7 ways to secure backup data

You need to see your backups the way bad actors do: an invaluable resource that can be turned against your organization if you don’t protect them correctly.Ransomware attacks focus on backup servers to either encrypt their data so they can’t restore other systems or to capture company IP and use it for extortion. Neither is a good outcome, so do everything you can to protect your backup data. Here’s how.Encrypt backups Encrypted backup data cannot be used to extort your company. Attackers might be able to exfiltrate it, but it will be useless without the keys. Encryption technology has evolved to a point that this can be handled with relative ease, allowing you to encrypt all backups wherever they are stored.To read this article in full, please click here

From instability to predictability: Transforming network communication to and from China

Getty Images China accounts for nearly 20% of global manufacturing trade and holds a large share of many global value chain inputs. With Connectivity being a challenge, until recently businesses have had to choose between two evils: Either a stable yet cumbersome process with large local telcos, or an unstable, unpredictable network that does not enable smooth communication with apps, cloud workloads, and teams. If your business suffers from communication issues in China, you’re not alone. About 90% of global businesses face these challenges, which result in costly workloads and provisioning. We’ve identified several main challenges:To read this article in full, please click here

Is It Time to Replace TCP in Data Centers?

One of my readers asked for my opinion about the provocative “It’s Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter” article by prof. John Ousterhout. I started reading it, found too many things that didn’t make sense, and decided to ignore it as another attempt of a proverbial physicist solving hard problems in someone else’s field.

However, pointers to that article kept popping up, and I eventually realized it was a position paper in a long-term process that included conference talks, interviews and keynote speeches, so I decided to take another look at the technical details.

Read more …

Is It Time to Replace TCP in Data Centers?

One of my readers asked for my opinion about the provocative “It’s Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter” article by prof. John Ousterhout. I started reading it, found too many things that didn’t make sense, and decided to ignore it as another attempt of a proverbial physicist solving hard problems in someone else’s field.

However, pointers to that article kept popping up, and I eventually realized it was a position paper in a long-term process that included conference talks, interviews and keynote speeches, so I decided to take another look at the technical details.

Read more …

BGP in 2022 – BNGP Updates

The first part of this report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the routing table. Dynamic routing updates are also part of this story. If the update rate of BGP is growing faster than we can deploy processing capability to match then the routing system will lose coherence, and at that point the network will head into periods of instability. This second part of the report will look at the profile of BGP updates across 2022 to assess whether the stability of the routing system, as measured by the level of BGP update activity, is changing.

How to Overcome Challenges in an API-Centric Architecture

This is the second in a two-part series. For an overview of a typical architecture, how it can be deployed and the right tools to use, please refer to Part 1.  Most APIs impose usage limits on number of requests per month and rate limits, such as a maximum of 50 requests per minute. A third-party API can be used by many parts of the system. Handling subscription limits requires the system to track all API calls and raise alerts if the limit will be reached soon. Often, increasing the limit requires human involvement, and alerts need to be raised well in advance. The system deployed must be able to track API usage data persistently to preserve data across service restarts or failures. Also, if the same API is used by multiple applications, collecting those counts and making decisions needs careful design. Rate limits are more complicated. If handed down to the developer, they will invariably add sleep statements, which will solve the problem in the short term; however, in the long run, this leads to complicated issues when the timing changes. A better approach is to use a concurrent data structure that limits rates. Even then, if the Continue reading

Network Break 412: IT Spending, ChatGPT, Cloud Repatriation And Other 2023 IT Speculations

Take a Network Break! For our first show of 2023 we skip the news to spend some time speculating on technologies and trends that may influence IT and networking in the coming year, including the influence of AI, machine learning, and ChatGPT in tech; data center network automation; cloud repatriation; and more.

