I discuss the current relationship that Cisco and Rockwell have developed and how it is enabling real value for manufacturing customers.
Watch the video and you’ll see how Cisco and Rockwell Automation are helping customers integrate their plant’s with the enterprise IT; how they can increase asset efficiency, improve their products; and increase operational efficiency. Some of the key initiatives are how OEMs can integrate with customer networks and the networks still be easy to use and operated by the customer or even by the OEM, remotely. Read More »
This is the Forth part in the series “Missives from the Trenches.” (Here are the (first), (second), and(third) parts of the series.) In today’s blog post we will be discussing Cisco IOS Netflow. Netflow has an interesting position as being both the most useful and least used tool. When meeting with other companies I often ask them “do you use Netflow?” By asking this question I am actually asking several different questions--Do you care about the security of your site? Or do you have any hopes in managing/responding to events at your site? Answers to these questions unfortunately tend to be as follows: What is Netflow? The network guys use it but we don’t. I think we capture it somewhere but not really sure where -- and so on. I then mention that Netflow is free, they don’t have to buy anything to start using it, and it’s used for every large case we do. At that point they start looking angrily at the sales engineer asking why this is the first they are hearing about it. So what is Netflow and why does Cisco CSIRT say its critical to daily event management? Read on to find out!
Have you ever watched a movie called “The Abyss?” Near the end of the movie there’s a scene that I think is particularly relevant to this post. Our hero has to go 17,000 feet under the sea to disarm a nuclear bomb (watch the movie and you’ll know how the bomb ended up there and why our hero has the unenviable task of disarming it). And when he gets to the bomb, he’s instructed to “cut the blue wire with a white stripe — not the black wire with a yellow stripe” in order to disable it.
Easy enough, right? The problem is that our hero is using a glow stick as a light source, and under its yellowish light he can’t accurately determine which wire is which; they both look exactly the same. So after a bit of indecision, preparing to cut one but changing his mind, he goes ahead and cuts a wire. Lucky for him, it was the right one.
While here at the Cisco PSIRT we do not have to deal with such explosive situations (well, maybe not in a physical sense), we do, however, think that making security decisions based on incomplete data is certainly not a good approach. And this is why our vulnerability disclosure process keeps evolving over time.
The iPad is one of the hottest gifts for this holiday season. Kids and adults alike are hoping to receive one as a gift from others or as a gift for themselves. It will be a busy time for the App Store for sure and many of the adults will probably be trying to use their iPad to access corporate email or other information.
Cisco’s gift for those users is Cisco AnyConnect for the iPad, making that corporate user more secure. The market-leading secure mobility client, positioned as a leader by Gartner in the recent 2010 Magic Quadrant for SSL VPNs , is now available on the Apple App Store free of charge. Companies with AnyConnect Essentials or Premium VPN licenses on their Cisco ASA 55000 can now allow their employees to connect using the iPad. Companies can now realize the value of Cisco Secure Mobility and Borderless networks. They can connect anyone, anywhere—securely, reliably, and seamlessly. Read More »
You can provide guests with Internet access while ensuring the safety of your company data
I do a fair bit of traveling in my job. When selecting hotels, secure Internet access is one of my top criteria. It’s right up there with a comfy bed and fluffy pillows. I want to know that when I’m using the hotel network, I can access my corporate email or do online banking without having to worry about whether an intruder is prying on my Internet connection. It’s the same when I visit a client site. Clients very kindly let me use their Internet connection, but they want to ensure that I can’t snoop on their corporate network. Read More »
