Lessons from high-profile IT failures

It has not been a good few months for the health and consistency of airline information technology. Two huge outages within a couple of weeks of each other -- caused by simple component failures -- resulted in massive passenger disruptions and cost two U.S. airlines millions of dollars in lost revenue and customer compensation.These events, while of course most painful for those who experienced them, present quite a few opportunities for learning and improving our own processes, and that's what I'd like to explore in this piece.[ Further reading: Backup and recovery tools: Users identify the good, bad and ugly ] First, a little background. What ended up being a faulty router took down the entire Southwest Airlines operation for a day on July 21 and caused rippling effects for several days after the original outage. (A fact that might surprise you is that Southwest is by a wide margin the largest domestic carrier of passengers in the United States.) The Dallas Morning News reported the fallout.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

How to keep viral memes from spreading malware in your enterprise

Perhaps the worst news about Pokemon Go is how attackers are using it to spread malware. This is not the first time bad-guy hackers have leveraged the popularity of games to spread malicious software. Viral memes spread malware, too, via drive-by attacks as people visit malicious sites that draw them by hosting or linking to the internet-based cultural sensation.Users assume that games and meme sites have integrity. This makes it easy for the hackers to push compromising software onto consumers’ phones and computers and into your organization. Cyber thugs also use man-in-the-middle attacks on game apps to take control of mobile devices and launch attacks on the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dropbox changed passwords after 68M accounts were compromised

Dropbox’s move last week to ask users who had signed up before mid-2012 to change their account passwords followed the discovery of a large dump of email addresses and passwords related to these accounts.The online storage company confirmed late Tuesday reports that 68 million user email addresses and hashed and salted passwords from an incident in 2012 had been compromised.Dropbox said that the password reset the company completed last week covered all of the affected users so that the Dropbox accounts are protected.Last week, the company asked users who signed up before mid-2012 to change their passwords if they haven’t done so since then, describing it as a preventive measure and not because there was any indication that their accounts were improperly accessed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dropbox changed passwords after 68M account records were compromised

Dropbox’s move last week to ask users who had signed up before mid-2012 to change their account passwords followed the discovery of a large dump of email addresses and passwords related to these accounts. The online storage company confirmed late Tuesday reports that 68 million user email addresses and hashed and salted passwords from an incident in 2012 had been compromised. Dropbox said that the password reset the company completed last week covered all of the affected users so that the Dropbox accounts are protected. Last week, the company asked users who signed up before mid-2012 to change their passwords if they haven’t done so since then, describing it as a preventive measure and not because there was any indication that their accounts were improperly accessed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dropbox changed passwords after 68M account records were compromised

Dropbox’s move last week to ask users who had signed up before mid-2012 to change their account passwords followed the discovery of a large dump of email addresses and passwords related to these accounts. The online storage company confirmed late Tuesday reports that 68 million user email addresses and hashed and salted passwords from an incident in 2012 had been compromised. Dropbox said that the password reset the company completed last week covered all of the affected users so that the Dropbox accounts are protected. Last week, the company asked users who signed up before mid-2012 to change their passwords if they haven’t done so since then, describing it as a preventive measure and not because there was any indication that their accounts were improperly accessed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Planning for Migration into the Cloud?

One of my readers sent me this question:

Have you written something about assessment and planning for migration of traditional in-premise data center network to private or public cloud? There would be hundreds of things to check during assessment and then plan accordingly.

Academically, that’s a wrong way of approaching the problem.

Read more ...

Inside VMware Before It Dons The Dell Invisibility Cloak

Where do you go when you are an infrastructure software provider that already has 500,000 enterprise customers? That is about as good and as big as it gets, particularly when the biggest spenders in IT infrastructure, the hyperscalers and the largest cloud builders, create their own hardware and infrastructure software and inspire legions of companies to follow their lead, often with open source projects they found.

So VMware, which has grown into a nearly $7 billion software powerhouse, has done so in the only way that any company can that has reached such a saturation point in the market. Having …

Inside VMware Before It Dons The Dell Invisibility Cloak was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Okta’s API access product targets the trend toward services

Okta has changed key parts of its product portfolio to attract new users to its corporate identity management and access control platforms. The startup is launching a new API access management product and revamping its provisioning service to make it easier to change employees' permissions within a company.The changes, announced at the company's Oktane conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, were designed to give Okta more ammunition against a growing field of identity-management rivals, including Microsoft and OneLogin.Okta API Access Management builds on Okta's existing tools for developers who manage application logins. It lets administrators control how users of those apps access business systems that are surfaced through APIs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Okta’s API access product targets the trend toward services

