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ITIL is simply a set of best practices for IT service management (ITSM). Over many years, IT practitioners have followed ITIL to manage the lifecycle of traditional IT-services. However, with the rise of cloud services, it’s changing how we launch, support and retire services.

With it, comes the question about how relevant ITIL is: “Can ITIL still help to manage cloud services?”
Recently, I attended a training course: “Professional Cloud Service Manager” offered by the “Cloud Credential Council” to address this very topic.

Note: For those who cannot attend the 3-days training here is a 60min snapshot: “Controlling the cloud with service management

The course was attended by customers (Maersk – the shipping/oil-drilling company) and vendors (i.e. Cisco). The course material was developed and presented by Mark O´Loughlin who has extensive theoretical (ITIL-master) and practical expertise (Microsoft Azure partner) to explain the challenges of managing the cloud with ITIL.

hybrid cloud

Besides the question of “How does the cloud impact ITIL ?”, I had a particular question as a Cisco employee: “Where are the opportunities for Cisco to better serve cloud customers?” Continue reading “How Do You Manage the Cloud with ITIL?”

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RolandRoth

Cloud Support Business Development Manager

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OpenStack blended cloud

Some people are perfectly happy buying and eating pre-made microwaveable meals.

These meals are rarely amazing. They’re never innovative. But they’re quick, perfectly consistent, and they get the job done. The only flexibility on the part of the consumer is which pre-made meal to pick. The decisions about what’s inside have been made for them, and there’s almost no risk of food poisoning. It’s a perfect example of “Good, fast, cheap. Pick two.”

Other people however, prefer the farmers’ market. The best chefs in the world are artists. They need selection. Choice. Flexibility. It’s that combination that allows for culinary innovation and creativity.

Continue reading “The Farmers’ Market for Development Teams”

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Last week, I was acknowledged by the Alum Rock Counseling Center for my personal commitment to mentoring at-risk students. As I prepared my thank you remarks, I was reminded how much I value youth mentoring nonprofits such as Alum Rock, Big Brother Big Sisters, and Child Advocates. Through mentor-mentee relationships, students are propelled to learn, to grow, and to discover their own genius.

It worked for me.

HCF #2

My parents immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s with little experience on living, working, or educating my sisters and me in this country. As a result, I leaned on mentors to guide me in areas my parents could not. Mentors who connected with my heart and with my mind made all the difference, because literacy and math achievement programs alone were not enough.

Continue reading “Mentoring At-Risk Students Good for Our Hearts and Minds”

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Ricardo Benavidez

Senior Community Relations Manager

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Since Cisco UCS Mini launched last September, Cisco and our partners (Citrix, EMC, Microsoft, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Oracle, SAP, and VMware) have been hard at work putting together a wide variety of solutions.

On the way to tradeshow week (May 4th), I’ll be doing a brief blog series on UCS Mini tied to these shows.

Continue reading “Cisco UCS Mini – Powering Microsoft Applications”

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Bill Shields

Senior Product Manager

UCS Solutions Product Management

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Organizations are under relentless attack, and security breaches happen every day. A global community of attackers creates advanced malware and launches it via multi-faceted attacks and through multiple attack vectors into organizations of all sizes.

These increasingly costly attacks against organizations of all sizes place customer data, corporate secrets, and intellectual property at risk. Smaller organizations that form part of the supply chain are targeted not only for their own assets but as an entry point for attacks against larger organizations that they partner with.

We believe the most effective way to address these real-world challenges is with continuous threat protection that is both pervasive and integrated. This goes beyond traditional point-in-time detection and taps into context-rich threat intelligence, dynamic malware analysis, and retrospective security to allow continuous breach detection, response, and remediation across the full attack continuum.

For this reason, we are unveiling new models of Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services for SMB, midsize organizations, and branch offices. These next-generation firewall (NGFW) models bring integrated threat defense, low total cost of ownership, and simplified security management to smaller and distributed organizations.

Continue reading “A New Way Forward: Continuous Threat Protection for Organizations of All Sizes”

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Bill Mabon

Senior Manager, Security Products

Cisco Security

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Last week, I shared with you how to set up WAN networking with Cisco Prime Infrastructure. Today, as the second blog of my 5-part blog series, I’m going to discuss with you how to connect your branch site users to the LAN and wireless network with Prime. Before I go further, just as a quick heads up, here’s my weekly blog series plan on how to set up networking with Prime for a new branch site.

WAN deployment – blog 1
Converged wired and wireless  – blog 2 (this blog)
Application performance – blog 3
Troubleshooting – blog 4
Network health – blog 5
 steve song blog 2 pic 1

Your new branch router is up and running. Cisco IWAN is working beautifully. You can’t wait to connect your branch users to their LAN and wireless access network. Mobility is what everyone automatically counts on these days. Cisco forecasts an 18-fold growth in mobile traffic from wearable devices along from 2015 to 2019. Meantime, wired LAN is still critical. IP phones, printing and some business functions depend on rock solid wired LAN access. You want to set up your wired and wireless access for success. A big challenge is how to keep it simple and easy to manage. Continue reading “Bringing Up a New Branch Site the Easy Way with Prime Infrastructure – Part 2”

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Steven Song

Business Manager

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Last week, I attended a very interesting meeting in San Francisco for a program we call CHILL – Cisco Hyper Innovation Living Labs. The session, facilitated by the Factory, an incubator backed by Skype co-founder Janus Friis, included key leaders from retail, consumer products, and finance industries.

Continue reading “Let’s CHILL… an IoE innovation acronym”

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Wim Elfrink

Executive Vice President, Industry Solutions & Chief

Globalisation Officer

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Many enterprises today want to build a private cloud to gain efficiencies such as on-demand service delivery and pay-as-you-go use of IT infrastructure services, all while maintaining control, accountability, and data sovereignty. There are two ways an organization can realize the benefits of cloud. One is to build and maintain a private cloud. The other is to have a trusted service provider host and manage your private cloud. The first step in making the decision is to gain a full understanding of business and application requirements.

Start by asking yourself some basic questions:

1. Do you have the right in-house resources to build and maintain a private cloud?

2. Is your company in a position to spend the capex necessary to build your own cloud, or is a pay-as you go model more beneficial?

3. What (if any) regulatory compliance issues does your company need to address regarding security, privacy, and data sovereignty?

Continue reading “Building a Private Cloud: Considerations to Maximize Success”

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Mark Balch

Product Management

Cloud Management Software & UCS Solutions

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This post was authored by Nick Biasini with contributions from Kevin Brooks

Overview

The use of macro enabled word documents has exploded over the last year, a primary example payload being Dridex. Last week, Talos researchers identified another short lived spam campaign that was delivering a new variant of Dridex. This particular campaign lasted less than five hours and was successful at mutating the subject and attachments to avoid detection. The five hour campaign actually consisted of two separate emails that both had malicious word documents as attachments. A sample of the two different subject lines are shown below.

Campaign One Subject:
Debit Note [97994] information attached to this email

Campaign Two Subject:
48142 – Your Latest Documents from RS Components 822379272

*Note: Italicized text used to identify mutating portions of email subject

Both campaigns centered on invoices being sent as word document attachments. Not only did the attackers use different subjects for every email they also rarely reused an attachment name. Less than five percent of the emails observed contained re-used attachment names.

Continue reading “Threat Spotlight: Spam Served With a Side of Dridex”

Authors

Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group