The post Network Break 412: IT Spending, ChatGPT, Cloud Repatriation And Other 2023 IT Speculations appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Supermicro launches Arm-powered servers

Supermicro is the latest OEM to offer Arm-based servers with the launch of its Mt. Hamilton platform. The new servers will be sold under the MegaDC brand name and run the Altra line of Arm-based CPUs from Ampere Computing.While the servers can be used on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud, Supermicro is emphasizing a cloud-performance angle. The Mt. Hamilton platform is designed to target cloud-native applications, such as video-on-demand, IaaS, databases, dense VDI, and telco edge, and it addresses specific cloud-native workload objectives, such as performance per watt and very low latency responses.The Mt. Hamilton platform is modular and supports a variety of storage and PCI-Express configurations. It includes support for up to four double-width GPUs or two dozen 2.5-inch U.2 NVM-Express SSDs. For networking, the motherboards use Nvidia’s ConnectX4 SmartNICs. The systems are available in 1U and 2U single-socket configurations, supporting up to 4TB of memory.To read this article in full, please click here

Supermicro launches Arm-powered servers

Supermicro is the latest OEM to offer Arm-based servers with the launch of its Mt. Hamilton platform. The new servers will be sold under the MegaDC brand name and run the Altra line of Arm-based CPUs from Ampere Computing.While the servers can be used on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud, Supermicro is emphasizing a cloud-performance angle. The Mt. Hamilton platform is designed to target cloud-native applications, such as video-on-demand, IaaS, databases, dense VDI, and telco edge, and it addresses specific cloud-native workload objectives, such as performance per watt and very low latency responses.The Mt. Hamilton platform is modular and supports a variety of storage and PCI-Express configurations. It includes support for up to four double-width GPUs or two dozen 2.5-inch U.2 NVM-Express SSDs. For networking, the motherboards use Nvidia’s ConnectX4 SmartNICs. The systems are available in 1U and 2U single-socket configurations, supporting up to 4TB of memory.To read this article in full, please click here

How to Use Time-Stamped Data to Reduce Network Downtime 

Increased regulations and emerging technologies forced telecommunications companies to evolve quickly in recent years. These organizations’ engineers and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams must use technology to improve performance, reliability and service uptime. Learn how WideOpenWest challenges that vary depending on where the company is in their life cycle. Across the industry, businesses must modernize their infrastructure while also maintaining legacy systems. At the same time, new regulations at both the local and federal levels increase the competition within the industry, and new businesses challenge the status quo set by current industry leaders. In recent years, the surge in people working from home requires a more reliable internet connection to handle their increased network bandwidth needs. The increased popularity of smartphones and other devices means there are more devices requiring network connectivity — all without a reduction in network speeds. Latency issues or poor uptime lead to unhappy customers, who then become flight risks. Add to this situation more frequent security breaches, which then  requires all businesses to monitor their networks to detect potential breaches faster. InfluxData is the Continue reading

Organise Efficiently with Zapier — Dropbox / S3 / Sheets— Integration to organise scanned documents and important attachments

< MEDIUM: https://medium.com/@raaki-88/organise-efficiently-with-zapier-dropbox-s3-sheets-integration-to-organise-scanned-4f47d51f4a54 >

One biggest problem with my google drive is that it’s flooded with a lot of documents, images and everything which seems really important during that instant of time with names which are almost impossible to search later.

I tried various Google APIs and Python programs with Oauth2.0 and its integration is, not something easy and needs tinkering for the OAuth consent page.

I wanted something easier, a workflow when I scan documents in the scanner-pro app on IPAD/iPhone and upload them to storage it should then be organised with certain rules which can be easily searchable and also listable. What I mean by listable is that I need some sort of Google Sheet integration which can just enter the filename and date once it’s uploaded to S3.

When there is an excel sheet even if the search is available it gives me so much pleasure to fire up pandas and analyse or search for it, just makes me happy

Note: I am a Paid user of Zapier and using S3 is a premium app, Am not an advertiser for Zapier in any way, I found the service useful

Moving on, here is the workflow

Continue reading

Bring your own certificates to Cloudflare Gateway

Bring your own certificates to Cloudflare Gateway
Bring your own certificates to Cloudflare Gateway

Today, we’re announcing support for customer provided certificates to give flexibility and ease of deployment options when using Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform. Using custom certificates, IT and Security administrators can now “bring-their-own” certificates instead of being required to use a Cloudflare-provided certificate to apply HTTP, DNS, CASB, DLP, RBI and other filtering policies.

The new custom certificate approach will exist alongside the method Cloudflare Zero Trust administrators are already used to: installing Cloudflare’s own certificate to enable traffic inspection and forward proxy controls. Both approaches have advantages, but providing them both enables organizations to find the path to security modernization that makes the most sense for them.

Custom user side certificates

When deploying new security services, organizations may prefer to use their own custom certificates for a few common reasons. Some value the privacy of controlling which certificates are deployed. Others have already deployed custom certificates to their device fleet because they may bind user attributes to these certificates or use them for internal-only domains.

