My friends at Cisco’s TechWiseTV have taken MDM to heart and have offered some keen insight from a geek’s POV (point of view) into MDM. Starting with a primer on MDM, Networking 101: MDM, Jimmy Ray answers the questions on what is MDM and what can it do for my organization in his entertaining and educational white board approach.

Read More »

Tags: MDM, mobility, mobility security, security

“Watering Hole” attacks, as evidenced by the recent attack involving the U.S. Department of Labor, are becoming increasingly popular as alternatives to attacks such as Spear Phishing. In a “Watering Hole” attack, the attacker compromises a site likely to be visited by a particular target group, rather than attacking the target group directly. Eventually, someone from the targeted group visits the “trusted” site (A.K.A. the “Watering Hole”) and becomes compromised.

Cisco identified suspicious GET requests made to the www.sellagreement.com, a malicious site which was recently linked with the Department of Labor attack. According to the evidence we have, the sites www.kforce.com and www.sbc.net were among those compromised during this attack. The webpages that were serving malicious content from these sites were mostly job-search related, but several requests to www.sellagreement.com lacked a “Referrer:” HTTP header entirely. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Security, department of labor, malicious javascript, spear phishing, TRAC, water hole attack

A new white paper from IDC discusses how converged infrastructure solutions from Cisco and EMC, through VCE, can enable IT organizations to deploy a highly virtualized, highly efficient computing infrastructure. For those new to the converged systems topic, VCE was formed by Cisco and EMC to build converged infrastructure systems that dramatically reduce the complexity that would otherwise be required to bring together technology components.

IDC highlights that the data center is changing and IT companies are adopting standards in hardware and software that will allow the entire infrastructure to be operated and managed more easily. IDC states that if standardization, flexibility, and simplification are not already top priorities for an organization, then complexity and inefficiencies can emerge as chief drivers of operational costs. To prove this point, IDC conducted platform migration studies in 2010 and 2012 and found that more than 50% of all sites were actively working on platform migration and that each migration targeted 40% or more of legacy systems (i.e. RISC/UNIX). The drive to consolidate workloads and to reduce costs continues to accelerate.

The white paper includes profiles from companies that have recently migrated from legacy RISC/UNIX platforms to VCE Vblock™ Systems and realized significant improvements in performance and reduction in server deployment times.

The paper conclusion summarizes that converged infrastructure solutions deployed as part of a data center transformation strategy can reduce IT staff costs, maintenance and management costs, and power/cooling costs.

The full length IDC white paper can be found here. Please also go to the following hyperlinks for more information on RISC/UNIX Migration, Cisco and EMC, and VCE Vblock Systems.

If you are attending EMC World this week, please come by the Cisco booth in the Solutions Pavilion to learn more about Cisco and EMC solutions.

By Andrew Yourtchenko, Technical Leader, Network Operations Systems Technology Group

As any geek, I find it a lot of fun to get some hands with the new technology -- be it a new gadget, new product or a solution.

It’s not very often that I have a chance to play with a whole new protocol. EANTC (European Advanced Network Testing Center) interoperability testing gave me such a chance. The bulk of the work happened on EANTC premises in Germany this past February. The overall activity involved many representatives from various vendors making their devices talk to each other. The goal is to test the protocols in several areas, including MPLS, SDN, and IPv6, but the highlight for me was the testing of MAP (Mapping Address and Port) -- a new protocol to enable the sharing of IPv4 addresses by several customer premise devices without keeping the state at the service provider end.

This protocol is being developed by IETF, and has two flavours, the standards-track “MAP” which uses encapsulation to transmit the packets, otherwise known also as MAP, and the experimental track “MAP-T” -- which uses the address family translation in order to send packets, instead of the encapsulation. Read More »

Tags: asr 9000, asr9k, ipv4, IPv6, Service Provider

Nothing makes a product marketeer’s job easier than when customers send in their own video testimonials about how successful they have been using our products. Today’s video comes all the way from one of my favorite cities in the world, Buenos Aires.

Martin Cabrera and Fernando Vicens, Data Center Managers from Argentina-based service provider IPLAN share their experience with the Nexus 1000V virtual switch. Their key points are two of the things we always say about Nexus 1000V and we continually hear from our customers:

1) Nexus 1000V allows virtual network policy controls to remain with the networking team, and

2) virtual networks are easier to manage when they are a seamless part of the physical infrastructure (consistent management, visibility, etc.)

Take it away Martin and Fernando:

Read More »

Tags: customer case study, Nexus 1000v