5 Common tech hiring mistakes to avoid

This contributed piece has been edited and approved by Network World editorsFinding the right hire for IT can be a chore, and if you get it wrong, the consequences can be substantial. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a bad hire costs at least 30% of the initial annual salary, but that number is believed to be much higher. It’s a mistake that companies simply can’t afford to make in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Meet the $114,725 Ubuntu server with eight Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs

The Ibex Pro is one supercharged machine that will probably hurt your electric bill.System76's fastest Ibex Pro with Ubuntu Server 16.10 packs some crazy horsepower with Intel's latest 22-core Xeon E5 v4 chips and eight Nvidia Tesla P100 graphics processors.It's got the same number of GPUs as Nvidia's superfast DGX-1, which is being used for deep learning. System76 is targeting the Ibex Pro -- which is a rack server -- at the same market as the DGX-1. The server has fewer, but newer, CPUs, compared to the DGX-1.An entry-level Ibex Pro priced at US $9,575 will run Ubuntu Server 16.10, with a six-core Intel Xeon E5-2603v4 chip, 16GB of memory, a Tesla K40 GPU, and 250GB of storage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump immigration halt casts dark cloud over next IETF gathering

The Internet Engineering Task Force’s upcoming meeting in Chicago might have fewer attendees than usual, thanks to the Trump administration’s broad immigration ban.Several lengthy discussions on the group’s mailing list highlight the fact that some regular attendees at the IETF’s meetings could have trouble attending IETF 98, which is scheduled for Chicago in March.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Busted: Federal Reserve employee mined bitcoin using government server + Trump to sign cybersecurity order calling for government-wide reviewTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump stresses cybersecurity but postpones executive order

U.S. President Donald Trump called on government agencies to better protect their networks, but he delayed signing an executive order to kick-start a government-wide review of cybersecurity policy.A draft copy of the order, leaked earlier, would give the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security 60 days to submit a list of recommendations to protect U.S. government and private networks. Trump had been scheduled to sign the executive order Tuesday but canceled shortly before it was due to happen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump stresses cybersecurity but postpones executive order

U.S. President Donald Trump called on government agencies to better protect their networks, but he delayed signing an executive order to kick-start a government-wide review of cybersecurity policy.A draft copy of the order, leaked earlier, would give the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security 60 days to submit a list of recommendations to protect U.S. government and private networks. Trump had been scheduled to sign the executive order Tuesday but canceled shortly before it was due to happen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Juniper battles Cisco, Huawei with new cloud infrastructure software, switches

Helping customers transform their enterprise environments to the cloud is the driving strategy behind new software, switches and services introduced this week from Juniper Networks. The networking company is introducing what it calls the third pillar of its Unite architecture – the previous two focusing on enterprise and branch office networking. Unite Cloud combines Juniper’s switches and software to simplify management and growth of corporate cloud computing. +More on Network World: Has Cisco broken out of the network hardware box?+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: BGP in 2016

Figure 2 illustrates an important principle in BGP, that there is no single authoritative view of the routing table – all views are in fact relative to the perspective of the BGP speaker. It also illustrates that at times the cause of changes in routing is not necessarily a change at the point of origination of the route which would be visible to all BGP speakers across the entire Internet, but it may well be a change in transit arrangements within the interior of the network that may expose, or hide, collections of routes. And thirdly, this illustrates the prevalent use of more specifics to affect traffic engineering. It is often the case that these more specifics are advertised with a limited scope, and if the changes to the transit arrangements move a BGP speaker in or out of this scope, then one can expect changes in the set of visible routes as a consequence. —Potaroo

The post Worth Reading: BGP in 2016 appeared first on 'net work.

The $475 S key

I have a Macbook Air, purchased from the Apple Refurb store about two years ago. It now has a dead key. It’s the S key. After cleaning it with compressed air, it worked badly for a while and is now dead. A query to the local Apple repair shop indicates it’s fixable for about $380. One look at the iFixit repair PDF, and it’s easy to see that it’s very labor intensive. For. One. Key. I obtained an appointment at the area Apple Store Genius Bar. After about 40 minutes, it was determined that Apple could repair my MacBook Air. The price would be $475, but that would include other refurbishments as determined at the time, perhaps including a new battery or whatever else was found “wrong” with the machine. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google upgrades G Suite with tools for IT pros

Google today bolstered its G Suite of productivity apps with new controls and tools for IT professionals. G Suite administrators now have more access to control security key enforcement, data control with data loss prevention (DLP) for Google Drive and Gmail, and additional insights by connecting Gmail to BigQuery, Google’s enterprise data warehouse designed to enable SQL queries, according to Google.All of the changes, which are live today, are designed to elevate G Suite for the enterprise, especially among companies that need more confidence in the controls they can maintain over corporate data, according to Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google upgrades G Suite with tools for IT pros

Google today bolstered its G Suite of productivity apps with new controls and tools for IT professionals. G Suite administrators now have more access to control security key enforcement, data control with data loss prevention (DLP) for Google Drive and Gmail, and additional insights by connecting Gmail to BigQuery, Google’s enterprise data warehouse designed to enable SQL queries, according to Google.All of the changes, which are live today, are designed to elevate G Suite for the enterprise, especially among companies that need more confidence in the controls they can maintain over corporate data, according to Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Application monitoring becomes table stakes in the digital age

