In just a couple of days, many of you will be taking planes, trains, and automobiles to sunny Barcelona. I see that the weather forecast is for 65ºF / 19ºC for the opening day of Mobile World Congress. I really appreciate how the MWC timeframe has gradually crept closer to Spring over these past few years. Maybe you are not paying attention to the weather as much as me. You would if you had the same view that I have out my window, where it is currently 20ºF / -6ºC. Yes, I should clean off my roof. But I do like that my garage roof serves as an historical record of the unmerciful winter we have had here in Boston in northeast U.S., where we have had over 100 inches / 250 cm of snow so far.
Threat actors are continually evolving their techniques. One of the latest Graftor variants is delivering a Malware DLL via a PNG file delivery mechanism. Graftor basically indicates some type of trojan hiding in a piece of software. Hiding executables and DLLs in PNG files is yet another attempt to avoid detection and deliver malicious content to user systems. In this instance, the malicious content is placed at the end of the real PNG file data.
On February 13, I attended the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University. President Obama, along with senior leaders spanning federal government, industry and technology sectors, law enforcement, consumer privacy advocates, and others convened to collaborate and build partnerships within the public and private sectors to further improve cybersecurity practices.
The keynote, panels and workgroup sessions covered a range of preeminent topics but the resounding theme from each was simple – everyone is online, therefore everyone is vulnerable. A comprehensive and collaborative effort from private and public sectors will be necessary to address these challenges. Sharing information in a safe, secure, confidential and reliable way will be a major factor in this coordinated approach.
Throughout the Summit, the key challenges were consistent –
The need for legislation to protect information sharing
Eliminate cross-industry barriers and establish partnerships
Liabilities created by the convergence of wireless & digital technology
Need to raise the security baseline for digital products and controls
Specifically within the utilities industry, there has been a consistent focus on reliability and safety, but modernizing the electric grid is an ongoing process. Cisco Secure Ops and Collaborative Operations are just a couple of the solutions addressing this industry evolution; click here to learn more. In my next blog, I’ll address some of these Cybersecurity exposures and how to leverage technology to reduce these risks.
Guest blog and interview written by Christine Morgner
At the Women of Impact Conference this year on March 19th, our focus is to empower attendees to Be Fearless – by taking risks, overcoming obstacles and blazing new trails in their personal and professional lives. The Conference focus is to connect, develop and inspire the women in technology at Cisco. Every week leading to our conference, we are planning to highlight a couple of our Fearless Females that embody our Be Fearless theme in their professional and personal lives.
Madhuri is a loyal and proud member of the Cisco IT team, based in Bangalore, India. For the last four and a half years, Madhuri has positively impacted Cisco’s IT organization by providing exceptional service contract support to our top customers. Even though it’s clear her role at Cisco is a result of her fearless actions and perseverance, Madhuri says she feels “lucky” to have her job.
Madhuri is originally from a small village in rural India. She credits her Mom for the inspiration to chase her dreams. Madhuri’s Mom worked outside the home during her childhood, which was not the norm in her culture. She encouraged Madhuri to do the same, but not before getting an education first. Despite many struggles including leaving the only life she knew for the daunting life in a big city, Madhuri successfully graduated from the Institute of Technology in Bangalore and was recruited for a job at Cisco. During the start of Madhuri’s career at Cisco, her biggest challenge was learning the English language. She was so close to quitting at one point, but her Mom urged her to fight and she did.
Madhuri said she experienced a huge triumph when she proved to her family, her manager, and most importantly to herself that she could overcome anything. Madhuri also acknowledges her current manager for his outstanding support and motivation.
In her free time, Madhuri enjoys mentoring young women in their pursuit of an education and a career. Madhuri also likes traveling, hiking, and helping others to see the limitless possibilities the world can offer. She is a true product of the opportunities any person can experience with the right amount of determination and fearlessness.
Have you registered for the Women of Impact Conference yet? For more conference details or registration information, click here:
Share with us with your stories and pictures how you can Be Fearless on Twitter @Cisco_WOI or find & LIKE us on Facebook on the Cisco Empowered Women’s Network Facebook page! Don’t forget to use the #WOI2015 hashtag!
