SD-WAN needs a dose of AIOps to deliver automation
In some ways, SD-WAN exacerbates the troubleshooting problem. It adds a level
of resiliency to the network via multi-path networking that can hide outages.
This leads to a situation where the network operations dashboard can show
everything is "green," but apps are performing poorly. Network performance
issues have become glaringly obvious with the rise of video, and they are
causing network engineers to constantly scramble to try and remediate issues.
Here is where AI can make a difference. AI systems can ingest the massive
amounts of data provided by network infrastructure (LAN, WLAN and WAN) to
"see" things that even the savviest network engineer can't see. At one time,
when networks were fairly simple and traffic volumes were lower, it was
possible for a seasoned network professional to "know" a network and quickly
find the root of problems through a combination of domain knowledge and rapid
inspection of traffic. But not so today as the numbers of devices,
applications and volume of information have skyrocketed. One of the big
changes is that periodic polling data has been replaced by real-time streaming
telemetry that increases data by an order of magnitude or more.
Ripe for digital disruption: Which industries are most at risk and why
The changing demographics favor workers who are much more open to gig work and
who place greater trust in digital platforms to create marketplaces. This has
opened the door to changes in typically cohesive industries, such as higher
education. The increased demand for digital skills has led many students
to decouple academic interest and professional credentialing. This will lead
to an exodus from costlier schools in favor of boutique schools that cater to
narrower interests. Students will earn digital credentials from specific,
technology-heavy institutions like Lambda School in their early career, and
pursue further growth and learning throughout their career from organizations
such as Coursera or LinkedIn Learning. Generation Z has grown up with
democratized value creation, like YouTube channels or Twitch streamers that
organically found their base and built their audience using digital
techniques. These new, digital entities can see the most valuable part of a
business process and align themselves to those while sourcing out the other
aspects with great velocity. Tesla, for example, has done away with its PR
department and is relying on its outspoken CEO to directly message the market.
The seven elements of successful DDoS defence
Because multiple computers from a globally dispersed botnet “zombie army” of
hijacked internet-connected devices are attempting to flood a server with fake
traffic to knock it offline, DDoS attacks are already more destructive than
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks perpetrated from one machine. However, in
recent years we’ve monitored a disturbing trend: DDoS used as a smokescreen.
The service disruption draws the IT team’s attention away from a separate and
more sophisticated incursion, such as account takeover or phishing. The damage
of just the DDoS can be bad enough. It takes a targeted website minutes to go
down in a strike, but hours to recover. In fact, 91% of organisations have
experienced downtime from a DDoS attack, with each hour of downtime costing an
average of $300,000. Beyond the revenue loss, DDoS can erode customer trust,
force businesses to spend large amounts in compensations, and cause long-term
reputational damage; particularly if it leads to other breaches. ... A
comprehensive defence is essential, but with attacks ranging from massive
volumetric bombardments to sophisticated and persistent application layer
threats, what are the most important elements of potential solutions to
consider?
Breakdown of a Break-in: A Manufacturer's Ransomware Response
At the 2020 (ISC)² Security Congress, SCADAfence CEO Elad Ben-Meir took the
virtual stage to share details of a targeted industrial ransomware attack
against a large European manufacturer earlier this year. His discussion of how
the attacker broke in, the collection of forensic evidence, and the incident
response process offered valuable lessons to an audience of security
practitioners. The firm learned of this attack late at night when several
critical services stopped functioning or froze altogether. Its local IT team
found ransom notes on multiple network devices and initially wanted to pay the
attackers; however, after the adversaries raised their price, the company
contacted SCADAfence's incident response team. ... Before it arrived on-site,
the incident response team instructed the manufacturer to contain the threat to
a specific area of the network and prevent the spread of infection, minimize or
eliminate downtime of unaffected systems, and keep the evidence in an
uncontaminated state. "The initial idea was to try to understand where this was
coming from, what machines were infected and what machines those machines were
connected to, and if there was the ability to propagate additionally from
there," said Ben-Meir in his talk.
Sustainability: The growing issue of supply chain disruption
There is likely to be more disruption ahead as extreme weather events appear
to be on the rise. According to McKinsey, climate disruptions to supply
chains are going to become increasingly frequent and more severe. Kern said:
“It’s a mathematical effect that the number of natural catastrophes has been
increasing massively in recent years. If you look at Hurricanes Katrina,
Harvey, Irma and Maria as well as the Japanese earthquake and the Thai
floods you can see that we are getting loss events far above the previous
average of around $50bn. We’re seeing nat cats causing losses up to $150bn
of insured value, so as you can imagine this is a very big concern for us.”
Baumann pointed out that as well as more extreme weather, other future
trends could play a role. He said: “There are several drivers of disruption.
The complexity of supply chains is increasing, and more complexity means
more potential points of failure. Even simple goods can have as many as ten
suppliers. That in turn adds to the risk that transportation and production
may be disrupted.” At the same time, practices such as just-in-time delivery
or lean manufacturing can also introduce risks, particularly when
organisations are focused purely on reducing costs.
