What users love (and hate) about 4 leading firewall solutions

While always an integral part of a company’s security procedures, firewalls are becoming even more important as more companies move to the cloud and software defined networks. A firewall is a network security system that controls and monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic, based on preset security parameters. Firewalls create a barrier between a secure internal network and a potentially less-secure outside network. Four of the top firewall solutions on the market are Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA, Sophos UTM and Palo Alto Networks WildFire, according to online reviews by enterprise users in the IT Central Station community.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Brocade VNF Manager can prevent virtual network services sprawl

Brocade announced today the availability of its virtual network function (VNF) Manager. The product is a commercial version of OpenStack Tacker, an OpenStack lead project designed to make it easier to deploy and operate virtual network services. The initiative is compatible with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Framework.For those not familiar with NFV, the technology allows organizations to run network services as virtual functions instead of requiring a single appliance per function. NFV has many cost benefits, as it reduces the overall hardware that needs to be purchased and managed. More important, it gives network services the same level of agility as virtual servers and storage. Infrastructure agility is a core requirement of becoming a digital company, and NFV enables that at the network level. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Got cloud skills? Now you can get certified by the OpenStack Foundation

Data science may have dominated recent discussions about IT skills in chronically short supply, but it's not the only area facing a shortage. Cloud computing is another big one, and on Monday the OpenStack Foundation launched a new program it hopes will help.The group's new Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam is designed to give cloud professionals a way to prove their worth while also helping employers identify qualified candidates. Originally announced in October at OpenStack Summit Tokyo, the performance-based exam can now be delivered virtually anywhere in the world through the OpenStack Foundation's training marketplace. It is the foundation's first professional certification offering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top U.S. universities failing at cybersecurity education

High-profile data breaches have become all too common in recent years with companies such as Target Home Depot and Anthem forced to own up to and handle PR nightmares following large-scale hacks. As a result, security has become a major priority for businesses both big and small -- but hackers always seem to be one step ahead. Experts agree that there is a growing need for cybersecurity professionals and universities across the country haven't caught up to the needs of the corporations. In fact, a recent study by CloudPassage found that most schools earn an "F" grade when it comes to teaching the next generation of cybersecurity pros.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top U.S. universities failing at cybersecurity education

High-profile data breaches have become all too common in recent years with companies such as Target Home Depot and Anthem forced to own up to and handle PR nightmares following large-scale hacks. As a result, security has become a major priority for businesses both big and small -- but hackers always seem to be one step ahead. Experts agree that there is a growing need for cybersecurity professionals and universities across the country haven't caught up to the needs of the corporations. In fact, a recent study by CloudPassage found that most schools earn an "F" grade when it comes to teaching the next generation of cybersecurity pros.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why Microsoft is your best strategic partner for the future

In March 2000, Avanade was created as a joint venture of Microsoft and Accenture to help companies build the client-server architectures that have powered IT for years. While the Seattle-based company still handles bread-and-butter infrastructure integration, today it is squarely focused on helping clients move to the cloud and engineer their digital transformation initiatives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

OpenStack Still Has A Place In The Stack

The IT industry likes drama perhaps a bit more than is warranted by what actually goes on in the datacenters of the world. We are always spoiling for a good fight between rival technologies because the clash results in competition, which drives technologies forward and prices down.

Ultimately, organizations have to pick some kind of foundation for their modern infrastructure, and OpenStack, the cloud controller spawned from NASA and Rackspace Hosting nearly six years ago, is a growing and vibrant community that, despite the advent of Docker containers and the rise of Mesos and Kubernetes as an alternative substrate for …

OpenStack Still Has A Place In The Stack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why outsourcing customers are terminating their call center deals

The contact center outsourcing industry has always been subject to greater provider churn than other areas of IT and business process services. Historically around a quarter to a third of call center deals up for renewal are terminated every year compared to just fifteen percent of non-voice contracts.[ Related: 8 tips for choosing the right contact center for your business ]But that termination rate has risen dramatically in recent years. Over the last two years, more than half of customers with end-of-term call center contracts decided not to renew their vendor relationships, according to recent research by outsourcing consultancy Everest Group, funded in part by business process and IT outsourcing provider TELUS International.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Securing BGP: A Case Study (8)

Throughout the last several months, I’ve been building a set of posts examining securing BGP as a sort of case study around protocol and/or system design. The point of this series of posts isn’t to find a way to secure BGP specifically, but rather to look at the kinds of problems we need to think about when building such a system. The interplay between technical and business requirements are wide and deep. In this post, I’m going to summarize the requirements drawn from the last seven posts in the series.

