How to counter outsourcers’ cost of living adjustments

For years, most large outsourcing contracts have included standard provisions for annual pricing adjustments based on consumer price indices and other economic indicators. These cost of living adjustments are intended to normalize services fees with economic conditions over the life of long-term deals. The impact on pricing can be significant—in the millions of dollars for a large deal. A $50 million annual services contract with a 2.75 percent cost of living adjustment could mean a $1.375 million increase in annual fees.  In theory, cost of living adjustments help service providers reduce attrition by ensuring that employee salaries keep up with market trends. Staff retention benefits providers and allows clients to avoid the disruption of employee turnover.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 on pace to reach 20% share by June

Windows 10 is on pace to power 20% of all Windows desktop systems by the end of June, or around the time Microsoft issues its next major upgrade, according to data published this week.Data from U.S.-based analytics vendor Net Applications pegged Windows 10's user share -- a proxy for the percentage of personal computers worldwide that ran the OS -- at 15.3% in April, a 1.2-percentage point increase from the month prior. Net Applications tallied unique visitors to clients' websites to come up with its measurements.The new operating system's growth last month was smaller than in January and March of this year, but larger than February's.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quantum computers pose a huge threat to security, and the NIST wants your help

It's no secret that quantum computers could render many of today's encryption methods useless, and now the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology wants the public to help it head off that threat.The federal agency recently published a report focusing on cryptography in a quantum world that outlines a long-term approach for avoiding the problem before it happens."There has been a lot of research into quantum computers in recent years, and everyone from major computer companies to the government want their cryptographic algorithms to be what we call 'quantum resistant,'" said NIST mathematician Dustin Moody. "So if and when someone does build a large-scale quantum computer, we want to have algorithms in place that it can't crack."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quantum computers pose a huge threat to security, and the NIST wants your help

It's no secret that quantum computers could render many of today's encryption methods useless, and now the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology wants the public to help it head off that threat.The federal agency recently published a report focusing on cryptography in a quantum world that outlines a long-term approach for avoiding the problem before it happens."There has been a lot of research into quantum computers in recent years, and everyone from major computer companies to the government want their cryptographic algorithms to be what we call 'quantum resistant,'" said NIST mathematician Dustin Moody. "So if and when someone does build a large-scale quantum computer, we want to have algorithms in place that it can't crack."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security ‘net: Privacy and Cybercrime Edition

DDoS blackmail is an increasingly common form of cybercrime, it appears. The general pattern is something like this: the administrator of a large corporate site receives an email, threatening a large scale DDoS attack unless the company deposits some amount of bitcoin in an untraceable account. Sometimes, if the company doesn’t comply, the blackmail is followed up with a small “sample attack,” and a second contact or email asking for more bitcoin than the first time.

The best reaction to these types of things is either to work with your service provider to hunker down and block the attack, or to simply ignore the threat. For instance, there has been a spate of threats from someone called Armada Collective over the last several weeks that appear to be completely empty; while threats have been reported, no action appears to have been taken.

We heard from more than 100 existing and prospective CloudFlare customers who had received the Armada Collective’s emailed threats. We’ve also compared notes with other DDoS mitigation vendors with customers that had received similar threats. -via Cloudflare

The bottom line is this: you should never pay against these threats. It’s always better to contact your provider and work Continue reading

Application-layer DDoS attacks will increase, Kaspersky Labs predicts

Monday is still the busiest day of the week for DDoS attacks, with Thursday replacing Tuesday as the second most-active day.According to Kaspersky Lab’s DDoS intelligence report covering the first quarter of 2016, 74 countries were targeted by DDoS attacks, with China, South Korea and the the United States as the top three most-targeted countries. There was slight drop in the percentage of attacks targeting resources in the U.S.SYN, TCP and HTTP were the top three most-popular DDoS attack methods in Q1.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Application-layer DDoS attacks will increase, Kaspersky Labs predicts

Monday is still the busiest day of the week for DDoS attacks, with Thursday replacing Tuesday as the second most-active day.According to Kaspersky Lab’s DDoS intelligence report covering the first quarter of 2016, 74 countries were targeted by DDoS attacks, with China, South Korea and the the United States as the top three most-targeted countries. There was slight drop in the percentage of attacks targeting resources in the U.S.SYN, TCP and HTTP were the top three most-popular DDoS attack methods in Q1.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kaspersky predicts application-layer DDoS attacks will increase

Monday is still the busiest day of the week for DDoS attacks with Thursday replacing Tuesday as the second most active day.According to Kaspersky Lab’s DDoS intelligence report covering the first quarter of 2016, 74 countries were targeted by DDoS attacks, with China, South Korea and the USA as the top three most-targeted countries. There was slight drop in the percentage of attacks targeting resources in the USA.SYN, TCP and HTTP were the top three most popular DDoS attack methods in Q1. Kaspersky Lab's Q1 2016 DDoS Intelligence Report Most botnet attacks are launched from Windows, 55.5% in Q1 2016, compared to 44.5% being Linux-based attacks. South Korea still has the most C&C servers, followed by China, “other,” USA, Russia, a tie by Great Britain and the Netherlands, followed by France.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trend Micro: 6 most popular homebrewed terrorist tools

