A look at Apple’s rise in the enterprise with IBM’s help

Apple's credibility in the enterprise has never been stronger. During the 22 months since the company inked a once unthinkable alliance with IBM, Apple turned a corner with IT professionals by simply extending its established strengths in consumer user experience, interface design and hardware to the market, which it hasn't historically prioritized."To a certain degree it's one of those successful partnerships that's a well-kept secret," says Van Baker, research vice president at Gartner. Both companies currently take a generally low-key approach to their MobileFirst for iOS initiative, and without splashy efforts to drum up interest or highlight momentum, much of the related activity happens behind the scenes, he says. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Box launches a product just for government users

Box is launching a new offering aimed squarely at government customers in an attempt to get more public agencies to use its file storage and collaboration service.On Thursday, the company launched Box for Government, designed to make it easier for government organizations to deploy Box for their employees. That announcement was timed with Box receiving provisional authority to operate under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management program (better known as FedRAMP), a sign that the company meets key requirements for handling government data.The government push is an important move for Box, which has been positioning itself as a cloud storage and content services provider focused on serving large organizations like public agencies and enterprises. Its FedRAMP Moderate certification meets a bar set to protect types of data that include personally identifiable information. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Everybody gets WebSockets

Two summers ago, with a seemed-big-at-the-time network of 28 datacenters, not long after introducing Medellin, CloudFlare introduced support for WebSockets, initially for our Enterprise customers.

CC BY 2.0 image by Marcin Wichary

Today, with our network nearing 80 global locations, we're pleased to announce support for WebSockets for all our customers, including Enterprise, Business, Pro, and Free, with resources allocated by plan level.

What are WebSockets?

If you don't want to read RFC 6455, then this short paragraph from our previous blog post explains:

The WebSocket protocol is a distinct TCP-based protocol, however, it’s initiated by an HTTP request which is then "upgraded" to create a persistent connection between the browser and the server. A WebSocket connection is bidirectional: the server can send data to the browser without the browser having to explicitly ask for it. This makes things like multiplayer games, chat, and other services that require real-time exchange of information possible over a standard web protocol

There's a lot more technical history in that post covering how we modified NGINX to support a huge number of connections through port reuse. But the bottom line is that WebSockets are a vital technology for web sites that Continue reading

Cyber insurance can be your worst nightmare, best friend

LAS VEGAS -- Cyber insurance can pay out millions of dollars to cover the cost of data breach liability, but buying the policies can be a nightmare for info security pros, and premiums for similar coverage can vary wildly, an Interop audience was told. On the flip side, the insurance companies lack underwriters with IT knowledge, a good model for assessing risk, a common vocabulary to discuss policies clearly, and face a looming threat that a single successful attack of just the wrong kind could mean a major financial hit, says Dave Bradford, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Advisens.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cyber insurance can be your worst nightmare, best friend

LAS VEGAS -- Cyber insurance can pay out millions of dollars to cover the cost of data breach liability, but buying the policies can be a nightmare for info security pros, and premiums for similar coverage can vary wildly, an Interop audience was told. On the flip side, the insurance companies lack underwriters with IT knowledge, a good model for assessing risk, a common vocabulary to discuss policies clearly, and face a looming threat that a single successful attack of just the wrong kind could mean a major financial hit, says Dave Bradford, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Advisens.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple patches vulnerable OS X Git version that put developers at risk

Apple has released a new version of its Xcode development tool in order to patch two critical vulnerabilities in the Git source code management client.The Git vulnerabilities, CVE‑2016‑2324 and CVE‑2016‑2315, have been known since mid-March and can be exploited when cloning a repository with a specially crafted file structure. This allows attackers to execute malicious code on systems where such cloning operations were initiated.Xcode is an integrated development environment (IDE) used by a large number of developers to write applications for OS X and iOS. It includes a package called the OS X Command Line Tools for Xcode that contains the open-source Git client.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple patches vulnerable OS X Git version that put developers at risk

Apple has released a new version of its Xcode development tool in order to patch two critical vulnerabilities in the Git source code management client.The Git vulnerabilities, CVE‑2016‑2324 and CVE‑2016‑2315, have been known since mid-March and can be exploited when cloning a repository with a specially crafted file structure. This allows attackers to execute malicious code on systems where such cloning operations were initiated.Xcode is an integrated development environment (IDE) used by a large number of developers to write applications for OS X and iOS. It includes a package called the OS X Command Line Tools for Xcode that contains the open-source Git client.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Hit by DDoS? You will likely be struck again

More than half of all DDoS strikes have resulted in some kind of customer data loss, intellectual property theft or disappearance of money, according to a new report from Neustar.It’ll happen again, too. The IT firm also discovered that the vast majority of organizations (82 percent) are attacked again after the first DDoS onslaught.“DDoS attacks continue to pose a legitimate threat as a dangerous weapon used to create chaos and hold organizations hostage,” Neustar says in the report.Not many are “spared,” the security outfit says, and almost half of those blitzed once were thrashed six or more times.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Hit by DDoS? You will likely be struck again

More than half of all DDoS strikes have resulted in some kind of customer data loss, intellectual property theft or disappearance of money, according to a new report from Neustar.It’ll happen again, too. The IT firm also discovered that the vast majority of organizations (82 percent) are attacked again after the first DDoS onslaught.“DDoS attacks continue to pose a legitimate threat as a dangerous weapon used to create chaos and hold organizations hostage,” Neustar says in the report.Not many are “spared,” the security outfit says, and almost half of those blitzed once were thrashed six or more times.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mashing Up OpenStack With Hyperconverged Storage

While innovators in the HPC and hyperscale arenas usually have the talent and often have the desire to get into the code for the tools that they use to create their infrastructure, most enterprises want their software with a bit more fit and finish, and if they can get it so it is easy to operate and yet still in some ways open, they are willing to pay a decent amount of cash to get commercial-grade support.

