the quality of Continue reading

Introducing Timing Insights: new performance metrics via our GraphQL API

If you care about the performance of your website or APIs, it’s critical to understand why things are slow.

Today we're introducing new analytics tools to help you understand what is contributing to "Time to First Byte" (TTFB) of Cloudflare and your origin. TTFB is just a simple timer from when a client sends a request until it receives the first byte in response. Timing Insights breaks down TTFB from the perspective of our servers to help you understand what is slow, so that you can begin addressing it.

But wait – maybe you've heard that you should stop worrying about TTFB? Isn't Cloudflare moving away from TTFB as a metric? Read on to understand why there are still situations where TTFB matters.

Why you may need to care about TTFB

It's true that TTFB on its own can be a misleading metric. When measuring web applications, metrics like Web Vitals provide a more holistic view into user experience. That's why we offer Web Analytics and Lighthouse within Cloudflare Observatory.

But there are two reasons why you still may need to pay attention to TTFB:

1. Not all applications are websites
More than half of Cloudflare traffic is for APIs, Continue reading

Introducing HTTP/3 Prioritization

Today, Cloudflare is very excited to announce full support for HTTP/3 Extensible Priorities, a new standard that speeds the loading of webpages by up to 37%. Cloudflare worked closely with standards builders to help form the specification for HTTP/3 priorities and is excited to help push the web forward. HTTP/3 Extensible Priorities is available on all plans on Cloudflare. For paid users, there is an enhanced version available that improves performance even more.

Web pages are made up of many objects that must be downloaded before they can be processed and presented to the user. Not all objects have equal importance for web performance. The role of HTTP prioritization is to load the right bytes at the most opportune time, to achieve the best results. Prioritization is most important when there are multiple objects all competing for the same constrained resource. In HTTP/3, this resource is the QUIC connection. In most cases, bandwidth is the bottleneck from server to client. Picking what objects to dedicate bandwidth to, or share bandwidth amongst, is a critical foundation to web performance. When it goes askew, the other optimizations we build on top can suffer.

Today, we're announcing support for prioritization in HTTP/3, using Continue reading

How to use Cloudflare Observatory for performance experiments

Website performance is crucial to the success of online businesses. Study after study has shown that an increased load time directly affects sales. But how do you get test products that could improve your website speed without incurring an element of risk?

In today's digital landscape, it is easy to find code optimizations on the Internet including our own developers documentation to improve the performance of your website or web applications. However, implementing these changes without knowing the impact they’ll have can be daunting. It could also cause an outage, taking websites or applications offline entirely, leaving admins scrambling to remove the offending code and get the business back online.

Users need a way to see the impact of these improvements on their websites without impacting uptime. They want to understand “If I enabled this, what performance boost should I expect to get?”.

Today, we are excited to announce Performance Experiments in Cloudflare Observatory. Performance Experiments gives users a safe place to experiment and determine what the best setup is to improve their website performance before pushing it live for all visitors to benefit from. Cloudflare users will be able to simply enter the desired code, run our Continue reading

Argo Smart Routing for UDP: speeding up gaming, real-time communications and more

Today, Cloudflare is super excited to announce that we’re bringing traffic acceleration to customer’s UDP traffic. Now, you can improve the latency of UDP-based applications like video games, voice calls, and video meetings by up to 17%. Combining the power of Argo Smart Routing (our traffic acceleration product) with UDP gives you the ability to supercharge your UDP-based traffic.

When applications use TCP vs. UDP

Typically when people talk about the Internet, they think of websites they visit in their browsers, or apps that allow them to order food. This type of traffic is sent across the Internet via HTTP which is built on top of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). However, there’s a lot more to the Internet than just browsing websites and using apps. Gaming, live video, or tunneling traffic to different networks via a VPN are all common applications that don’t use HTTP or TCP. These popular applications leverage the User Datagram Protocol (or UDP for short). To understand why these applications use UDP instead of TCP, we’ll need to dig into how these different applications work.

When you load a web page, you generally want to see the entire web page; the website would be confusing Continue reading

Faster website, more customers: Cloudflare Observatory can help your business grow

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語 and Español.

Website performance is crucial to the success of online businesses. Study after study has shown that an increased load time directly affects sales. In highly competitive markets the performance of a website is crucial for success. Just like a physical shop situated in a remote area faces challenges in attracting customers, a slow website encounters similar difficulties in attracting traffic. It is vital to measure and improve website performance to enhance user experience and maximize online engagement. Results from testing at home don’t take into account how your customers in different countries, on different devices, with different Internet connections experience your website.

Simply put, you might not know how your website is performing. And that could be costing your business money every single day.

Today we are excited to announce Cloudflare Observatory - the new home of performance at Cloudflare.

Cloudflare users can now easily monitor website performance using Real User Monitoring (RUM) data along with scheduled tests from different regions in a single dashboard. This will identify any performance issues your website may have. The best bit? Once we’ve identified any issues, Observatory will highlight customized recommendations Continue reading

INP. Get ready for the new Core Web Vital

INP will replace FID in the Core Web Vitals

On May 10, 2023, Google announced that INP will replace FID in the Core Web Vitals in March 2024. The Core Web Vitals play a role in the Google Search algorithm. So website owners who care about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should prepare for the change. Otherwise their search ranking might suffer.

This post will first explain what FID, INP and the Core Web Vitals are. Then it will show how FID and INP relate to each other across a large range of Cloudflare sites. (Spoiler alert - If a site has ‘Good’ scoring FID, it might not have ‘Good’ scoring INP). Then it will discuss how to prepare for this change and how Cloudflare can help.

A few definitions

In order to make sense of the upcoming change, here are some definitions that will set the scene.

