Micromanaging networks considered harmful: on (k)nerd knobs

Nerd Knobs (or as we used to call them in TAC, knerd knobs) are the bane of the support engineer’s life. Well, that and crashes. And customer who call in with a decoded stack trace. Or don’t know where to put the floppy disc that came with the router into the router. But, anyway…

What is it with nerd knobs? Ivan has a great piece up this week on the topic. I think this is the closest he gets to what I think of as the real root cause for nerd knobs —

Instead of using cookie-cutter designs, we prefer to carefully craft unique snowflakes that magically integrate the legacy stuff that should have been dead years ago with the next-generation technologies… and every unique snowflake needs at least a nerd knob or two to make it work.

Greg has a response to Ivan up; again, I think he gets close to the problem with these thoughts —

Most IT managers have lost the ability to recognise technical debt and its impacts … Nerd Knobs are symptoms of much deeper problems/technical debt in the networking market and treat the cause not the symptom.

A somewhat orthogonal article caught my eye, Continue reading

Intel’s pint-sized Compute Stick PC powered up with Core M processor

Intel announced a Core M-based version of its Compute Stick pocket PC at the IFA show, part of a small coterie of unexpected announcements Intel made at the trade show here.As expected, Intel formally announced Skylake, its sixth-generation Core processor. Kirk Skaugen, a senior vice president at Intel, called the chip its “best processor ever.”Skylake can scale from over 90 watts down to just 4.5 watts, the power consumed by the Core M, now rebranded as the Core m. That makes it ideal for two-in-ones and even tiny devices like Intel’s Compute Stick, which had used an earlier version of Intel’s Atom processor when it debuted. Intel didn’t announce a price or a ship date for the new Compute Stick, however.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How CISOs can beat the information security skills-gap

The information security skills gap may have become a huge issue for Chief Security Offices (CSOs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), but there are a number of ways InfoSec teams can work around the shortage so to protect their networks and stay ahead of the attackers. Outsourcing staff When people think of outsourcing, they often think of outsourcing services. A company may, for example, choose to outsource its accounting, customer management, or recruitment. However, it’s worth noting that you can also outsource talent and this is a poignant note for an understaffed and under-skilled security industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Study: 81% of large health care organizations breached

In the past two years, 81 percent of hospitals and health insurance companies have had a data breach, according to a report released by KPMG."These are all incidents where they have determined they lost data," said Greg Bell, Cyber US Leader at KPMG. "This wasn't just a malware or a virus infection -- it actually went to exfiltration."The study surveyed 223 senior technology and security executives at health care organizations with over $500 million in annual revenues.However, only 66 percent of the insurance executives and 53 percent of hospital executives said they said that they were prepared for an attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Employees put business data at risk by installing gambling apps on their phones

If you work for a large, global company, chances are some of your peers have installed gambling apps on the mobile devices they use for work, and that's bad news for IT security.A study has found that the average company has more than one such gambling application in some employee devices, putting corporate data stored on those devices at risk.The analysis was performed by security firm Veracode, which scanned hundreds of thousands of mobile apps installed in corporate mobile environments. The study found that some companies had as many as 35 mobile gambling apps on their network environment.The company tested some of the most popular gambling apps it detected in corporate environments for potential security risks and found critical vulnerabilities that could enable hackers to gain access to a phone's contacts, emails, call history and location data, as well as to record conversations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How VMware aims to distinguish itself in the cloud

VMware VP of Cloud Services Mathew Lodge acknowledges that the virtualization vendor “got started later than other folks” in the IaaS public cloud market, but he flatly denies that the company is slowing investment in this area. VMware’s position is that while it has catching up to do with cloud market leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, it also has strengths that can make it stand out.VMware used its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco this week to show off some of those differentiators, and teased more advances to come. HYBRID ALL THE WAY The company’s cloud strategy centers around VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud platform, as CEO Pat Gelsinger stressed in a pre-VMworld interview with Network World.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP beefs up enterprise security suite with tools to root out malware, app vulnerabilites

Hewlett-Packard has devised two new ways of securing enterprise systems in the endless war on malicious network attackers.One service inspects the Internet addresses being requested by employees for malicious links and the other service learns how an organization's coders write their programs.The two new releases aim to "protect the interactions among your most valuable assets: your users, your applications and your data," said Frank Mong, HP vice president of solutions. The company announced the new software at the HP Protect security conference, held this week near Washington.HP DNS Malware Analytics (DMA) monitors outbound DNS (Domain Name System) requests to ensure employee browsers aren't contacting rogue or malware Web sites. A DNS server provides specific numeric Internet addresses to end-user computers requesting Web sites by their domain names.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Test all the things: IPv6, HTTP/2, SHA-2

CloudFlare constantly tries to stay on the leading edge of Internet technologies so that our customers' web sites use the latest, fastest, most secure protocols. For example, in the past we've enabled IPv6 and SPDY/3.1.

