2015 - Page 99 of 217

July 9, 2015 Leave a Comment

Behind the cloud: Interview with Cisco engineer John Schofield

Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud delivers a true public cloud experience in a private cloud environment—on your premises, behind your firewall. We handle the engineering, setup, and ongoing operations, so you can focus on building and running your applications. It’s a core component of Cisco’s growing cloud portfolio.

Today we meet with one of the real people behind the scenes that make this solution possible: John Schofield

John, what is it that you do for Cisco as part of the Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud team?

My thing has always been Linux system administration. Mostly I’ve been working on proactive hardware monitoring. Lately I’ve been doing more OpenStack work around automating live migrations. And of course helping our customers with the issues they run into with OpenStack.

Proactive hardware monitoring? Can you explain? What is it and why does it matter in a cloud environment?

Every five minutes, we are asking our customers’ hardware “How ya doing?” Which really means, “How are your fans? How’s your hard drive? How are your RAID controllers?” And most of the time the response is “My fans are fine. My hard drive is humming along nicely. And my RAID controllers are working perfectly.”

Continue reading “Behind the cloud: Interview with Cisco engineer John Schofield”

Authors

Ali Amagasu

Marketing Communications Manager

1 Comment

Cisco Secure Ops demonstrated at Cisco Live 2015

Peter Granger

As I mentioned in my last blog: “Cisco Live Hosts Enhanced Cisco Collaborative Operations Solution Demonstration“, Cisco Live excited many delegates this year, and one of the highlights was indeed the World of Solutions. I talked about how the industrial section of the ‘Cisco Campus’ not only showed off lots of new advances, but, for the first time, the small but important process industries (including Oil and Gas) booth opened up showing the services-based solutions Secure Ops and Collaborative Operations. Now let’s talk about Secure Ops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO20kmLZnKg&index=2&list=PLC9B77E2CF83FB00D

In the video, I interview Cisco and Partner representatives to discuss the Secure Ops Solution from Cisco: What it is, what the business need is, and how Cisco is helping customers get better better business outcomes – especially when it comes to cybersecurity! Having the Secure Ops solution can increase availability of systems and critical infrastructure, reducing downtime in, for example, the oil and gas industry, or or any industry that relies on critical infrastructure such as process manufacturing, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals or other industrial automation environments.

Cisco Secure Ops delivers a standardized, comprehensive and integrated approach to security. It is supported by automation suppliers such as Yokogawa and Rockwell and technology providers such as McAfee and Symantec and provides a framework for a wide range of partners to participate. It’s currently installed at customers such as Royal Dutch Shell.

Rob Arlic of Cisco is joined by Galina Antova at Cisco Live. Rob talks about what Secure Ops is, how it helps provide not only cybersecurity protection, but also demonstrable regulation compliance. It therefore provide companies with higher availability and better Operational Excellence.

Galina talks about what’s new. Added capabilities include going deeper than just the IP network to gain more profound visibility into operations. Then gaining a view of what’s normal/abnormal in those other networks which can be assessed. Managing all that is key, and included.

Rob concludes by summing up: “It’s all about up-time and availability. If there are security vulnerabilities, (making sure) those are addressed proactively, proactively and preemptively”.

To learn more go to www.cisco.com/go/oilandgas.

And, as always, tell us what you think.

Authors

Peter Granger

Senior Sales Transformation Manager

Cisco Collaboration at Tech on Deck

Rowan Trollope

This week I had a great opportunity to participate in the first ever Tech on Deck with Robert Scoble and Scott Jordan.

Tech on Deck is being broadcast from SCOTTeVEST’s headquarters in Ketchum, Idaho, which happens to be a mile away from Sun Valley where the annual Allen & Co. Conference is taking place. This event boasts an impressive list of the who’s who in technology and media so Robert and Scott thought what better time to do a live broadcast exploring many different topics ranging from technology, to startups, to music and more. We provided the video collaboration and wireless network technology to help make Robert and Scott’s vision become reality.

During our discussion, we talked about what I am doing at Cisco, our vision for collaboration and dug deep into video and a hot new category called business messaging, Cisco Spark and our cloud platform. I am glad to have supported this inaugural event and check out the full interview here.

Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Congratulations to the entire Tech on Deck team for a successful event!

For more information, visit:

Authors

Rowan Trollope

Senior Vice President and General Manager

IoT and Collaboration Technology Group

July 8, 2015 4 Comments

Ding! Your RAT has been delivered

Talos Group

This post was authored by Nick Biasini

Talos is constantly observing malicious spam campaigns delivering various different types of payloads. Common payloads include things like Dridex, Upatre, and various versions of Ransomware. One less common payload that Talos analyzes periodically are Remote Access Trojans or RATs. A recently observed spam campaign was using freeware remote access trojan DarkKomet (a.k.a DarkComet). This isn’t a novel approach since threat actors have been leveraging tools like DarkKomet or Hawkeye keylogger for quite sometime.

