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China Express: Cloudflare partners to boost performance in China for corporate networks

Cloudflare has been helping global organizations offer their users a consistent experience all over the world. This includes mainland China, a market our global customers cannot ignore but that continues to be challenging for infrastructure teams trying to ensure performance, security and reliability for their applications and users both in and outside mainland China. We are excited to announce China Express — a new suite of capabilities and best practices in partnership with our partners China Mobile International (CMI) and CBC Tech — that help address some of these performance challenges and ensure a consistent experience for customers and employees everywhere.

Cloudflare has been providing Application Services to users in mainland China since 2015, improving performance and security using in-country data centers and caching. Today, we have a presence in 30 cities in mainland China thanks to our strategic partnership with JD Cloud. While this delivers significant performance improvements, some requests still need to go back to the origin servers which may live outside mainland China. With limited international Internet gateways and restrictive cross-border regulations, international traffic has a very high latency and packet drop rate in and out of China. This results in inconsistent cached content within China and Continue reading

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What to expect from SASE certifications

Secure access service edge (SASE) is a network architecture that rolls SD-WAN and security into a single, centrally-managed cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployment, improved security, and better performance.According to Gartner, SASE’s benefits are transformational because it can speed deployment time for new users, locations, applications, and devices, as well as reduce attack surfaces and shorten remediation times by as much as 95%.With the pandemic, adoption of SASE has been on an upward swing. Gartner predicts in its most recent SASE roadmap that 80% of enterprises will have adopted a SASE or SSE architecture by 2025, up from 20% in 2021. (Security service edge, or SSE, is a security-focused subset of SASE that’s basically SASE without SD-WAN.)To read this article in full, please click here

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What to expect from SASE certifications

Secure access service edge (SASE) is a network architecture that rolls SD-WAN and security into a single, centrally-managed cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployment, improved security, and better performance.According to Gartner, SASE’s benefits are transformational because it can speed deployment time for new users, locations, applications, and devices, as well as reduce attack surfaces and shorten remediation times by as much as 95%.With the pandemic, adoption of SASE has been on an upward swing. Gartner predicts in its most recent SASE roadmap that 80% of enterprises will have adopted a SASE or SSE architecture by 2025, up from 20% in 2021. (Security service edge, or SSE, is a security-focused subset of SASE that’s basically SASE without SD-WAN.)To read this article in full, please click here

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Video: MLAG with EVPN Deep Dive

In November 2022 I described some of the intricacies of using EVPN to implement MLAG control plane. You might have noticed that I didn’t dive deep into EVPN details, and I had a good reason for that – Lukas Krattiger did a wonderful job describing how MLAG works with EVPN in the EVPN Deep Dive webinar.

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Video: MLAG with EVPN Deep Dive

In November 2022 I described some of the intricacies of using EVPN to implement MLAG control plane. You might have noticed that I didn’t dive deep into EVPN details, and I had a good reason for that – Lukas Krattiger did a wonderful job describing how MLAG works with EVPN in the EVPN Deep Dive webinar.

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Addressing NetOps issues with Event-Driven Ansible

A simple example - No Shut, No Problem

Since the announcement of Event-Driven Ansible, I cannot stop thinking about potential use cases. Can I get events to automate scaling? Could I use a filesystem event to trigger filesystem integrity checks? Could I get a slackbot to trigger my choice of heavy metal playlist based on a “mood” event? It's all possible! But let’s not go too crazy, not yet. 

I started having a look at the fantastic work that one of our engineers, Nilashish Chakraborty has been doing around network telemetry and Ansible. This led me down the path to explore network events and what I could potentially do with something like Event-Driven Ansible. So let’s start with a super simple interface example.

Reaching out to the team at Arista, we started discussing and looking at the mechanisms they are using to get telemetry data. With Arista we are able to use gNMI, gNMI is an open source protocol specification created by the OpenConfig working group that is used to stream data to and from network devices. The OpenConfig working group operates as an open source project with contributions from network operators, equipment vendors in providing vendor-neutral Continue reading

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Hedge 161: Going Dark with Geoff Huston

Encrypt everything! Now! We don’t often do well with absolutes like this in the engineering world–we tend to focus on “get it down,” and not to think very much about the side effects or unintended consequences. What are the unintended consequences of encrypting all traffic all the time? Geoff Huston joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the problems with going dark.

