Cybercrime damage is projected to reach $6 trillion annually by 2021. That’s creating lots of demand for security protection—estimated at over $1 trillion cumulatively between 2017 and 2021. As a result, an estimated 1,200 vendors are competing to provide enterprise-class cybersecurity products, so how do you go about choosing which solution to use?

There’s no doubt, cyberthreats are real—according to the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), the number of cyber incidents targeting businesses almost doubled from 82,000 in 2016 to 159,700 in 2017, and due to non-reporting of many incidents, the actual number for 2017 could well have exceeded 360,000.

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Cisco’s announcement earlier this month that it will add the Viptela SD-WAN technology to the IOS XE software running the ISR/ASR routers will be a mixed blessing for enterprises.

On the one hand, it brings SD-WAN migration closer to Cisco customers. On the other hand, two preliminary indicators —  one-on-one conversations and Cisco’s refusal to participate in an SD-WAN test —  suggest enterprises should expect reduced throughput if they enable the SD-WAN capabilities on their routers.

Cisco’s easy migration to SD-WAN

By including the SD-WAN code with IOS XE, Cisco will provide a migration path for the more than one million ISR/ASR edge routers in the field. There’s been a lot of conversation as to whether or not SD-WAN is going to kill the router performance. Delivering SD-WAN code on the ISRs is Cisco’s answer: routers are here to stay but they’ll morph into SD-WAN appliances.

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Over the last few years, I have been sprawled in so many technologies that I have forgotten where my roots began in the world of data center. Therefore, I decided to delve deeper into what’s prevalent and headed straight to Ivan Pepelnjak's Ethernet VPN (EVPN) webinar hosted by Dinesh Dutt.

I knew of the distinguished Dinesh since he was the chief scientist at Cumulus Networks, and for me, he is a leader in this field. Before reading his book on EVPN, I decided to give Dinesh a call to exchange our views about the beginning of EVPN. We talked about the practicalities and limitations of the data center. Here is an excerpt from our discussion.

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Welcome to Agility City! Let me set the scene.

In the castle, the Wonderful Wizard orchestrates networks in beautiful and powerful ways. Point-to-point tunnel connections are heralded as “architectural wonders,” which decades ago were called bridges with disdain.

Meanwhile, The Wicked Witch of the West brews a primordial potion of complexity that is hidden behind curtains of automated provisioning. Packets of information are heavily laden with unnecessary information and double encryption.

It almost makes you want Dorothy Gale to appear and click her ruby slippers - “There's no place like home. There's no place like home.” If only we start talking about true networking and not orchestration of bridges.

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Every project management tool seeks to do the same instrumental thing: keep teams connected, on task and on deadline to get major initiatives done. But the market is getting pretty crowded, and for good reason — no platform seems to have gotten the right feel for what people need to see, and how that information should be displayed so that it’s both actionable/relevant, and contextualized.

That’s why monday.com is worth a shot. The platform is based off a simple, but powerful idea: that as humans, we like to feel like we’re contributing to part of a greater/effort good — an idea that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle as we focus on the details of getting stuff done. So projects are put onto a task board (think of it like a digital whiteboard), where everyone can have the same level of visibility into anyone else who’s contributing set of tasks. That transparency breaks down the silos between teams that cause communication errors and costly project mistakes — and it’s a beautiful, simple way to connect people to the processes that drive forward big business initiatives.

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One of the most basic things to understand in backup and recovery is the concept of backup levels and what they mean.

Without a proper understanding of what they are and how they work, companies can adopt bad practices that range from wasted bandwidth and storage to actually missing important data on their backups. Understanding these concepts is also crucial when selecting new data-protection products or services.

Full backup

A full backup contains all data in the entire system. A full backup of the C:\ drive in Windows contains every file on the C: drive. A full backup of a Windows system should contain a copy of every file on every drive on the machine or VM (e.g. C:\, D:\, F:\, etc.). The same goes for a full backup of a UNIX or Linux machine; it contains every file on every file system on the machine (e.g./, /home, /opt, etc.).

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Ready or not, the upgrade to an important internet security operation may soon be launched. Then again, it might not.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will meet the week of Sept. 17 and will likely decide whether or not to give the go ahead on its multi-year project to upgrade the top pair of cryptographic keys used in the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) protocol — commonly known as the root zone key signing key (KSK) — which secures the Internet's foundational servers.

Changing these keys and making them stronger is an essential security step, in much the same way that regularly changing passwords is considered a practical habit by any Internet user, ICANN says. The update will help prevent certain nefarious activities such as attackers taking control of a session and directing users to a site that for example might steal their personal information.

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Ciena

In the first installment of this 3-part series, we begin the story of one hero’s road to streamlined enterprise networking operations. Ciena’s Chris Sweetapple details Our Hero’s journey as he navigates the convoluted tangle of enterprise networking.