Figuring out programming for the cloud
The trick, says Rosoff, is to give the programmer enough of a language to
express the authorization rule, but not so much freedom that they can break
the entire application if they have a bug. How does one determine which
language to use? Rosoff offers three decision criteria: Does the language
allow me to express the complete breadth of programs I need to write? (In
the case of authorization, does it let me express all of my authZ
rules?); Is the language concise? (Is it fewer lines of code and easier
to read and understand than the YAML equivalent?); Is the language
safe? (Does it stop the programmer from introducing defects, even
intentionally?). We still have a ways to go to make declarative languages
the easy and obvious answer to infrastructure-as-code programming. One
reason developers turn to imperative languages is that they have huge
ecosystems built up around them with documentation, tooling, and more. Thus
it’s easier to start with imperative languages, even if they’re not ideal
for expressing authorization configurations in IaC. We also still have work
to do to make the declarative languages themselves approachable for newbies.
This is one reason Polar, for example, tries to borrow imperative syntax.
A Cloud-Native Architecture for a Digital Enterprise
Cloud-native applications are all about dynamism, and microservice
architecture (MSA) is critical to accomplish this goal. MSA helps to divide
and conquer by deploying smaller services focusing on well-defined scopes.
These smaller services need to integrate with different software as a
service (SaaS) endpoints, legacy applications, and other microservices to
deliver business functionalities. While microservices expose their
capabilities as simple APIs, ideally, consumers should access these as
integrated, composite APIs to align with business requirements. A
combination of API-led integration platform and cloud-native technologies
helps to provide secured, managed, observed, and monetized APIs that are
critical for a digital enterprise. The infrastructure and orchestration
layers represent the same functionality that we discussed in the
cloud-native reference architecture. Cloud Foundry, Mesos, Nomad,
Kubernetes, Istio, Linkerd, and OpenPaaS are some examples of current
industry-leading container orchestration platforms. Knative, AWS Lambda,
Azure Functions, Google Functions, and Oracle Functions are a few examples
of functions as a service platform (FaaS).
New streaming and digital media rules by Indian government rattles industry
So, what exactly does rule this portend? It's not entirely clear. To some
who earn their bread and butter monitoring these industries, the prognosis
is dire. Nikhil Pahwa, a digital rights activist and founder of prominent
website MediaNama that writes about these industries said this to the
Guardian: "The fear is that with the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting -- essentially India's Ministry of Truth -- now in a position
to regulate online news and entertainment, we will see a greater exercise of
government control and censorship." If this becomes reality it would wreck
the plans of companies such as Netflix and Amazon that have seen their
fortunes rise dramatically in the last few years with the spectacular boom
of smartphones and cheap data, both goldmines that keep on giving. The COVID
era has only added more fuel to this trend. Eager to capitalise on this
nascent market, Netflix has already pumped $400 million into the country and
amassed 2.5 million precious subscribers. Consulting outfit PwC predicts
that India's media and entertainment industry will grow at a brisk 10.1%
clip annually to reach $2.9 billion by 2024.
Executive Perspective: Privacy Ops Meets DataOps
PrivacyOps is emerging because privacy considerations can no longer be an
afterthought in an organization’s software development lifecycle -- they
need to be tightly integrated. There is pressure on organizations to prove
they are taking responsibility for personal data and acting in compliance
with regulations, and it’s only going to increase. The real opportunity that
the emergence of PrivacyOps presents is bringing security and privacy
processes together, and standardizing best practices that need to be
implemented across organizations. It’s far too easy for engineering,
analytics, and compliance teams to talk over each other. Bringing these
domains together through software will help to set expectations across the
industry about privatizing data assets. Techniques such as k-anonymization,
for example, are practiced by some of the best teams in healthcare, but they
are hardly commonplace, despite being relatively easy to implement. To
deliver compliant analytics, you need data engineers that can reliably ship
the data from place to place, while implementing the appropriate
transformations. However, what actually needs to be done is often not very
clear to the engineering team. Data scientists want as much data as
possible; compliance teams are pushing to minimize the data footprint.
Regulations are in flux and imprecise.
2021 predictions for the Everywhere Enterprise
While people will eventually return to the office, they won’t do so full-time,
and they won’t return in droves. This shift will close the circle on a long
trend that has been building since the mid-2000s: the dissolution of the
network perimeter. The network and the devices that defined its perimeter will
become even less special from a cybersecurity standpoint. ... Happy,
productive workers are even more important during a pandemic. Especially as on
average, employees are working three hours longer since the pandemic started,
disrupting the work-life balance. It’s up to employers to focus on the user
experience and make workers’ lives as easy as possible. When the COVID-19
lockdown began, companies coped by expanding their remote VPN usage. That got
them through the immediate crisis, but it was far from ideal. On-premises VPN
appliances suffered a capacity crunch as they struggled to scale, creating
performance issues, and users found themselves dealing with cumbersome VPN
clients and log-ins. It worked for a few months, but as employees settle in to
continue working from home in 2021, IT departments must concentrate on
building a better remote user experience.
Quote for the day:
"At first dreams seem impossible, then improbable, then inevitable." -- Christopher Reeve
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