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Using Pynetbox to Create Netbox API Tokens

As a warning to everyone, I am not a developer. I am a network engineer who is trying to do some automation stuff. Some of what I’m doing sounds logical to me, but I would not trust my own opinions for production work. I’m sure you can find a Slack channel or Mastodon instance with people who can tell you how to do things properly.

The last time, I talked about using pynetbox to make queries to Netbox. This was a very simple example, and one of the things that bugged me the most about it was the API token. In that post, we used a statically-assigned API token where I went into the Netbox GUI and generated one for myself. I think I may have even noted that this was definitely not the best way to handle those things. A possibly-better way to do it is to use your username and password on Netbox to generate a token for yourself. This would a token that you then delete when you’re done.

How is this better? The static tokens are just that — they’re static. If you generate your token, then anyone who has it can use it to Continue reading

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Using Pynetbox to Create Netbox API Tokens

As a warning to everyone, I am not a developer. I am a network engineer who is trying to do some automation stuff. Some of what I’m doing sounds logical to me, but I would not trust my own opinions for production work. I’m sure you can find a Slack channel or Mastodon instance with people who can tell you how to do things properly.

The last time, I talked about using pynetbox to make queries to Netbox. This was a very simple example, and one of the things that bugged me the most about it was the API token. In that post, we used a statically-assigned API token where I went into the Netbox GUI and generated one for myself. I think I may have even noted that this was definitely not the best way to handle those things. A possibly-better way to do it is to use your username and password on Netbox to generate a token for yourself. This would a token that you then delete when you’re done.

How is this better? The static tokens are just that — they’re static. If you generate your token, then anyone who has it can use it to Continue reading

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The Highly Profitable Chip Making Monopoly Called TSMC

When Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing speaks, the datacenter sector of the IT industry listens because, with few exceptions, this foundry etches the compute, networking, and storage engines that power the datacenter. …

The Highly Profitable Chip Making Monopoly Called TSMC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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IPv6 Buzz 117: Microsoft’s OS Evolution With IPv6

The IPv6 Buzz podcast talks with Richard Hicks about Microsoft's OS changes and use cases for IPv6. Richard is a technology consultant and author. We discuss which Microsoft solutions use IPv6, what its v6 strategy changed, and more.

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IPv6 Buzz 117: Microsoft’s OS Evolution With IPv6

The IPv6 Buzz podcast talks with Richard Hicks about Microsoft's OS changes and use cases for IPv6. Richard is a technology consultant and author. We discuss which Microsoft solutions use IPv6, what its v6 strategy changed, and more.

The post IPv6 Buzz 117: Microsoft’s OS Evolution With IPv6 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Announcing SCIM support for Cloudflare Access & Gateway

Today, we're excited to announce that Cloudflare Access and Gateway now support the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol. Before we dive into what this means, let's take a step back and review what SCIM, Access, and Gateway are.

SCIM is a protocol that enables organizations to manage user identities and access to resources across multiple systems and domains. It is often used to automate the process of creating, updating, and deleting user accounts and permissions, and to keep these accounts and permissions in sync across different systems.

For example, most organizations have an identity provider, such as Okta or Azure Active Directory, that stores information about its employees, such as names, addresses, and job titles. The organization also likely uses cloud-based applications for collaboration. In order to access the cloud-based application, employees need to create an account and log in with a username and password. Instead of manually creating and managing these accounts, the organization can use SCIM to automate the process. Both the on-premise system and the cloud-based application are configured to support SCIM.

When a new employee is added to, or removed from, the identity provider, SCIM automatically creates an account for that employee in the Continue reading

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How to use the tree command

In this Linux tip, we’re going to look at the tree command. It’s a command that displays the files and subdirectories in whatever directory you ask it to display – and it does it in a surprisingly graphical way.

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Expanding our Microsoft collaboration: proactive and automated Zero Trust security for customers

As CIOs navigate the complexities of stitching together multiple solutions, we are extending our partnership with Microsoft to create one of the best Zero Trust solutions available. Today, we are announcing four new integrations between Azure AD and Cloudflare Zero Trust that reduce risk proactively. These integrated offerings increase automation allowing security teams to focus on threats versus implementation and maintenance.

What is Zero Trust and why is it important?