Our hero, responsible for running his enterprise network, is hopelessly stuck in an enormous tangle of network complexity. He needs the best connectivity for collaboration, applications and cloud access. But he knows that the networking technology he has today won’t cope with the demands of tomorrow. The business depends on online transactions, connections to multiple data centers and real-time data. Failover, backup, load balancing and stringent security are essential.

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Future 5G-based wireless networking equipment and data center equipment will combine antennas and the corresponding radio guts into one microprocessor unit, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology say.

Integrating all of the wireless elements that one needs in a radio will reduce waste heat and allow better modulation, according to the group, which has been working on a one-chip, multiple transmitter and receiver package design. Longer transmission times and better data rates will result, they say.

“Within the same channel bandwidth, the proposed transmitter can transmit six- to ten-times higher data rate,” says Hua Wang, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in a news article on the university’s website about the idea.

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Many businesses today are moving customer-facing websites and applications to the cloud—and rightfully so. Cloud computing allows enterprises to reduce infrastructure costs and spend more time focusing on revenue generation and business growth. But cloud computing requires a shift in thinking about how to ensure high-quality user experiences and repeat business.

Simply going live with a cloud deployment isn't enough. You also need to embrace openness and think about what happens outside the walls of your cloud provider's data center. Here are three steps all businesses can take to help make sure customers have a speedy, positive experience when accessing cloud-based websites and applications.

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In a world with vastly increasing amounts of data and dependency on the Internet, digital transformation is now paramount to the long-term survival of enterprises. But what will digital transformation in the years ahead involve? A crucial component for companies will be ensuring they have enough interconnection bandwidth to handle business demands in the future.

Interconnection bandwidth is the ability to support direct private data exchange across a variety of hubs and interconnection points within a network, bypassing the public Internet. These private connections are important because they offer scalability, security, and direct connections to copartners and service providers that companies cannot get otherwise.

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IoT is being weaponized. The same sensors, networks and real-time data analysis used monitoring classrooms can morph into weapons for targeted killing. How do such malicious drones operate and what can be done to protest against their airborne threat?

Background

Here are three data-points of weaponized drones.

1. The recent assassination attempt on the President of Venezuela with drones. “Aug 4, 2018. CARACAS, Venezuela — A drone attack caused pandemonium at a military ceremony where President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela was speaking on Saturday, sending National Guard troops scurrying in what administration officials called an assassination attempt.”
2. The use of drones to shoot down incendiary kites in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ”IDF reservists to help; troops able to shoot down flying objects 40 seconds from detection”
3. Slaugtherbots. “A video by the Future of Life Institute and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at Berkeley presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria.”

How do they work?

Drones are aerial IoT devices. They’re mounted with sensors that relay their location, altitude and other sensor readings such as images to a back-end system or controller which determines what action the drone should take. Such drones have to remain within sight for a human control to operate them. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stipulates that Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) users must (1) Register their UAS with the FAA (2) Fly the UAS within visual line-of-sight. The examples above with the Venezuelan assassination attempt and shooting down incendiary kites both involve human controllers.

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One way of looking at IoT deployments is this – a large array of not-particularly-sophisticated endpoints, mindlessly sending individual data points like temperature and pressure levels to either an edge device somewhere on a factory floor, or all the way out to a cloud back-end or data center.

And that’s largely correct, in many cases, but it’s increasingly not the whole story – IoT endpoints are getting closer and closer to the ability to do their own analysis, leading to simpler architectures and more responsive systems. It’s not the right fit for every use case, but there are types of IoT implementation that are already putting the responsibility for the customizing their own metrics on the devices themselves, and more that could be a fit for such an architecture.

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Fully baked products weren’t the only technologies on display at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas this week; VMware previewed three in-the-works projects related to edge computing, artificial intelligence and enterprise blockchain.

The first is Project Dimension, which aims to deliver the functionality of VMware’s cloud offerings to the edge as a managed service. Project Dimension will combine the elements of VMware Cloud Foundation – including software-defined services for compute, storage, network and security, along with cloud management capabilities – in a hyperconverged form factor that’s operated by VMware.

Just as VMware Cloud on AWS manages a customer’s infrastructure in the Amazon cloud, Project Dimension will manage a customer’s on-premises data-center and edge locations, such as branch offices and warehouse sites.

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The semiconductor world is buzzing over the news that custom semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, the foundry born when AMD divested itself of its fabrication facilities, announced the sudden decision to drop its 7nm FinFET development program and restructure its R&D teams around “enhanced portfolio initiatives.”

For now, GlobalFoundries will stick to 12nm and 14nm manufacturing. All told, approximately 5 percent (of roughly 18,000 employees) will lose their jobs. But it also sets back AMD, a GlobalFoundries customer, in its bid to get ahead of Intel, which has struggled for two years to get to 10nm and won’t get there until 2020.

“The vast majority of today’s fabless customers are looking to get more value out of each technology generation to leverage the substantial investments required to design into each technology node. Essentially, these nodes are transitioning to design platforms serving multiple waves of applications, giving each node greater longevity. This industry dynamic has resulted in fewer fabless clients designing into the outer limits of Moore’s Law,” said Thomas Caulfield, who was named CEO of GlobalFoundries last March, in a statement.