Okta has changed key parts of its product portfolio to attract new users to its corporate identity management and access control platforms. The startup is launching a new API access management product and revamping its provisioning service to make it easier to change employees' permissions within a company.The changes, announced at the company's Oktane conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, were designed to give Okta more ammunition against a growing field of identity-management rivals, including Microsoft and OneLogin.Okta API Access Management builds on Okta's existing tools for developers who manage application logins. It lets administrators control how users of those apps access business systems that are surfaced through APIs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 unveiling now set for September 7

In case you missed it, Apple yesterday sent out invitations for a special media event slated to take place on Wednesday, September 7 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Per usual, the event will kick off at 10 AM Pacific time and will be live-streamed via Apple’s website.Apple’s upcoming media event will, naturally, primarily center on the iPhone 7. The iPhone 7 likely won’t deliver any breakthrough technological features but users can expect to see substantial camera improvements and enhanced internals. Of particular interest will be how Apple addresses the rumored removal of the traditional 3.5mm headphone jack. While some have speculated that the removal was simply done to make the iPhone 7 thinner, others believe that Apple may introduce a superior Bluetooth alternative in its place. Another item to keep an eye on will be if battery life has been improved or if it will remain largely in line with what we've seen from past iPhone models.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

25% off 150-pack iCloth Screen Cleaning Wipes for Electronics – Deal Alert

These screen cleaning cloths from iCloth currently average 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 700 people (read reviews) and its list price is currently discounted 25% to $28.12 for a pack of 150, individually packaged. The aerospace-grade soft fabric wipes are made from high quality and extremely low-linting Dupont Sontara fabric, and are premoistened with a purified water-based formula containing a isopropyl alcohol (not harmful ethyl alcohol) and proprietary ingredients that are safe on all sensitive optics and specialty coatings. So they are ideal for tablets, smartphones and laptops, but will work equally well on your sensitive eyewear. iCloth wipes are made in America, and come with a money-back-guarantee if you're not satisfied. See the discounted 150-pack now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How VMware’s cross-cloud NSX will work

VMware this week announced plans to extend NSX, its software defined networking product, to public IaaS cloud computing platforms, allowing customers to manage multiple cloud environments with a single network management portal.About 1,700 customers have already deployed NSX as an on-premises network virtualization platform. At some point in the future (VMware executives will not say when) the company will allow customers to deploy NSX across multiple different cloud providers. The idea is customers can centrally manage their on premises and public cloud resources within NSX. How exactly will this work?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMworld 2016: Clouds are commodities

VMware is poised to take you to the cloud, and it wants to prove its worth to be your cloud broker.During yesterday’s keynote address at VMworld in Las Vegas, CEO Pat Gelsinger talked about a new layer between the cloud and a data center. For purposes of discussion, I’ll call it the hybrid cloud control plane. It’s not quite an operating system and not quite compute as a service, but it’s close to both of these. It’s an intelligent brokerage system, designed to keep you loving VMware.+ Also on Network World: Hot products from VMworld 2016 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Say hello to old friend Dell Technologies on Sept. 7

Dell will complete its acquisition of EMC on Sept. 7, ending nearly a year of approvals and decades of history for the two companies that will combine to become Dell Technologies.The mammoth deal was announced last October with an estimated value of US$67 billion. The companies recently crossed their last regulatory hurdle when China’s Ministry of Commerce signed off on the deal.Buying EMC and its federation of related companies will make Dell a stronger player in key areas that include software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, and security, Dell Technologies Chairman and CEO Michael Dell said in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU outlines stiff new net neutrality rules

An EU regulatory group Tuesday imposed tough new rules on European ISPs, in a move that advocates for net neutrality are hailing as a great victory.The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications published a 45-page report that essentially bans paid prioritization of network traffic, and imposes strict requirements on any specialized services that ISPs want to offer.MORE: Net Neutrality may be unenforceable – here’s whyISPs, the new rules say, “should treat all traffic equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, independently of its sender or receiver, content, application or service, or terminal equipment.” Quality of service measures are allowed, according to the EU, but those measures have to be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate,” as well as being targeted strictly towards technical service quality, and not commercial gain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

EU outlines stiff new net neutrality rules

An EU regulatory group Tuesday imposed tough new rules on European ISPs, in a move that advocates for net neutrality are hailing as a great victory.The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications published a 45-page report that essentially bans paid prioritization of network traffic, and imposes strict requirements on any specialized services that ISPs want to offer.MORE: Net Neutrality may be unenforceable – here’s whyISPs, the new rules say, “should treat all traffic equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, independently of its sender or receiver, content, application or service, or terminal equipment.” Quality of service measures are allowed, according to the EU, but those measures have to be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate,” as well as being targeted strictly towards technical service quality, and not commercial gain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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