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 editors

C-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.

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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

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

NSX Growth and Success in 2016

Last week VMware hosted its Q4 2016 earnings call and shared financial results. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and the executive team have frequently highlighted VMware NSX growth and success on these calls. For Q4, NSX license bookings grew over 50 percent year-over-year. Annualizing our Q4 total bookings for NSX, it is now at a $1B run rate. With one month into 2017, we’d like to share more on NSX customer success in 2016.

Customer Success

2,400+

Exiting 2016, we shared our latest customer count at more than 2,400, which is almost double the customer count from last year. In Q4 we also had the largest NSX-only deal, more than $10M. For every customer I meet with or hear about from my team, I am continued to be impressed how they choose to go about using NSX. We love to share these success stories, whether we’re talking about all the customers we had speaking at VMworld last year, or the many videos and case studies the team publishes regularly. These stories go into details on the significant NSX wins across multiple verticals and every major geography.

Customer Deployments & Expansion

Success for our team is when customers expand their use of Continue reading

What P4 programming is and why it’s such a big deal for Software Defined Networking

P4 The dawn of software defined networking (SDN) ushered in an era of disaggregation of the networking control plane from the data plane; management of the network was no longer bound to the networking hardware it ran on.This created a market of overlay control-plane software from companies like Nicira, which was sold to VMware and is now NSX; Cisco ACI and others followed suit. But at the data plane – where network packets are actually forwarded - there has been less innovation, says IDC data center network research director Brad Casemore. Until now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenCL Opens Doors to Deep Learning Training on FPGA

Hardware and device makers are in a mad dash to create or acquire the perfect chip for performing deep learning training and inference. While we have yet to see anything that can handle both parts of the workload on a single chip with spectacular results (the Pascal general GPUs are the closest thing yet, with threats coming from Intel/Nervana in the future), there is promise for FPGAs to find inroads.

So far, most of the work we have focused on for FPGAs and deep learning has centered more on the acceleration of inference versus boosting training times and accuracy …

OpenCL Opens Doors to Deep Learning Training on FPGA was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

IoT network builders sign up partners for small devices

There’s a land grab happening now between networks to link small, battery-powered IoT devices.If countless forecasts are true, there will soon be a lot more tiny, low-power devices like sensors out in the world. The 2G networks that connected many of these to the cloud are gradually going away and newer, more specialized networks are emerging. Vendors are pushing different LPWANs (low-power, wide-area networks) to do the job and trying to get more users and network operators on their side. Their survival may depend on building up a big ecosystem of devices.On Monday, U.S. network operator Ingenu partnered with distributor and system builder Arrow Electronics, which will offer Ingenu’s RPMA (Random Phase Multiple Access) technology when it develops IoT systems for enterprises and smaller businesses in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IoT network builders sign up partners for small devices

There’s a land grab happening now between networks to link small, battery-powered IoT devices.If countless forecasts are true, there will soon be a lot more tiny, low-power devices like sensors out in the world. The 2G networks that connected many of these to the cloud are gradually going away and newer, more specialized networks are emerging. Vendors are pushing different LPWANs (low-power, wide-area networks) to do the job and trying to get more users and network operators on their side. Their survival may depend on building up a big ecosystem of devices.On Monday, U.S. network operator Ingenu partnered with distributor and system builder Arrow Electronics, which will offer Ingenu’s RPMA (Random Phase Multiple Access) technology when it develops IoT systems for enterprises and smaller businesses in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slack finally launches its enterprise edition

After a long wait, Slack has announced the version of its popular work chat application that is designed for enterprises. On Tuesday in San Francisco, the company unveiled its new Enterprise Grid product, aimed at helping companies administer and connect multiple chat instances.Grid allows business administrators to set up each team inside their organization with their own centrally managed Slack instance. Those workspaces can then be linked together using shared channels, and all of the people inside an enterprise can direct- message one another, even if they’re not part of the same workspace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Office 365 could give Microsoft Teams an advantage over Slack

Slack's full-page ad in the New York Times welcomed Microsoft Teams to the enterprise chat market in somewhat patronizing tones. Clearly, the messaging company thought that market was its to lose. But a new Spiceworks survey of IT pros at 450 companies across EMEA and North America shows a different reality.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Easy-to-exploit authentication bypass flaw puts Netgear routers at risk

For the past half year Netgear has been working on fixing a serious and easy-to-exploit vulnerability in many of its routers. And it's still not done.While Netgear has worked to fix the issue, the list of affected router models increased to 30, of which only 20 have firmware fixes available to date. A manual workaround is available for the rest.The vulnerability was discovered by Simon Kenin, a security researcher at Trustwave, and stems from a faulty password recovery implementation in the firmware of many Netgear routers. It is a variation of an older vulnerability that has been publicly known since 2014, but this new version is actually easier to exploit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Easy-to-exploit authentication bypass flaw puts Netgear routers at risk

For the past half year Netgear has been working on fixing a serious and easy-to-exploit vulnerability in many of its routers. And it's still not done.While Netgear has worked to fix the issue, the list of affected router models increased to 30, of which only 20 have firmware fixes available to date. A manual workaround is available for the rest.The vulnerability was discovered by Simon Kenin, a security researcher at Trustwave, and stems from a faulty password recovery implementation in the firmware of many Netgear routers. It is a variation of an older vulnerability that has been publicly known since 2014, but this new version is actually easier to exploit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Easy-to-exploit authentication bypass flaw puts Netgear routers at risk

For the past half year Netgear has been working on fixing a serious and easy-to-exploit vulnerability in many of its routers. And it's still not done.While Netgear has worked to fix the issue, the list of affected router models increased to 30, of which only 20 have firmware fixes available to date. A manual workaround is available for the rest.The vulnerability was discovered by Simon Kenin, a security researcher at Trustwave, and stems from a faulty password recovery implementation in the firmware of many Netgear routers. It is a variation of an older vulnerability that has been publicly known since 2014, but this new version is actually easier to exploit.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

Trump to sign cybersecurity order calling for government-wide review

President Donald Trump is due to sign an executive order Tuesday that gives each cabinet official more responsibility for the safety of data within their agency.It will be accompanied by a government-wide review of cybersecurity by the Office of Management and Budget, looking at the technology in place that guards U.S. government systems from cyberattacks, according to a White House official.The results of that review could lead to a government-wide upgrade of federal cybersecurity systems.The U.S. government has been hit by hacks in the last few years. The State Department spent months trying to get rid of intruders in its unclassified network and the Office of Personnel Management lost personal information on millions of government workers through a second hack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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