Don’t try to prove things you can’t. This might feel like a bit of an “anti-requirement,” but the point is still important. In this case, we can’t prove which path along which traffic will flow. We also can’t enforce policies, specifically “don’t transit this AS;” the best we can do is to provide information and letting other operators make a local decision about what to follow and what not to follow. In the larger sense, it’s important to understand what can, and what can’t, be solved, or rather what the practical limits of any solution might be, as close to the beginning of the design phase as possible.

In the Continue reading

Sites that prevent ad blockers lose readers

It’s no secret that publishers despise ad blocker add-ons in web browsers. It is, after all, costing them revenue, and they have a right to make money. But there are different ways to skin a cat, so to speak, and one method isn’t working out very well.Some sites, such as our sister site Computerworld.com, will pop up a window politely asking you to disable the ad blocker and then let you continue on to the content. Others, however, flat out lock you out of the content until the ad blocker is disabled. And those sites are losing traffic. The question is how much of that loss can be attributed to the ad blocker blockade.The U.K. tech news site The Stack has looked at several sites that shut you out if an ad blocker is enabled, and it found virtually all of them are losing readers at a steady rate. It looked at both U.S. and European publishers, such as German publisher Axel Springer, publisher of the popular Bild newspaper and website, City AM financial news,  Forbes and Wired. All of those sites denied users access to content until they whitelisted the site or disabled their Continue reading

Volkswagen’s “Cloud First” Approach to Infrastructure Decisions

As automotive companies like Ford begin to consider themselves technology companies, others, including Volkswagen Group are taking a similar route. The company’s new CEO, who took over in September, 2015 has a background in computer science and began his career managing IT department for the Audi division. Under his more technical-tuned guard, IT teams within the company are taking major strides to shore up their infrastructure to support the 1.5 billion Euro investment in R&D for forthcoming electric and connected cars in the near future.

Part of the roadmap for Volkswagen Group includes a shift to OpenStack to manage …

Volkswagen’s “Cloud First” Approach to Infrastructure Decisions was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Malvertising attack silently infects old Android devices with ransomware

Attackers are using two known exploits to silently install ransomware on older Android devices when their owners browse to websites that load malicious advertisements.Web-based attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in browsers or their plug-ins to install malware are common on Windows computers, but not on Android, where the application security model is stronger.But researchers from Blue Coat Systems detected the new Android drive-by download attack recently when one of their test devices -- a Samsung tablet running CyanogenMod 10.1 based on Android 4.2.2 -- became infected with ransomware after visiting a Web page that displayed a malicious ad.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Malvertising attack silently infects old Android devices with ransomware

Attackers are using two known exploits to silently install ransomware on older Android devices when their owners browse to websites that load malicious advertisements.Web-based attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in browsers or their plug-ins to install malware are common on Windows computers, but not on Android, where the application security model is stronger.But researchers from Blue Coat Systems detected the new Android drive-by download attack recently when one of their test devices -- a Samsung tablet running CyanogenMod 10.1 based on Android 4.2.2 -- became infected with ransomware after visiting a Web page that displayed a malicious ad.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network visibility with Docker

Microservices describes the critical role that network visibility provides as a common point of reference for monitoring, managing and securing the interactions between the numerous and diverse distributed service instances in a microservices deployment.

Industry standard sFlow is well placed to give network visibility into the Docker infrastructure used to support microservices. The sFlow standard is widely supported by data center switch vendors (Cisco, Arista, Juniper, Dell, HPE, Brocade, Cumulus, etc.)  providing a cost effective and scaleable method of monitoring the physical network infrastructure. In addition, Linux bridge, macvlan, ipvlan, adapters described how sFlow is also an efficient means of leveraging instrumentation built into the Linux kernel to extend visibility into Docker host networking.

The following commands build the Host sFlow binary package from sources on an Ubuntu 14.04 system:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libpcap-dev
sudo apt-get install wget
wget https://github.com/sflow/host-sflow/archive/v1.29.1.tar.gz
tar -xvzf v1.29.1.tar.gz
cd host-sflow-1.29.1
make DOCKER=yes PCAP=yes deb
This resulting hsflowd_1.29.1-1_amd64.deb package can be copied and installed on all the hosts in the Docker cluster using configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc.

This Continue reading
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