Why automation doubles IT outsourcing cost savings

Outsourcing consultancy and research firm Information Services Group (ISG) this week unveiled a new research report to quantify the cost savings and productivity gains from automating IT services.The inaugural Automation Index shows improvements in productivity fueled by automation can more than double the cost savings typically derived from outsourcing IT. Total cost reduction ranged from 26 percent to 66 percent, depending on the service tower, with 14 to 28 percentage points of these savings directly attributable to automation, according to ISG. (The typical cost savings from labor arbitrage and process improvements alone range from 20 percent to 30 percent).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Firefox blocks websites with vulnerable encryption keys

To protect users from cryptographic attacks that can compromise secure web connections, the popular Firefox browser will block access to HTTPS servers that use weak Diffie-Hellman keys.Diffie-Hellman is a key exchange protocol that is slowly replacing the widely used RSA key agreement for the TLS  (Transport Layer Security) protocol. Unlike RSA, Diffie-Hellman can be used with TLS's ephemeral modes, which provide forward secrecy -- a property that prevents the decryption of previously captured traffic if the key is cracked at a later time.However, in May 2015 a team of researchers devised a downgrade attack that could compromise the encryption connection between browsers and servers if those servers supported DHE_EXPORT, a version of Diffie-Hellman key exchange imposed on exported cryptographic systems by the U.S. National Security Agency in the 1990s and which limited the key size to 512 bits. In May 2015 around 7 percent of websites on the internet were vulnerable to the attack, which was dubbed LogJam.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Firefox blocks websites with vulnerable encryption keys

To protect users from cryptographic attacks that can compromise secure web connections, the popular Firefox browser will block access to HTTPS servers that use weak Diffie-Hellman keys.Diffie-Hellman is a key exchange protocol that is slowly replacing the widely used RSA key agreement for the TLS  (Transport Layer Security) protocol. Unlike RSA, Diffie-Hellman can be used with TLS's ephemeral modes, which provide forward secrecy -- a property that prevents the decryption of previously captured traffic if the key is cracked at a later time.However, in May 2015 a team of researchers devised a downgrade attack that could compromise the encryption connection between browsers and servers if those servers supported DHE_EXPORT, a version of Diffie-Hellman key exchange imposed on exported cryptographic systems by the U.S. National Security Agency in the 1990s and which limited the key size to 512 bits. In May 2015 around 7 percent of websites on the internet were vulnerable to the attack, which was dubbed LogJam.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For September 30th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Everything is a network. Map showing the global genetic interaction network of a cell. 

• 18: Google can now drink and drive in Washington DC.; $10 billion: cost of a Vision Quest to Mars; 620 Gbps: DDoS attack on KrebsOnSecurity; 1 Tbps: DDoS attack on OVH; $200,000: cost of a typical cyber incident; 8 million: video training dataset labeled with 4800 labels; 180: Amazon warehouses in the US; 10: bits of info per photon; 16: GPUs in new AI killer P2 instance type;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @markmccaughrean: 1,000,000 people to Mars in 100 yrs. 10 people/launch? That's 3 a day, every day, for a century. 1% failure rate? One explosion every month
  • @jeremiahg: Any sufficiently advanced exploit is indistinguishable from a 400lb hacker.
  • BrianKrebs: I suggested to Mr. Wright perhaps a better comparison was that ne’er-do-wells now have a virtually limitless supply of Stormtrooper clones that can be conscripted into an attack at a moment’s notice.
  • Sonia: Academia’s not-so-subtle distain for applied research does more than damage a few promising careers; it Continue reading

Worth Reading: The biggest attack in internet history

For a long time, Akamai offered their DOS protection service to Krebs pro bono, both as a public service and because it’s fantastic advertising. Brian is perhaps the most high-profile target for cyber-criminals: if Akamai can defend his site, they can defend anybody’s. But it would appear Brian’s latest round of reporting—including both the Israeli arrests and outing the fact that an anti-DOS service’s former owner appeared to control a huge DOS botnet—has managed to annoy someone enough to launch a DOS attack that not only disrupted Kreb’s site but actually caused disruption to Akamai’s other services! This attack was so disruptive that Akamai had to prioritize their paying customers and stop supporting Kreb’s site. —LawFare

The post Worth Reading: The biggest attack in internet history appeared first on 'net work.

