Is network fabric heading down the same path as ‘software defined’ and ‘stacking’?

Technology vendors love to grab terms that are hot and then overuse them to the point where no one really understands what it means any more. I understand the desire to catch a market trend and have the “rising tide” lift the vendors along with a number of others. But the overuse of terms tends to confuse buyers while they are trying to figure out what’s what.This is one reason why Gartner’s Hype Cycle has the phases it does. While I think some of the terms are a little silly, the fact is that the first upslope creates vendor overhype and then technology goes into a lull while users do their own research. Gartner If you’ve been around the network industry for a while, you probably remember the days when the term “stacking” became such a term. There’s some debate as to who invented stacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Is network fabric heading down the same path as ‘software defined’ and ‘stacking’?

Technology vendors love to grab terms that are hot and then overuse them to the point where no one really understands what it means any more. I understand the desire to catch a market trend and have the “rising tide” lift the vendors along with a number of others. But the overuse of terms tends to confuse buyers while they are trying to figure out what’s what.This is one reason why Gartner’s Hype Cycle has the phases it does. While I think some of the terms are a little silly, the fact is that the first upslope creates vendor overhype and then technology goes into a lull while users do their own research. Gartner If you’ve been around the network industry for a while, you probably remember the days when the term “stacking” became such a term. There’s some debate as to who invented stacking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Family-friendly benefits key to attracting top tech talent

Don’t disturb Eric Poirier between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. -- he’s spending time with his family. Poirier, the CEO of Addepar, a Silicon Valley investment management software startup, makes it a point to block out “Eric time” on the firm’s publicly accessible calendar, and encourages the rest of the company to do the same.It’s one example of a growing trend in Silicon Valley; using family-friendly and work-life balance-focused benefits and perks to attract, retain, engage and motivate the workforce, says Lissa Minkin, Addepar’s vice president of people. As IT talent becomes more difficult to find and even harder to retain, many IT companies are focusing on what’s truly important to their employees, and that means offering more family-friendly benefits instead of flashy perks like free lunch, dry cleaning, massage, ping-pong tables or yoga, according to Minkin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 sees its largest surge ever as Microsoft’s forced-upgrade push rolls on

Putting away the carrots and breaking out the sticks appears to be paying off for Microsoft, at least in raw market share.After pushing Windows 10 onto legions of Windows 7 and 8 PCs as a Recommended update, Windows 10 saw its largest-ever surge in month-to-month usage share in May, according to Net Applications. Windows 10’s usage share jumped by 2.09 percent between April and May, to 17.43 percent overall. That may not sound like much, but it’s a huge leap in such a short time. The only other month that even comes close is January, which saw Windows 10 usage spike by 1.89 percent after the holiday season.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Software-Defined Perimeter Essentials

I’ve written about Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) a few times, as I think this model is a strong fit for today’s IT cocktail made up of mobile applications, public cloud infrastructure and pervasive security threats. What is an SDP? The model is really based upon the “black cloud” concept coming out of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) where network access and connections are allowed on a “need-to-know” basis. Similarly, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) refers to SDPs as “on-demand, dynamically-provisioned, air gapped networks.”Several vendors, including Cryptzone and Vidder, actively market SDP offerings. In addition, Google’s BeyondCorp is a homegrown SDP project that Google has made public and highly visible. While these efforts clearly fall under the SDP category, I viewed the SDP model a bit more broadly. SDP is clearly associated with numerous innovations and initiatives of the past, including next-generation firewalls, network access control (NAC) and even 802.1X, so there are plenty of SDP-like solutions from vendors such as Cisco, HP (Aruba) and Pulse Secure (formerly part of Juniper). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Software-defined Perimeter (SDP) Essentials

I’ve written about SDPs a few times as I think this model is a strong fit today’s IT cocktail made up of mobile applications, public cloud infrastructure, and pervasive security threats. Just what is an SDP anyway?  The model is really based upon the “black cloud” concept coming out of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) where network access and connections are allowed on a “need-to-know” basis.  Similarly, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) refers to SDPs as “on-demand, dynamically-provisioned, air gapped networks.”Several vendors, including Cryptzone and Vidder, actively market SDP offerings while Google’s BeyondCorp is a homegrown SDP project that Google has made public and highly-visible.  While these efforts clearly fall under the SDP category, I viewed the SDP model a bit more broadly.  SDP is clearly associated with numerous innovations and initiatives of the past including next-generation firewalls, network access control (NAC), and even 802.1X so there are plenty of SDP-like solutions from vendors like Cisco, HP (Aruba), and Pulse Secure (formerly part of Juniper).  While definitions vary slightly, SDP is also closely aligned with concepts like attribute-based authentication so SaaS providers like Microsoft (Azure AD), Okta, and Continue reading

Cost of a Windows zero-day exploit? This one goes for $90,000

Ever wonder how much an exploit for a previously unknown vulnerability that affects all Windows versions costs on the black market? The answer, according to a recent offer seen on a cybercrime forum, is $90,000.The offer was observed by researchers from security firm Trustwave on an underground market for Russian-speaking cybercriminals, where users hire malware coders, lease exploit kits, buy access to compromised websites or rent botnets.Zero-day exploits -- exploits for unpatched vulnerabilities -- are typically used for cyberespionage. Hackers sell them to governments and large corporations, under strict non-disclosure agreements, often through specialized brokers, so it's uncommon to see them traded on cybercrime forums.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cost of a Windows zero-day exploit? This one goes for $90,000