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What is rapidly aging and largely male? If you said the heavy metal music scene, you wouldn’t be wrong (c’est moi), but that’s not the answer in this instance. It’s data center staffing.

In its recent report on data center efficiency, Uptime Institute focused primarily on outages and the improvement in power efficiency, but there were other interesting findings, such as this:

Data center staff are getting older on average, and women show no interest in the job.

New skills needed for hybrid IT environments

According to the report, there is a growing need for new skills in an increasingly hybrid IT environment. New skills, such as overseeing and managing SLAs for off-premises workloads, are needed, but people don’t have them. Just 35 percent of survey respondents reported that they did not have any of the hiring or staffing issues identified by Uptime.

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Ciena

The evolution toward a more holistic, personalized health maintenance program will create an explosion of data putting more pressure on our communication networks. Is your network healthy enough to make the sharing of this information possible? Ciena’s Daniele Loffreda discusses.

In the past, an annual visit to our primary care doctor was considered common practice. But in today's era of personalized, precision medicine, the annual checkup may not be as necessary for otherwise healthy adults. In fact, research conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration suggests that yearly visits in the absence of symptoms are not beneficial. According to the National Center for Policy Analysis, patients in the United States visit their physicians for annual checkups more than 44 million times per year despite having no medical issues or concerns.

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Starting in 2019, NASA will begin using laser communications technology to "enable greater return of science data from space." 

The reason is laser is more bandwidth-friendly than classic radio for data delivery, plus it's more secure, NASA says in a newly released explainer of its plans.

Laser signals from space will be much harder to hack than old-school radio because the signal is more concentrated, the agency says on its website. Plus, the higher frequencies provide more bandwidth — important for space data crunching. And laser equipment is lighter, allowing for longer missions, among other benefits.

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The recent release of Linux kernel 4.18 followed closely by the releases of 4.18.1, 4.18.2, 4.18.3, 4.18.4, and 4.18.5 brings some important changes to the Linux landscape along with a boatload of tweaks, fixes, and improvements.

While many of the more significant changes might knock the socks off developers who have been aiming at these advancements for quite some time, the bulk of them are likely to go unnoticed by the broad expanse of Linux users. Here we take a look at some of the things this new kernel brings to our systems that might just make your something-to-get-a-little-excited-about list.

Code Cleanup

For one thing, the 4.18 kernel has brought about the surprising removal of nearly 100,000 lines of outdated code. That's a lot of code! Does this mean that any of your favorite features may have been ripped out? That is not very likely. This code cleanup does means that a lot of code deadwood has been carefully expunged from the kernel along with one significant chunk. As a result, the new kernel should take up less memory, run a little more efficiently and be less vulnerable to attacks that might have taken advantage of the neglected sections of older code. This change also leaves the remaining code somewhat cleaner and easier to manage.

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Companies are slowly migrating toward controller-based architectures, so as a network IT professional, it pays well to keep your skills relevant as new technology is adopted. For network engineers and technicians with at least a year of networking experience under their belts, earning a Cisco Certified Network Professional certification may help achieve this. This Complete Cisco Network Certification Training Bundle features guides to help you ace your next certification exam for $59.

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Network firewalls were created to block unauthorized content and code from the network while ensuring the unimpeded flow of data packets vital to the operations of the enterprise. But they were designed to intercept external incursion, not prevent security issues inside the network.

“As server virtualization has increased in popularity, the amount of traffic moving laterally across the data center (East-West) has dwarfed traditional client-server traffic, which moves in and out (North-South),” industry analyst Zeus Kerravala writes in Network World. “This is playing havoc with data center managers as they attempt to meet the demands of this era of IT.”

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What’s the silliest, dumbest, most ridiculous Internet of Things (IoT) application you can think of? Smart toothbrushes? Internet-connected toilets? Digital notepads in the shower?

Well, forget all that. Heck, you can even forget the "smart" Air Dresser wardrobe that Samsung announced earlier this month. (If you’re wondering, this digital closet is said to automatically "air" — whatever that means — steam, dry, and purify clothes so they don’t, you know, stink.)

IBM has just patented an IoT device concept so incredibly inane that it makes all those earlier attempts to trivialize the IoT seem like cures for cancer. What could possibly be so ill-conceived as to make a smart hairbrush look, well, smart?

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Getting wide-area network links up and securely running quickly with minimal IT irritation has always been Cisco Meraki’s strong suite.

Equipping customers tasked with securely supporting more cloud applications and mobile devices with ever more throughput and the latest connectivity options are the chief goals behind a raft of new model additions to Cisco Meraki’s MX and Z branch-office security appliances.

Meraki’s MX family supports everything from SD-WAN and Wi-Fi features to next-generation firewall and intrusion prevention in a single package.   

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