Some interesting techniques in this campaign were used by the threat actor to bypass simplistic sandbox methods including use of sub folders, right to left override, and excessive process creation. This threat also had surprising longevity and ample variations, used over time, to help ensure the success of the attack.

What is DarkKomet?

Continue reading “Ding! Your RAT has been delivered”

Authors

Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

7 Comments

“Seeing is Hearing” – Where Video Really Makes the Difference

Kim Littleton

I love hearing customers talk how they’ve conquered communications challenges using our technology. It’s exciting to be a key part of their journeys and successes. A recent conversation with such a customer affected me in a powerful and personal way that I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

It was late afternoon at a recent technology trade show. Booth traffic was lighter as attendees headed toward a reception to wrap up a long, information-packed day. I was mentally massaging my aching “trade-show” feet and thinking about a research-paper topic for the American Sign Language (ASL) class that my daughter and I are taking at our local community college. A customer strolled up to ask about our latest portfolio enhancements, and thus began our extraordinary conversation.

He shared how his organization comprises a group of companies that deliver network-based interpretation services for different types of clients. His team provides “in-person” ASL interpretation through a video-relay-service (VRS) using Cisco collaboration technologies.

The organization offers the service to registered deaf and hard of hearing clients across North America. It uses Cisco video conferencing solutions. Continue reading ““Seeing is Hearing” – Where Video Really Makes the Difference”

Authors

Kim Littleton

Product Marketing Manager

UC & Collaboration Infrastructure

Simpler IT Management Increases the Effectiveness of Advanced Technologies

Joann Starke

Advanced technology assists your business on its journey to becoming more efficient and agile so it can keep serving the rising expectations of customers. But, how can you help these advanced technologies serve your business well?

Technology headlines focus on the individual tools to help you support advanced technologies; but the pivotal reality is that the foundation for all such technologies is your data center infrastructure. If your infrastructure cannot meet the speed and flexibility needs of these new technologies, they won’t help your business become more efficient or agile.

The good news is that Cisco has made automating your infrastructure straight forward with Cisco UCS Director. This solution replaces manual tools and processes with automated workflows to deliver infrastructure resources within minutes. It reduces data center operational complexity across Cisco and multi-vendor infrastructure components.

Need proof?

Continue reading “Simpler IT Management Increases the Effectiveness of Advanced Technologies”

Authors

Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

July 7, 2015 1 Comment

#CiscoChampion Radio S2|Ep 26. Dallas / Fort Worth Cisco User Group

Rachel Bakker

#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we’ll be talking about the Dallas / Fort Worth Cisco User Group (DFW CUG) with its leadership team.

Listen to the Podcast.

Learn about the Cisco Champions Program HERE.
See a list of all #CiscoChampion Radio podcasts HERE.
Ask about the next round of Cisco Champions nominations. EMAIL US.

Cisco SMEs
Chris Williamson, DFW CUG Director – Education and Certifications, Cisco Network Engineer
Beau Williamson, DFW CUG Founding and Active member
Ken Cooper, DFW CUG Founding member and President
Eric Severson, DFW CUG Vice-President
Mark Scewczul, DFW CUG Director of Sales & Marketing

Cisco Champion Guest Hosts
Stephen Rodriguez, @WiFiJanitor, Solutions Architect Network and Mobility
Rowell Dionicio, @rowelldionicio, Network Engineer
Chris Partsenidis, @firewallcx, Senior Network Engineer

Moderator
Lauren Friedman (@lauren) Continue reading “#CiscoChampion Radio S2|Ep 26. Dallas / Fort Worth Cisco User Group”

Authors

Rachel Bakker

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

Maximizing Your Return on Investment From Data Virtualization Customers

Kevin Ott

Forrester Consulting recently conducted a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study and examined the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying the Cisco Data Virtualization solution. This provides readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of investing in the Cisco Data Virtualization solution for their organizations.

Forrester gathered data through interviews with some of our long-term customers who have several years’ experience using the solution to better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with Cisco Data Virtualization. In this blog, I’d like to dive a little deeper on these customers, the challenges they were faced with and the results they are seeing from implementing Cisco Data Virtualization.

Continue reading “Maximizing Your Return on Investment From Data Virtualization Customers”

Authors

Marketing Communications Manager

Authors

Senior Sales Transformation Manager

Authors

Senior Vice President and General Manager

IoT and Collaboration Technology Group

Authors

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office

What is DarkKomet?

Authors

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

Authors

Product Marketing Manager

UC & Collaboration Infrastructure

Authors

No Longer with Cisco

Authors

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

Authors

No Longer with Cisco