NETWORKING

In today’s security climate, NetOps and SecOps teams are witnessing increased attack surface area as applications and workloads move far beyond the boundaries of their data center. These applications/workloads move to, and reside in, multicloud architecture, adding complexity to connectivity, visibility, and control. In the multicloud world, the SecOps teams use a distributed security model that is expensive, difficult to deploy, and complex to manage.   Cisco has partnered with Alkira to help secure your multi-cloud environment….

With the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal in November 2021, state and local governments are looking at transportation projects that will improve safety, simplify operations, and reduce traffic congestion and emissions. Connected technology should be at the centerpiece of your investments for critical infrastructure. In the first blog in this series, I described five high-value projects. (Cliff Notes version: video surveillance, connected traffic signal controllers, traffic signal priority and emergency vehicle pre-emption, dynamic message…

A lot of people gawk when I tell them that I work with my spouse. Those looks become even more exaggerated when we tell them we not only work for the same company, but at one time we worked in the same organization, in the same building, and on the same floor. But then I caveat with- do you often talk to your spouse about work? Do you always know the exact context of what…

The Apache Log4j vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) has taken the Internet by storm in the past few days.  This blog details quick ways Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) and Secure IPS users can protect against attacks leveraging this vulnerability while patching their infrastructure. Talos first released updated Snort rules on Friday, December 10. For customers inspecting ingress traffic— with decryption if traffic is TLS (Transport Layer Security) encrypted — these rules will alert and can block attacks…

Intel announced a collaboration with Inspur, Ruijie Networks, and Silicom Connectivity Solutions to design and develop new infrastructure processing units (IPU) using both a CPU and FPGA. IPU—what Intel calls a data-processing unit (DPU)—is a programmable networking device designed to offload network processing tasks such as storage virtualization, network virtualization, and security from the CPU. That reduces overhead and frees up the CPU to focus on its primary data-processing functions. They are becoming a real…

Intel announced a collaboration with Inspur, Ruijie Networks, and Silicom Connectivity Solutions to design and develop new infrastructure processing units (IPU) using both a CPU and FPGA. IPU–what Intel calls a data-processing unit (DPU)–is a programmable networking device designed to offload network processing tasks such as storage virtualization, network virtualization, and security from the CPU. That reduces overhead and frees up the CPU to focus on its primary data-processing functions. They are becoming a real…

The ncdu command provides a useful and convenient way to view disk usage. The name stands for “NCurses disk usage”. This means that it’s based on ncurses which, like curses, is a terminal control library used on Unix/Linux systems. The curses part of each name is a pun on “cursor” or “cursor optimization” and is unrelated to the use of foul language. You can think of ncdu as a disk usage analyzer with an ncurses…

Magnetic storage tape has’t been the recommended destination for the initial backup copy of data for quite some time, and the question is whether LTO-9, the latest tape open standard, and other market dynamics will changed that. Here’s a look at modern tape drives, discussion of the degree to which ransomware changes the equation, and a closer look at LTO-9. Tape drives: Too fast for their own good? In the 80s and early 90s, there…

Where we came from Over the last decade we have been moving to Cloud Native deployments for most of our application and API deployment. This has mostly been an effort to break legacy monolithic application and service models into what we commonly refer to as microservices. Most of that move has been most successful under Cloud Native technologies utilizing containers and container orchestration. This move has been handled utilizing Kubernetes, Docker, and other similar technologies….

In collaboration with Kenny Jones, Mayank Jain, Earl Dimaculangan   Management of multi-cloud matures Figure 1. Multi-cloud strategy adoption For enterprise IT organizations, the public cloud has become a staple at delivering software, infrastructure, security, and other capabilities at scale. Companies primarily adopt public cloud services for greater flexibility, faster time-to-market, and to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions while avoiding vendor lock-in. While SaaS platforms are the lion’s share of services consumed (48%), IaaS and…