Today we've switched on a test server that is open for people to test compatibility of web clients. It's a mirror of this blog and is served from https://http2.cloudflare.com/. The server uses three technologies that it may be helpful to test with: IPv4/IPv6, HTTP/2 and an SSL certificate that uses SHA-2 for its signature.

The server has both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

$ dig +short http2.cloudflare.com A
45.55.83.207  
$ dig +short http2.cloudflare.com AAAA
2604:a880:800:10:5ca1:ab1e:f4:e001

The certificate is based on SHA-2 (in this case SHA-256). This is important because SHA-1 is being deprecated by some browsers very soon. On a recent browser the connection will also be secured using ECDHE (for forward secrecy).

And, finally, the server uses HTTP/2 if the browser is capable. For example, in Google Chrome, with the HTTP/2 and SPDY indicator extension the blue lightning bolt indicates that the page was served using HTTP/2:

This server isn't on the normal CloudFlare Continue reading

Private and Public Clouds, and the Mistakes You Can Make

A few days ago I had a nice chat with Christoph Jaggi about private and public clouds, and the mistakes you can make when building a private cloud – the topics we’ll be discussing in the Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds workshop @ Data Center Day in Berne in mid-September.

The German version of our talk has been published on Inside-IT; those of you not fluent in German will find the English version below.

Read more ...

Verizon to introduce SDN security feature later this month

Verizon will introduce a virtualized firewall service across its global network later this month, part of its move into software-defined networking.The aim is to help businesses such as manufacturers or retailers, who may be running networks in far-flung places, to have better security when connecting their applications to the corporate network, said Shawn Hakl, head of network platforms and managed services for Verizon Enterprise Solutions.The type of organizations Verizon is aiming to attract are those running a Layer 3 private network who may want a better and more reliable connection for people using mobile apps.Mobile users will connect to whatever network is available and then onto Verizon's private network, Hakl said. Applications can securely connect, and the traffic can be put through the usual security inspections before it goes into the corporate network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware pitches network virtualization for better security

VMware is making a case that network virtualization can improve security in the enterprise.VMware, one of the biggest proponents of virtualizing the entire data center, says CIOs concerned about protecting their IT infrastructures from attackers should look at virtual networking, which has been around a while but isn't as popular as server virtualization."The security industry is messy and complicated, and we spend the bulk of our dollars on products that don't really solve the problem. It simply isn't working," said Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO, in a keynote talk at the VMworld conference in San Francisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft and VMware cozy up, forgoing past rivalry

Microsoft's new, more collaborative approach to the computing industry was on display at VMware's annual conference in San Francisco Tuesday, when executives from both companies shared the stage to talk about new device management features in Windows 10.As VMware Executive Vice President Sanjay Poonen explained, VMware and Microsoft, historically fierce rivals, have been working together more closely under the leadership of Satya Nadella. That work has now borne fruit in the form of Project A2, a new service that brings together VMware's AirWatch device management service and its App Volumes application delivery technology. Using Project A2, Windows 10 users can log in to their corporate account, get their device set up for use with a company's resources and then get all the applications they need provided straight from IT. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMworld 2015 Day 2 Keynote Liveblog

The day 2 keynote kicks off with another Cloud Academy presentation… After the video wraps up, Sanjay Poonen takes the stage. Poonen briefly recaps yesterday’s messaging, and then moves into the focus of today’s keynote—focusing on the “any application and any device” part of the “Ready for Any” messaging.

According to Poonen, the core of the solution for “any application on any device” is VMware’s Workspace Suite. Workspace Suite creates the magic of “enterprise computing with consumer simplicity.” How? It starts by building upon the core of virtualized infrastructure, made possibe by VMware’s compute, storage, and network virtualization solutions. Combined with a strong management layer and hybrid cloud solutions, this becomes the software-defined data center (SDDC). Somehow, though, this stuff needs to be connected to the end users—via desktop, mobile, content collaboration, and tying it all together with identity management. Poonen points to innovation in all of these areas.

Obviously, mobile is a category that is growing very rapidly, and Poonen talks about VMware’s movement in this space via the AirWatch acquisition. And the use of mobile devices is also key to VMware’s identity efforts as well. Poonen shows a video with a few customer testimonials, and then introduces Continue reading

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