One of the first lessons that every economics student is taught is “supply and demand” – the fundamental economic principle that price goes up with increased demand. Yet we are witnessing the opposite to these age old principles in the mobile business. Despite phenomenal demand for mobility services, the mobile operators that provide these services are engaged in a fierce price war.
SQL Server 2005 end of support is on April 12, 2016. Many of our customers agree that it’s time to think about migrating/upgrading to something better and faster soon. If you are still using SQL Server 2005, here are some points to consider.
SQL Server 2014 New Features This is a major upgrade packed with new features of SQL Server 2014 include In-Memory online transaction processing (OLTP), updateable Columnstore indexes, and AlwaysOn availability groups.
Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS)So why should you consider Cisco UCS to take advantage of these SQL Server 2014 features? Let’s start with performance.
Cisco UCS C460 M4 running Microsoft SQL Server 2014 outperformed:
Fujitsu SPARC M10-4S by 80 percent
Dell PowerEdge R820 by 31 percent
IBM x3859 by 13 percent
Why are we so good?
Optimize OLTP workloads The new OLTP engine helps facilitate high performance, low latency data access. Cisco UCS has high memory capacities that support you to take advantage of the SQL Servers’ In-Memory OLTP engine. Progress Insurance used Cisco UCS and In-Memory OLTP and saw a 4x performance gain. They saw a 320% increase in processing rate, from 5,000 transactions/second to 21,000 transactions.
Optimize BI and Data Warehousing workloads Columnstore index provides significant performance improvement for Data Warehouse queries. You no longer need to drop and recreate the index when making changes. We have seen 10x better performance results. Such workloads are increasing tenfold every 5 years. With high memory support, Cisco UCS Blade Servers provide up to 3TB of RAM and the Cisco UCS Rack Servers up to 6TB of RAM. You can trust us to give you the best experience.
Maximizing Availability Cisco UCS’s service profiles and the stateless architecture allow SQL Server workloads to be introduced back into production in 5-7 minutes regardless if it’s virtualized or bare metal. Children’s Hospital in Colorado leveraged the service profiles and provisioned 15 servers in 1 day. Without them, it usually takes up to weeks to configure the new servers.
SQL Server’s AlwaysOn AGs provide protection against unplanned downtime. During a failure, Cisco Unified Fabric ensures the connection between the primary and the secondary replicas has the best performance of bandwidth.
As retailers compete for consumers’ attention—and purchases—they are always looking for ways to deliver a better shopping experience that will make customers want to come back to the store, again and again. A good starting point is to eliminate some of the common frustrations of the shopping experience, such as long checkout lines.
As the focus on securing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) supply chains intensifies, the number of standards and guidelines is increasing at a troubling pace. These well-intended efforts to provide a framework for security may very well be “cooking the global ICT supply chain goose,” without moving the security needle. For more on this challenge see SC Magazine from the CSO’s Desk: The proliferation of mandates.
The transportation industry is on the cusp of a total revolution with the Internet of Everything pushing our innovation. Cisco estimates that the coming together of people, process, data and things in Internet of Everything (IoE) world creates unprecedented opportunity. Specifically, over $19 trillion in value at stake will be up for grabs by public and private sector organizations and our industry is certainly capturing its share of that opportunity. Through the use of networked sensors and real-time data reports, agencies like ours across the world have used connected transportation to keep commuters moving by setting new standards for millions of miles worth of roadways. Read the ASFINAG case study. Continue reading “Internet of Everything Fuels New Standards for Smarter Austrian Roads”
In just a couple of days, many of you will be taking planes, trains, and automobiles to sunny Barcelona. I see that the weather forecast is for 65ºF / 19ºC for the opening day of Mobile World Congress. I really appreciate how the MWC timeframe has gradually crept closer to Spring over these past few years. Maybe you are not paying attention to the weather as much as me. You would if you had the same view that I have out my window, where it is currently 20ºF / -6ºC. Yes, I should clean off my roof. But I do like that my garage roof serves as an historical record of the unmerciful winter we have had here in Boston in northeast U.S., where we have had over 100 inches / 250 cm of snow so far.
So why should you consider Cisco UCS to take advantage of these SQL Server 2014 features? Let’s start with performance.