LILEE Systems’ new fog computing platform is well suited to distributed enterprises  

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  Location, location, location! It turns out that mantra is not just for the real estate market. Location is a critical aspect of fog computing as well.Cisco introduced the notion of fog computing about two and a half years ago. (See Cisco unveils 'fog computing' to bridge clouds and the Internet of Things.) This distributed computing architecture addresses the challenge of backhauling a lot of raw data generated in the field –say from thousands or millions of IoT devices – to the cloud for analysis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tips to help select and manage your co-location vendor

The percentage of IT processed at in-house sites has remained steady at around 70 percent, but data points to a major shift to co-location and cloud for new workloads in the coming years.Half of senior IT execs expect the majority of their IT workloads to reside off-premise in the future, according to Uptime Institute’s sixth annual Data Center Industry Survey. Of those, 70 percent expect that shift to happen by 2020.+ Also on Network World: 10 tips for a successful cloud plan +It is hard to predict what percentage will go to public cloud, but a significant portion of those workloads will be shifting to co-location providers—companies that provide data center facilities and varying levels of operations management and support. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tips to help select and manage your co-location vendor

The percentage of IT processed at in-house sites has remained steady at around 70 percent, but data points to a major shift to co-location and cloud for new workloads in the coming years.Half of senior IT execs expect the majority of their IT workloads to reside off-premise in the future, according to Uptime Institute’s sixth annual Data Center Industry Survey. Of those, 70 percent expect that shift to happen by 2020.+ Also on Network World: 10 tips for a successful cloud plan +It is hard to predict what percentage will go to public cloud, but a significant portion of those workloads will be shifting to co-location providers—companies that provide data center facilities and varying levels of operations management and support. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud Misunderstandings: What You Can and Can’t See

It is time to see through the false sense of security offered by typical deployments.

Noction announces the release of Intelligent Routing Platform 3.6

Noction is pleased to announce the release of Intelligent Routing Platform 3.6. The major feature available in the new product version is

The post Noction announces the release of Intelligent Routing Platform 3.6 appeared first on Noction.

33% off Kinivo 5 Port HDMI Switch With Auto-Switching & Remote – Deal Alert

This highly rated splitter from Kinivo takes 5 HDMI inputs from your various devices, and outputs them to one HDMI connection. Ideal for TVs that just don't have that many HDMI inputs. 501BN will automatically switch to the currently active input source if there is only one active input. If there are multiple active inputs, you can simply select using the IR remote or using the selector button on the unit itself. Supports video up to 1080p and 3D as well. The item currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 9,000 customers (read reviews) and its list price of $59.99 is currently discounted 33% to $39.99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Overlay Problem: Getting In and Out

I've been researching overlay network strategies recently. There are plenty of competing implementations available, employing various encapsulations and control plane designs. But every design I've encountered seems ultimately hampered by the same issue: scalability at the edge.

Why Build an Overlay?

Imagine a scenario where we've got 2,000 physical servers split across 50 racks. Each server functions as a hypervisor housing on average 100 virtual machines, resulting in a total of approximately 200,000 virtual hosts (~4,000 per rack).

In an ideal world, we could allocate a /20 of IPv4 space to each rack. The top-of-rack (ToR) L3 switches in each rack would advertise this /20 northbound toward the network core, resulting in a clean, efficient routing table in the core. This is, of course, how IP was intended to function.

Unfortunately, this approach isn't usually viable in the real world because we need to preserve the ability to move a virtual machine from one hypervisor to another (often residing in a different rack) without changing its assigned IP address. Establishing the L3 boundary at the ToR switch prevents us from doing this efficiently.

Continue reading · 22 comments

The Overlay Problem: Getting In and Out

I've been researching overlay network strategies recently. There are plenty of competing implementations available, employing various encapsulations and control plane designs. But every design I've encountered seems ultimately hampered by the same issue: scalability at the edge.

Why Build an Overlay?

Imagine a scenario where we've got 2,000 physical servers split across 50 racks. Each server functions as a hypervisor housing on average 100 virtual machines, resulting in a total of approximately 200,000 virtual hosts (~4,000 per rack).

In an ideal world, we could allocate a /20 of IPv4 space to each rack. The top-of-rack (ToR) L3 switches in each rack would advertise this /20 northbound toward the network core, resulting in a clean, efficient routing table in the core. This is, of course, how IP was intended to function.

Unfortunately, this approach isn't usually viable in the real world because we need to preserve the ability to move a virtual machine from one hypervisor to another (often residing in a different rack) without changing its assigned IP address. Establishing the L3 boundary at the ToR switch prevents us from doing this efficiently.