So, it can be easier and faster to apply additional security controls around what administrators have deployed already–versus installing additional certificates.

To get started using your own certificate first upload your root certificates via API Continue reading

Cloudflare is faster than Zscaler

Cloudflare is faster than Zscaler
Cloudflare is faster than Zscaler

Every Innovation Week, Cloudflare looks at our network’s performance versus our competitors. In past weeks, we’ve focused on how much faster we are compared to reverse proxies like Akamai, or platforms that sell edge compute that compares to our Supercloud, like Fastly and AWS. For CIO Week, we want to show you how our network stacks up against competitors that offer forward proxy services. These products are part of our Zero Trust platform, which helps secure applications and Internet experiences out to the public Internet, as opposed to our reverse proxy which protects your websites from outside users.

We’ve run a series of tests comparing our Zero Trust services with Zscaler. We’ve compared our ZT Application protection product Cloudflare Access against Zscaler Private Access (ZPA). We’ve compared our Secure Web Gateway, Cloudflare Gateway, against Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), and finally our Remote Browser Isolation product, Cloudflare Browser Isolation, against Zscaler Cloud Browser Isolation. We’ve found that Cloudflare Gateway is 58% faster than ZIA in our tests, Cloudflare Access is 38% faster than ZPA worldwide, and Cloudflare Browser Isolation is 45% faster than Zscaler Cloud Browser Isolation worldwide. For each of these tests, we used 95th percentile Time to First Byte Continue reading

Introducing Digital Experience Monitoring

Introducing Digital Experience Monitoring

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, Français and Español.

Introducing Digital Experience Monitoring

Today, organizations of all shapes and sizes lack visibility and insight into the digital experiences of their end-users. This often leaves IT and network administrators feeling vulnerable to issues beyond their control which hinder productivity across their organization. When issues inevitably arise, teams are left with a finger-pointing exercise. They’re unsure if the root cause lies within the first, middle or last mile and are forced to file a ticket for the respective owners of each. Ideally, each team sprints into investigation to find the needle in the haystack. However, once each side has exhausted all resources, they once again finger point upstream. To help solve this problem, we’re building a new product, Digital Experience Monitoring, which will enable administrators to pinpoint and resolve issues impacting end-user connectivity and performance.

To get started, sign up to receive early access. If you’re interested in learning more about how it works and what else we will be launching in the near future, keep scrolling.

Our vision

Over the last year, we’ve received an overwhelming amount of feedback that users want to see the intelligence that Cloudflare possesses from our Continue reading

Weave your own global, private, virtual Zero Trust network on Cloudflare with WARP-to-WARP

Weave your own global, private, virtual Zero Trust network on Cloudflare with WARP-to-WARP
Weave your own global, private, virtual Zero Trust network on Cloudflare with WARP-to-WARP

Millions of users rely on Cloudflare WARP to connect to the Internet through Cloudflare’s network. Individuals download the mobile or desktop application and rely on the Wireguard-based tunnel to make their browser faster and more private. Thousands of enterprises trust Cloudflare WARP to connect employees to our Secure Web Gateway and other Zero Trust services as they navigate the Internet.

We’ve heard from both groups of users that they also want to connect to other devices running WARP. Teams can build a private network on Cloudflare’s network today by connecting WARP on one side to a Cloudflare Tunnel, GRE tunnels, or IPSec tunnels on the other end. However, what if both devices already run WARP?

Starting today, we’re excited to make it even easier to build a network on Cloudflare with the launch of WARP-to-WARP connectivity. With a single click, any device running WARP in your organization can reach any other device running WARP. Developers can connect to a teammate's machine to test a web server. Administrators can reach employee devices to troubleshoot issues. The feature works with our existing private network on-ramps, like the tunnel options listed above. All with Zero Trust rules built in.

To Continue reading

Work from home is here to stay, so how should IT adjust?

The pandemic has changed how we work, probably forever. Most employees with jobs that can be done effectively from home have no intention of returning full time to the office. They find that their work-life balance is much more balanced without the long commutes and constant interruptions that accompany office work.According to a McKinsey/Ipsos survey, 58 percent of American workers had the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week in 2022, while 38 percent were not generally required to be in the office at all.To read this article in full, please click here

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