NETWORKING

Recently one of the big-three consumer credit bureaus fixed an issue that allowed an ordinary user to obtain the credit score of tens of millions of Americans just by providing their name and mailing address.  The connective tissue making this data exposure possible was an Application Programming Interface or API. An API enables two pieces of software to communicate with each other. Just think about the different ways you interface with software. You might open…

In today’s virtualized data center, Layer 4-Layer 7 network service appliances such as firewalls, load-balancers, proxies, and optimizers play a critical role in the secure and efficient operation of the network. Our previous blog post, Dynamic Service Chaining in a Data Center with Nexus Infrastructure, explored how Cisco Nexus enhanced Policy-Based Redirect (ePBR) enables service insertion and service chaining across these appliances within a single data center fabric. This post continues the discussion on how…

IBM has introduced a new CPU for its Z Series mainframe that’s designed for transactions like banking, training, insurance, customer interactions, and fraud detection. The Telum processor was unveiled at the annual Hot Chips conference and has been in development for three years to provide high-volume, real-time inferencing needed for artificial intelligence. The Telum design is very different from its System z15 predecessor. It features 8 CPU cores, on-chip workload accelerators, and 32MB of what…

So what’s firewall as a service? Firewall as a service, or FWaaS, relies on technology in the cloud. A user or application connects to the FWaaS via the internet, and the service applies domain rules, URL filtering, and other security that physical firewall appliances use. The idea is to replace the multitude of hardware firewalls you’d need to secure all of your business’ traffic from all of its different operational sites with secure internet connections…

We hear a lot about private 5G, meaning 5G networks deployed and owned by individual enterprises. A lot online, anyway; of 177 enterprises I’ve talked with this year, only three said they even knew how to build a private 5G network, and these three learned by doing it. The three discovered an important, but usually unrecognized, question, which is, “What do I it run on?” One reason private 5G gets a lot of attention is…

Customer requirements are keep changing, and Cisco is focusing more on network to be more software-focused and less hardware-dependent. Cisco Smart Licensing supports this vision by software license management. Smart Licensing is a flexible software licensing model that simplifies the way you activate and manage licenses across your organization. Smart Licensing simplifies the way customers activate and manage licenses across their organization in below ways: License flexibility: Licenses are not node-locked to hardware, so customers can easily pool license entitlements and move them…

At Cisco, we are committed to partnering with the federal government to help them meet the mission. These days, that mission relies more than ever on a dynamic security architecture and partners you can trust to keep your workloads, workforce, and workplaces safe. The past year and half have brought unprecedented change: President Biden’s executive order created new and needed requirements to federal agencies and their industry partners. There have been new requirements for critical…

Now, that we have ventured off into my three-part series called, What in the World of Applications, we have discussed the evolution of applications, the role of application security in our society, and the emergence of Cloud Native technologies. In this next edition, we want to continue building on top of this foundation and introduce a real-world application networking example that illustrates how we benefit from application networking. This will further help you understand why…

Comcast is certainly serious about boosting its corporate networking business. Or the cord cutters are really causing some damage. Maybe both. Either way, Comcast Business just announced plans to acquire privately-held Masergy Communications, an SD-WAN and cloud-based security specialist. Comcast is a public company, but Masergy is not, so terms of the deal were not disclosed. Masergy was acquired by private equity firm Berkshire Partners in 2016. Comcast currently has its own SD-WAN offering through a…

Securing today’s dynamic enterprise applications requires deep visibility, automated recommendations, and efficiency at scale.  With hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, traditional network-based security ran into limitations in mitigating modern day threats. As organizations move their applications and workloads to the cloud, the complexity of their environment increases. They can lose visibility into their cloud-based workloads and those blind spots can be fatal. To ensure application and workload protection, there is a need for visibility into application environments…