Core Web Vitals

Measuring user-centric web performance is challenging. To face this challenge, Google developed a series of metrics called the Web Vitals. These Web Vitals are signals that measure different aspects of web performance. For example Time To First Byte (TTFB) is one of the Web Vitals: from the perspective of the Continue reading

Multi-Protocol Label Switching – Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) and Configuration

The post Multi-Protocol Label Switching – Transport Profile (MPLS-TP) and Configuration appeared first on Noction.

When a Device Without an IP Address Wants to Play the IP Game

After I published the Source IP Address in Multicast Packets blog post, Erik Auerswald sent me several examples of network devices sending IP packets with source IP address set to 0.0.0.0:

Cisco wireless access points using 0.0.0.0 as the source IP address in VRRP packets.
Extreme (formerly Avaya) switches sending IGMP queries with source IP address 0.0.0.0 on VLANs on which they have no IP address.

When a Device Without an IP Address Wants to Play the IP Game

After I published the Source IP Address in Multicast Packets blog post, Erik Auerswald sent me several examples of network devices sending IP packets with source IP address set to 0.0.0.0:

Cisco wireless access points using 0.0.0.0 as the source IP address in VRRP packets.
Extreme (formerly Avaya) switches sending IGMP queries with source IP address 0.0.0.0 on VLANs on which they have no IP address.

How Standards-Based APIs are Revolutionizing the Communications Industry

NaaS solutions are just one example of how standardized APIs are being used to deliver new and innovative services, and businesses not using APIs will soon be at a competitive disadvantage.

Introducing Low-Latency HLS Support for Cloudflare Stream

Stream Live lets users easily scale their live streaming apps and websites to millions of creators and concurrent viewers without having to worry about bandwidth costs or purchasing hardware for real-time encoding at scale. Stream Live lets users focus on the content rather than the infrastructure — taking care of the codecs, protocols, and bitrate automatically. When we launched Stream Live last year, we focused on bringing high quality, feature-rich streaming to websites and applications with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).

Today, we're excited to introduce support for Low-Latency HTTP Live Streaming (LL-HLS) in a closed beta, offering you an even faster streaming experience. LL-HLS will reduce the latency a viewer may experience on their player from highs of around 30 seconds to less than 10 in many cases. Lower latency brings creators even closer to their viewers, empowering customers to build more interactive features like Q&A or chat and enabling the use of live streaming in more time-sensitive applications like sports, gaming, and live events.

Broadcast with less than 10-second latency

LL-HLS is an extension of HLS and allows us to reduce glass-to-glass latency — the time between something happening on the broadcast end and a user seeing it on Continue reading

Every request, every microsecond: scalable machine learning at Cloudflare

In this post, we will take you through the advancements we've made in our machine learning capabilities. We'll describe the technical strategies that have enabled us to expand the number of machine learning features and models, all while substantially reducing the processing time for each HTTP request on our network. Let's begin.

Background

For a comprehensive understanding of our evolved approach, it's important to grasp the context within which our machine learning detections operate. Cloudflare, on average, serves over 46 million HTTP requests per second, surging to more than 63 million requests per second during peak times.

Machine learning detection plays a crucial role in ensuring the security and integrity of this vast network. In fact, it classifies the largest volume of requests among all our detection mechanisms, providing the final Bot Score decision for over 72% of all HTTP requests. Going beyond, we run several machine learning models in shadow mode for every HTTP request.

At the heart of our machine learning infrastructure lies our reliable ally, CatBoost. It enables ultra low-latency model inference and ensures high-quality predictions to detect novel threats such as stopping bots targeting our customers' mobile apps. However, it's worth noting that machine learning Continue reading

How Orpheus automatically routes around bad Internet weather

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet for everyone, and Orpheus plays an important role in realizing this mission. Orpheus identifies Internet connectivity outages beyond Cloudflare’s network in real time then leverages the scale and speed of Cloudflare’s network to find alternative paths around those outages. This ensures that everyone can reach a Cloudflare customer’s origin server no matter what is happening on the Internet. The end result is powerful: Cloudflare protects customers from Internet incidents outside our network while maintaining the average latency and speed of our customer’s traffic.

A little less than two years ago, Cloudflare made Orpheus automatically available to all customers for free. Since then, Orpheus has saved 132 billion Internet requests from failing by intelligently routing them around connectivity outages, prevented 50+ Internet incidents from impacting our customers, and made our customer’s origins more reachable to everyone on the Internet. Let’s dive into how Orpheus accomplished these feats over the last year.

Increasing origin reachability

One service that Cloudflare offers is a reverse proxy that receives Internet requests from end users then applies any number of services like DDoS protection, caching, load balancing, and / or encryption. If the response Continue reading

Smart Hints make code-free performance simple

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, Deutsch, Français and Español.

Today, we’re excited to announce how we’re making Early Hints and Fetch Priorities automatic using the power of Cloudflare’s network. Almost a year ago we launched Early Hints. Early Hints are a method that allows web servers to asynchronously send instructions to the browser whilst the web server is getting the full response ready. This gives proactive suggestions to the browser on how to load the webpage faster for the visitor rather than idly waiting to receive the full webpage response.

In initial lab experiments, we observed page load improvements exceeding 30%. Since then, we have sent about two-trillion hints on behalf of over 150,000 websites using the product.

In order to effectively use Early Hints on a website, HTTP link headers or HTML link elements must be configured to specify which assets should be preloaded or which third-party servers should be preconnected. Making these decisions requires understanding how your website interacts with browsers, and identifying render-blocking assets to hint on without implementing prioritization strategies that saturate network bandwidth on non-critical assets (i.e. you can’t just Early Hint everything and expect good results).

For Continue reading

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