Ever wonder how much an exploit for a previously unknown vulnerability that affects all Windows versions costs on the black market? The answer, according to a recent offer seen on a cybercrime forum, is $90,000.The offer was observed by researchers from security firm Trustwave on an underground market for Russian-speaking cybercriminals, where users hire malware coders, lease exploit kits, buy access to compromised websites or rent botnets.Zero-day exploits -- exploits for unpatched vulnerabilities -- are typically used for cyberespionage. Hackers sell them to governments and large corporations, under strict non-disclosure agreements, often through specialized brokers, so it's uncommon to see them traded on cybercrime forums.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

$90,000 zero-day exploit for sale: It could potentially impact all Windows OS versions

On the Russian underground forum exploit.in, seller “BuggiCorp” has a zero-day for sale that purportedly works against all versions of Windows. The price tag is $90,000.In the words of the email alerting me to this zero-day, this vulnerability “could affect almost all Windows machines on the planet.” If the local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability truly does exit in all versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 2000 up to Windows 10, then it could potentially impact “over 1.5 billion Windows users.”According to SpiderLabs security researchers at Trustwave, who found the post on a cybercriminal underground forum, “It seems the seller has put in the effort to present himself/herself as a trustworthy seller with a valid offering. One of the main indicators for this is the fact that the seller insists on conducting the deal using the forum's admin as the escrow.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

$90,000 zero-day exploit for sale: It could potentially impact all Windows OS versions

On the Russian underground forum exploit.in, seller “BuggiCorp” has a zero-day for sale that purportedly works against all versions of Windows. The price tag is $90,000.In the words of the email alerting me to this zero-day, this vulnerability “could affect almost all Windows machines on the planet.” If the local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability truly does exit in all versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 2000 up to Windows 10, then it could potentially impact “over 1.5 billion Windows users.”According to SpiderLabs security researchers at Trustwave, who found the post on a cybercriminal underground forum, “It seems the seller has put in the effort to present himself/herself as a trustworthy seller with a valid offering. One of the main indicators for this is the fact that the seller insists on conducting the deal using the forum's admin as the escrow.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce to add digital commerce capabilities with $2.8B Demandware acquisition

Salesforce.com is moving beyond CRM and into e-commerce with the acquisition of cloud service provider Demandware.It will use the purchase to kick-start a new field of business, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it said Wednesday.The company already has its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud.By rebranding Demandware Commerce Cloud as its own, Salesforce will be able to combine e-commerce, order management, point-of-sale, store operations and predictive intelligence into its own platform.Commerce Cloud will allow Salesforce customers to connect with their own clients in new ways, the company said, while Demandware customers will gain access to sales, marketing and analytics functions from Salesforce. Demandware customers include L’Oreal and U.K. retail chain Marks & Spencer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Are Dynamic Routing Protocols Used?

Why are dynamic routing protocols used is usually asked by newbies in the networking field, especially after they have heard about routing protocols. Besides that, they often asked this question: What is the difference between static routing and the dynamic routing protocols? And the common answer is that dynamic routing protocols are scalable. In other words, […]

The post Why Are Dynamic Routing Protocols Used? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

IDG Contributor Network: Cloud provider DigitalOcean heads to the subcontinent

News today from DigitalOcean, the little engine that could of the cloud world. Despite being a relative unknown, at least compared to the big three of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean has managed to grow incredibly fast in its short life.The company, which is headquartered in New York City, has a massive 700,000 customers globally, customers who are attracted to its super-simple offering. DigitalOcean offers the simplest of products, in contrast to the other cloud vendors that give customers a plethora of different options.While that simplicity may be a problem if and when DigitalOcean wants to go up market, for the moment it is scooping up hundreds of thousands of grassroots developers in its main market of the U.S. and Europe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell’s private buyout shortchanged shareholders, court rules

Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners paid about 22 percent too little for Dell when they took the company private in 2013 and will have to pay millions of dollars more to shareholders who opposed the deal, a Delaware court ruled on Tuesday.Though the buyers paid $24.9 billion, or $13.75 per share, the company's actual fair value at the time was $17.62 per share, according to Delaware Vice Chancellor Travis Laster.The decision comes in response to a lawsuit brought by a number of Dell investors who felt shortchanged by the deal. Through what's known as an appraisal suit, they asked the Chancery Court to determine the fair value of their shares at the time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Microsoft masters microservices

Many businesses either have implemented or claim to be implementing microservice architectures, for better or for worse. Microservice architectures give you strong module boundaries, independent deployment and independent scaling of lightweight pieces, isolation of concerns, and the opportunity to use whatever technology is appropriate for each small service. On the other hand, distributed systems inherently have higher latency and more opportunities for failure than monolithic systems, as well as higher operational complexity, so the application has to be “big enough” to justify the overhead of being distributed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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