Continue reading · 23 comments

The Overlay Problem: Getting In and Out

I've been researching overlay network strategies recently. There are plenty of competing implementations available, employing various encapsulations and control plane designs. But every design I've encountered seems ultimately hampered by the same issue: scalability at the edge.

Why Build an Overlay?

Imagine a scenario where we've got 2,000 physical servers split across 50 racks. Each server functions as a hypervisor housing on average 100 virtual machines, resulting in a total of approximately 200,000 virtual hosts (~4,000 per rack).

In an ideal world, we could allocate a /20 of IPv4 space to each rack. The top-of-rack (ToR) L3 switches in each rack would advertise this /20 northbound toward the network core, resulting in a clean, efficient routing table in the core. This is, of course, how IP was intended to function.

Unfortunately, this approach isn't usually viable in the real world because we need to preserve the ability to move a virtual machine from one hypervisor to another (often residing in a different rack) without changing its assigned IP address. Establishing the L3 boundary at the ToR switch prevents us from doing this efficiently.

Continue reading · 4 comments

Ransomware spreads through weak remote desktop credentials

Stolen or weak remote desktop credentials are routinely used to infect point-of-sale systems with malware, but recently they've also become a common distribution method for file-encrypting ransomware.In March, researchers discovered a ransomware program dubbed Surprise that was being installed through stolen credentials for TeamViewer, a popular remote administration tool. But the trend had started long before that, with some ransomware variants being distributed through brute-force password guessing attacks against Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers since 2015.While this method of infection was initially used by relatively obscure ransomware programs, recently it has been adopted by an increasing number of cybercriminals, including those behind widespread ransomware programs such as Crysis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware spreads through weak remote desktop credentials

Stolen or weak remote desktop credentials are routinely used to infect point-of-sale systems with malware, but recently they've also become a common distribution method for file-encrypting ransomware.In March, researchers discovered a ransomware program dubbed Surprise that was being installed through stolen credentials for TeamViewer, a popular remote administration tool. But the trend had started long before that, with some ransomware variants being distributed through brute-force password guessing attacks against Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers since 2015.While this method of infection was initially used by relatively obscure ransomware programs, recently it has been adopted by an increasing number of cybercriminals, including those behind widespread ransomware programs such as Crysis.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Wi-Fi can be used to identify people in IoT locations

Wi-Fi signals can be used to unobtrusively identify different people at a location, such as home. It promises to replace other forms of identification in those domestic environments, Chinese scientists say.The system works by identifying body shapes along with the unique way that individuals move in a room. Those characteristics influence Wi-Fi propagation, researchers from Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi’an claim. The Wi-Fi is affected by the people in the room, and that impact on the wireless access point can be detected and interpreted, they say.INSIDER: 5 ways to prepare for Internet of Things security threats “Each person has specific influence patterns to the surrounding Wi-Fi signal while moving indoors, regarding their body shape characteristics and motion patterns,” the team writes in an abstract to their paper, published in August.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers make progress toward computer video recognition

Computers can already recognize you in an image, but can they see a video or real-world objects and tell exactly what's going on? Researchers are trying to make computer video recognition a reality, and they are using some image recognition techniques to make that happen. Researchers in and outside of Google are making progress in video recognition, but there are also challenges to overcome, Rajat Monga, engineering director of TensorFlow for Google's Brain team, said during a question-and-answer session on Quora this week. The benefits of video recognition are enormous. For example, a computer will be able to identify a person's activities, an event, or a location. Video recognition will also make self-driving cars more viable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How businesses are turning tech into robot toil

See how businesses are using robots to advance their trades Image by Martyn Williams The RoboBusiness conference in San Jose is all about creating business advantages through the use of robotic helpers. Case in point: the Navii shopping assistant from Fellow Robotics, that can greet customers, ask them if they need help, and then guide them to the item they need. Navii will be working in 11 Lowe’s stores around the San Francisco Bay area beginning this fall.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Four state AGs sue to block US decision to cede key internet role

A judge in Texas has fixed for Friday the hearing in a suit filed by four state attorneys general against a decision by the U.S. to transfer by month end oversight of some key internet technical functions to a multistakeholder body.The attorneys general of Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada and Texas filed late Wednesday a suit asking the federal court for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction on the proposed transfer of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.ICANN, under contract with the Department of Commerce, administers the IANA functions, which include responsibility for the coordination of the DNS (Domain Name System) root, IP addressing, and other internet protocol resources. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency within the Commerce Department, said last month it will go ahead with its plan to transfer supervision of the IANA functions to a multistakeholder body on Oct. 1, in line with a plan first announced in March 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here