Bill Hineline had two requirements as he was searching last year for a new tool to keep tabs on the hundreds of interconnected applications that keep United Airline's planes flying. It had to ensure critical flight operations software was working and it had to meet customers' demands for accessing information from smartphones and tablets. The airline's director of application performance management also wanted a cloud application rather than another on-premises tool to manage internally. United Airlines Bill Hineline, director of application performance management at United Airlines.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Illumio extends its segmentation to the network and cloud

Data centers have become increasingly dynamic and distributed, which is why there has been a rise in technologies such as virtual machines, containers and hyperconverged systems.Security has been slow to evolve to meet the needs of the new world, but thanks to innovative start-ups such as Illumio, security is starting to change and is able to meet the demands of digital organizations. One of the big advancements in data center security has been the rise of segmentation tools. In actuality, coarse-grained segmentation has been around for decades in the form of firewalls, VLANs and ACLs, but companies like Illumio and VMware have extended the paradigm to applications, workloads and users. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Illumio extends its segmentation to the network and cloud

Data centers have become increasingly dynamic and distributed, which is why there has been a rise in technologies such as virtual machines, containers and hyperconverged systems.Security has been slow to evolve to meet the needs of the new world, but thanks to innovative start-ups such as Illumio, security is starting to change and is able to meet the demands of digital organizations. One of the big advancements in data center security has been the rise of segmentation tools. In actuality, coarse-grained segmentation has been around for decades in the form of firewalls, VLANs and ACLs, but companies like Illumio and VMware have extended the paradigm to applications, workloads and users. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Startup Illumio’s Security Reaches Into Cisco, Arista, and Public Clouds

It's about making security policy more uniform.

Savings in the cloud: How to find them and when to make your move

This contributed piece has been edited and approved by Network World editorsC-level executives are increasingly calling on IT to investigate cloud options. In fact, according to Gartner, 90% of organizations are looking into crafting a cloud strategy. There are, in fact, significant economic advantages to be found in the cloud. But despite the potential benefits, you need to look carefully before you leap.Cloud providers have many things working in their favor. For starters, their ability to procure and operate at scale gives them substantial discounts that can be passed along to customers. Cloud customers also benefit by being able to purchase compute for specific applications on a pay-as-you-go basis, without the need for a long-term commitment. The real savings come from elasticity and not having to lay out substantial capital if you only want to ramp up compute for a short period of time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Savings in the cloud: How to find them and when to make your move

Cisco: Spam is making a big-time comeback

Spam is making a surprising resurgence as a threat to corporate security and becoming a more significant carrier of attacks as varied as spear phishing, ransomware and bots, according to Cisco’s 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report.The company’s 10th such report says spam is way up. It accounts for 65% of all corporate email among customers who opted in to let the company gather data via telemetry in Cisco gear.Whereas spam had been knocked down as a threat in 2010 and kept at relatively low levels through 2015, it made a surge in 2016. In 2010, Cisco recorded 5,000 spam messages being sent per second. That number stayed generally below 1,500 for the next five years, spiking to about 2,000 briefly in 2014. But in 2016 it leaped to more than 3,000.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco: Spam is making a big-time comeback

Spam is making a surprising resurgence as a threat to corporate security and becoming a more significant carrier of attacks as varied as spear phishing, ransomware and bots, according to Cisco’s 2017 Annual Cybersecurity Report.The company’s 10th such report says spam is way up. It accounts for 65% of all corporate email among customers who opted in to let the company gather data via telemetry in Cisco gear.Whereas spam had been knocked down as a threat in 2010 and kept at relatively low levels through 2015, it made a surge in 2016. In 2010, Cisco recorded 5,000 spam messages being sent per second. That number stayed generally below 1,500 for the next five years, spiking to about 2,000 briefly in 2014. But in 2016 it leaped to more than 3,000.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RTGWG Interim Meeting on Data Center Challenges

Last week, the Routing Area Working Group (IETF) held an interim meeting on challenges and (potential) solutions to large scale data center fabric design. I’ve filed this here because I spoke for all of about 3 minutes out of the entire meeting—but I really wanted to highlight this meeting, as it will be of interest to just about every network engineer “out there” who deals with data center design at all.

There are three key URLs for the interim

The agenda
The session slides and links to drafts presented
A Webex recording of the entire proceedings

My reaction, in general, is that we are starting to really understand the challenges in a networking way, rather than just as a coding problem, or a “wow, that’s really big.” I’m not certain we are heading down the right path in all areas; I am becoming more convinced than ever that the true path to scale is to layer the control plane in ways we are not doing today. You can see this in the LinkedIn presentation, which Shawn and I shared. I tend to think the move towards sucking every bit of state possible out of the control plane is a Continue reading

Secure applications, not the cloud

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not advocate a position that is particular to the author’s employer and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.Cloud adoption is a strategic initiative for nearly every company today, but there is still a fair amout of fear, uncertainty and doubt around cloud security, most of it unfounded. In my experience, coding errors and application vulnerabilities are the root of most security problems, regardless of where the data resides.  When it comes to cloud, you need to look past the distractions and focus primarily on securing applications.The main difference between on-premise and cloud security is there is no longer a well-defined security perimeter that can be protected by hardware appliances. Security teams need to move away from hardware-defined approaches to programmatic, software-defined solutions. And it’s worth noting, cloud is not the only driver in this dissipation, the rapid onset of mobile-first is another key contributor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here