Zero Trust is an overused term in the industry and creates a lot of confusion. So, let's break it down. Zero Trust architecture emphasizes the “never trust, always verify” approach. One way to think about it is that in the traditional security perimeter or “castle and moat” model, you have access to all the rooms inside the building (e.g., apps) simply by having access to the main door (e.g., typically a VPN).  In the Zero Trust model you would need to obtain access to each locked room (or app) individually rather than only relying on access through the main door. Some key components of the Zero Trust model are identity e.g., Azure AD (who), apps e.g., a SAP instance or a custom Continue reading

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New: Scan Salesforce and Box for security issues

Today, we’re sharing the release of two new SaaS integrations for Cloudflare CASB - Salesforce and Box - in order to help CIOs, IT leaders, and security admins swiftly identify looming security issues present across the exact type of tools housing this business-critical data.

Recap: What is Cloudflare CASB?

Released in September, Cloudflare’s API CASB has already proven to organizations from around the world that security risks - like insecure settings and inappropriate file sharing - can often exist across the friendly SaaS apps we all know and love, and indeed pose a threat. By giving operators a comprehensive view of the issues plaguing their SaaS environments, Cloudflare CASB has allowed them to effortlessly remediate problems in a timely manner before they can be leveraged against them.

But as both we and other forward-thinking administrators have come to realize, it’s not always Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and business chat tools like Slack that contain an organization’s most sensitive information.

Scan Salesforce with Cloudflare CASB

The first Software-as-a-Service. Salesforce, the sprawling, intricate, hard-to-contain Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, gives workforces a flexible hub from which they can do just as the software describes: manage customer relationships. Whether it be tracking Continue reading

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API-based email scanning

The landscape of email security is constantly changing. One aspect that remains consistent is the reliance of email as the beginning for the majority of threat campaigns. Attackers often start with a phishing campaign to gather employee credentials which, if successful, are used to exfiltrate data, siphon money, or perform other malicious activities. This threat remains ever present even as companies transition to moving their email to the cloud using providers like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.

In our pursuit to help build a better Internet and tackle online threats, Cloudflare offers email security via our Area 1 product to protect all types of email inboxes - from cloud to on premise. The Area 1 product analyzes every email an organization receives and uses our threat models to assess if the message poses risk to the customer. For messages that are deemed malicious, the Area 1 platform will even prevent the email from landing in the recipient's inbox, ensuring that there is no chance for the attempted attack to be successful.

We try to provide customers with the flexibility to deploy our solution in whatever way they find easiest. Continuing in this pursuit to make our solution as turnkey as Continue reading

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Zone Versioning is now generally available

Today we are announcing the general availability of Zone Versioning for enterprise customers. Zone Versioning allows you to safely manage zone configuration by versioning changes and choosing how and when to deploy those changes to defined environments of traffic. Previously announced as HTTP Applications, we have redesigned the experience based on testing and feedback to provide a seamless experience for customers looking to safely rollout configuration changes.

Problems with making configuration changes

There are two problems we have heard from customers that Zone Versioning aims to solve:

1. How do I test changes to my zone safely?
2. If I do end up making a change that impacts my traffic negatively, how can I quickly revert that change?

Customers have worked out various ways of solving these problems. For problem #1, customers will create staging zones that live on a different hostname, often taking the form staging.example.com, that they make changes on first to ensure that those changes will work when deployed to their production zone. When making more than one change this can become troublesome as they now need to keep track of all the changes made to make the exact same set of changes on the Continue reading

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IT Lessons Learned from Southwest Airlines’ Winter Plight

Severe weather and outdated software systems led to an estimated $825M loss for the airline, exposing operational risks that can arise if technology is not updated.

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8 hot networking technologies for 2023

Despite the challenges posed by economic turmoil, epidemics, and political upheaval, network researchers are continuing to blaze new trails in innovation, performance, management, and security. In sum, 2023 is shaping up as a year of network evolution and transformation.Here are eight network technologies you will want to pay particularly close attention to.1. Unified SASE: Addresses hybrid workforce, hybrid clouds Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) tightly integrates security and networking into a single platform. The technology uses a single-pass scanning architecture combined with a unified policy that's configured via a unified console that draws from a unified data lake. "This is significant for organizations to continue to provide a consistent and assured user experience while protecting users, devices, sites, and data amid the rapidly evolving dynamics coming in 2023," says Kelly Ahuja, CEO of networking and cybersecurity firm Versa Networks.To read this article in full, please click here