OpenStack has pretty much vanquished Eucalyptus, CloudStack, and a few other open source alternatives from the corporate datacenter, and it is giving …

Mashing Up OpenStack With Hyperconverged Storage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

To go from IT to IoT, build on your skills

The Internet of Things is growing so fast, it’s an obvious place to look for career growth.IoT is already a reality at 29 percent of enterprises, according to a Gartner survey taken late last year. Fourteen percent said they would implement it this year, and 64 percent said they plan to use some form of IoT eventually.Yet, like a lot of IoT technology, jobs in this vast field are still evolving out of what's been in place for years. Instead of aiming for a whole new job, the best strategy may be to add some skills to the ones you already have.There will be plenty of new things to do in enterprises that adopt IoT systems, which can make companies more efficient and generate new sources of revenue. And some people are working on IoT full time. But for now, most companies heading in that direction are still scouting it out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Simplivity attacks the ‘unbearable complexity’ of IT

Hyperconvergence is a relatively new buzzword but Westborough, Mass.,-based Simplivity is already boasting of creating version 3.0 of this emerging IT model. In this installment of the IDG CEO Interview Series, Simplivity CEO Doron Kempel talked with IDG US Media Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how Simplivity’s OmniStack outperforms competitors like Nutanix and claims customers deploying workloads on Simplivity can save 22% to nearly 50% compared to running them on Amazon Web Services. Kempel also talked about Simplivity’s partnerships with Cisco, VMware and Lenovo and explored why it took nearly four years to bring the company’s vision of hyperconvergence to reality. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Simplivity attacks the ‘unbearable complexity’ of IT

(Insider Story)

Unexpected Recovery Might Kill Your Data Center

Here’s an interesting story I got from one of my friends:

• A large organization used a disaster recovery strategy based on stretched IP subnets and restarting workloads with unchanged IP addresses in a secondary data center;
• Once they experienced a WAN connectivity failure in the primary data center and their disaster recovery plan kicked in.

However…

Overheard At Interop, Day 3

WLAN Design Best Practices And Challenges

A Russian hacker gave away millions of email credentials for social media votes

Tens of millions of stolen credentials for Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo email accounts are being shared online by a young Russian hacker known as "the Collector" as part of a supposed larger trove of 1.17 billion records.That's according to Hold Security, which says it has looked at more than 272 million unique credentials so far, including 42.5 million it had never seen before. A majority of the accounts reportedly were stolen from users of Mail.ru, Russia's most popular email service, but credentials for other services apparently were also included.Hold discovered the breach when its researchers came across the hacker bragging in an online forum. Though the hacker initially asked Hold for 50 rubles for the initial 10GB stash -- that's equivalent to about 75 cents -- he eventually turned it over to them in exchange for likes and votes for him on social media.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Russian hacker gave away millions of email credentials for social media votes

Tens of millions of stolen credentials for Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo email accounts are being shared online by a young Russian hacker known as "the Collector" as part of a supposed larger trove of 1.17 billion records.That's according to Hold Security, which says it has looked at more than 272 million unique credentials so far, including 42.5 million it had never seen before. A majority of the accounts reportedly were stolen from users of Mail.ru, Russia's most popular email service, but credentials for other services apparently were also included.Hold discovered the breach when its researchers came across the hacker bragging in an online forum. Though the hacker initially asked Hold for 50 rubles for the initial 10GB stash -- that's equivalent to about 75 cents -- he eventually turned it over to them in exchange for likes and votes for him on social media.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Russian hacker gave away millions of email credentials for social media votes

Tens of millions of stolen credentials for Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo email accounts are being shared online by a young Russian hacker known as "the Collector" as part of a supposed larger trove of 1.17 billion records.That's according to Hold Security, which says it has looked at more than 272 million unique credentials so far, including 42.5 million it had never seen before. A majority of the accounts reportedly were stolen from users of Mail.ru, Russia's most popular email service, but credentials for other services apparently were also included.Hold discovered the breach when its researchers came across the hacker bragging in an online forum. Though the hacker initially asked Hold for 50 rubles for the initial 10GB stash -- that's equivalent to about 75 cents -- he eventually turned it over to them in exchange for likes and votes for him on social media.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Russian hacker gave away millions of email credentials for social media votes

Tens of millions of stolen credentials for Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo email accounts are being shared online by a young Russian hacker known as "the Collector" as part of a supposed larger trove of 1.17 billion records.That's according to Hold Security, which says it has looked at more than 272 million unique credentials so far, including 42.5 million it had never seen before. A majority of the accounts reportedly were stolen from users of Mail.ru, Russia's most popular email service, but credentials for other services apparently were also included.Hold discovered the breach when its researchers came across the hacker bragging in an online forum. Though the hacker initially asked Hold for 50 rubles for the initial 10GB stash -- that's equivalent to about 75 cents -- he eventually turned it over to them in exchange for likes and votes for him on social media.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here