Terrorists are developing and distributing encryption tools that protect privacy of their communications, as well as other homegrown apps that include a news-feed compiler and DDoS attack software, according to a Trend Micro report.The tools have been made to give less tech-savvy members of terror groups the ability to use known technologies without having to trust or invest in commercial products that can perform the same functions, the report says.Some of the tools are still being updated, indicating an active development community among the terrorists.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trend Micro: 6 most popular homebrewed terrorist tools

Terrorists are developing and distributing encryption tools that protect privacy of their communications, as well as other homegrown apps that include a news-feed compiler and DDoS attack software, according to a Trend Micro report.The tools have been made to give less tech-savvy members of terror groups the ability to use known technologies without having to trust or invest in commercial products that can perform the same functions, the report says.Some of the tools are still being updated, indicating an active development community among the terrorists.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ExtraHop broadens its monitoring further across hybrid environments

ExtraHop is a vendor that offers real-time stream analytics for data in motion. That's a fancy-schmancy way of saying ExtraHop analyzes communication across the network to give visibility into application performance, availability and security. ExtraHop is an agent-less, appliance-based offering that promises cross-tier visibility.Given this message of visibility across geographically distributed operations, and across multiple infrastructure providers, it is perhaps unsurprising to see ExtraHop today announce the availability of extended public cloud monitoring functionality to now include Microsoft Azure (alongside the existing Amazon Web Services). On top of the Azure extension, ExtraHop is extending its offering to support branch offices to benefit geographically dispersed organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX: From Turning Point to Tipping Point

I’m very excited that I get the opportunity to report on another exceptional quarter for VMware NSX. As a company, we’re demonstrating that NSX will be an important growth driver for the foreseeable future. We added more than 200 new NSX customers in the quarter, and have more than 120 customers that have spent more than $1M on NSX. Organizations such as Shutterfly, TriZetto, Riverside County, and Royal Bank of Scotland are all making commitments to NSX as a foundational part of their IT future. Production deployments also continued to accelerate. We have more than 340, and in Q1 added the equivalent of one new NSX production deployment each day.

NSX is, indisputably, the leading software network overlay. NSX is proving equally valuable across all hardware underlays. Most notably, we’re starting to see customer proof points of something we’ve said all along – VMware NSX and Cisco ACI can be successfully deployed in the same environment to address different pain points. Just look at customers such as Sugar Creek and Hutto ISD; even the channel recognizes this as reported by CRN.

Executing On the NSX Plan, Reaching the Turning Point

The plan for growing NSX in the market was very Continue reading

EMC’s latest VCE nodes aim to make clouds easy

One way to get enterprises and service providers to adopt cloud infrastructure is to make it easier to set up and use. That’s what EMC is doing with Neutrino, a new type of hardware-software node for the VCE VxRack platform.The VxRack System 1000 with Neutrino nodes can run any workload on any node in the rack, and on any of several cloud software stacks. If OpenStack is best for one job, Hadoop is best for another, and VMware Photon is ideal for a third application, each can run on the appropriate stack. As long as there’s capacity somewhere in the rack, it doesn’t matter where each is hosted.“It allows any of the hardware in the nodes to be provisioned to any software stack,” said Jeremy Burton, EMC’s president of products and marketing. This will help enterprises and service providers deliver IaaS (infrastructure as a service) to their users and customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NYC scowls at LTE-U in open letter

The City of New York became the latest entity to weigh in on the subject of LTE-U, as an open letter from the mayor’s office to policymakers at the 3GPP standards body pushes for thorough protection for existing Wi-Fi.LTE-U, a carrier technology designed to take the load off of existing networks by using the unlicensed frequency bands where Wi-Fi lives, has provoked widespread concerns about interference and disruption. The technology’s inventors, Qualcomm and Ericsson, and the carriers have insisted that LTE-U contains features that will enable it to co-exist peacefully with Wi-Fi, but many others, from the cable industry to Google and Microsoft, have expressed serious doubts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gotchas to configuring Calico with Docker

© Calico project - Metaswitch
Setting up Calico with Docker has been documented with step-by-step commands on the Calico github page and I will not be repeating them here again. I am going to use this as a scratch pad for the gotchas that I learnt from following that article on github. I hope it helps some of you.

Docker networking has seen a lot of improvements both in the native libnetwork library as well as other projects & solutions. Docker container networking especially across two physical hosts is an interesting problem with various solutions out there with their own pros and cons. You could go with flannel, a L2 overlay, VXLAN overlay to facilitate multi-host container networking or choose a pure L3-only solution like Calico. Speaking of the various choices for container networking I came across this article that compares the network glue : underlay/ overlay solutions using different parameters. Feel free to check that out if you want to get an idea into what each of these (VXLAN, flannel & Calico) offer but then of course making your own comparisons and benchmarks will not only provide with the differences/features you are looking for but also Continue reading
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