The Hub and Spoke!

HRToolkit helps you with an easy-to-implement HR solution for your business at an affordable price. This product is easy to use for any start-up or small business and consists of a set of ready-to-use HR policies, templates and documents. The solution is cost-effective and assists you in setting up employment relations correctly.  Procedurally incorrect or substantively unfair dismissals are costly if they are referred to the CCMA or Labour Court. Minimise that risk with HRToolKit, which contains everything you need to handle employee changes effectively and in a legally compliant way. As a business owner, you will reap the rewards by knowing your HR system is in place.  Download the toolkit here .

In search of improvement, we have repeatedly bet on new tools to improve our work. We’ve cycled through new platforms (e.g., Virtualization, Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes) and new automation (e.g., Puppet, Chef, Ansible). While each comes with its own merits, has the stress and overload on operations fundamentally changed? Enterprises have also spent the past two decades liberally applying Management frameworks like ITIL and COBIT. Would an average operations engineer say things have gotten better or worse? In the midst of all of this, there is conventional wisdom that rarely gets questioned. Read the blog post over at RUNDECK here .

You may recall a post from early 2017 in which I mentioned that containers were tired of being typecast . It was January, to be exact. Which means containers are no longer tired of being typecast, they are downright exhausted with it.   The proof of their weariness can be seen in a recent Portworx survey on container adoption . Significant gains in both container adoption - up to 82% - and use of containers in production - now at 83% - were reported.   But that's no surprise. Container adoption has been a steady course to consume budget for a couple years now. What may be a surprise is the reasons behind that adoption. Spoiler alert: it isn't really about microservices.  Read the blog post at f5 over here .

Phishing is the primary method of entry in 90% of cyber-attacks world-wide and many high-profile breaches emanate from a single, successful phish.  Since it typically takes more than 200 days to detect a breach, global organizations need to focus their efforts on prevention and response to neutralize these highly successful attack methods.

Carbon Black Enterprise Response is the most complete endpoint detection and response solution available to security teams who want a single platform for hunting threats, disrupting adversary behavior and changing the economics of security operations. Only Cb Enterprise Response is the #1 EDR solution among global enterprises and 70+ of the world‰Ûªs leading IR and MSSP firms.

A rip of Brotherhood of man, that ripped ABBA Long ago, High on a mountain in Gauteng Lived a young crooked boy, Angelo Who met a young Watson and he loved him so Rich was he, Came from a very high family, Angelo knew it could never be, They ran away to their destiny Running away together Running away forever Angelo Running away from danger Hiding from every prosecution Angelo They knew it was wrong They found a greed so strong They took their bribes at night And in the morning light They found them in the vault They saw them lying there, hand-in-hand Long ago, High on a mountain in Gauteng Lived a young crooked boy, Angelo Who met a young Watson and he loved him so Running away together, Running away forever, Angelo Running away from danger, Hiding from every prosecution, Angelo They knew it was wrong They found…

There’s no doubt that Software-Defined Wide Area Networking is one of the most hyped technologies we’ve seen recent history. From cost savings to unprecedented simplicity, no claim seemed to be off limits when it came to controller driven networks. Now that’s it’s 2019 and some of the dust is settling we wanted to have a chat with a couple of engineers who have been in the thick of it and know what it’s really like to design, implement, and operate Software-Defined WANs. Listen to podcast over at Network Collective here .

Cyberattacks are gaining in complexity and sophistication. Recent attacks such as Throwhammer , Nethammer , NetSpectre , Faxploit , and Malware Guard Extension attest to the increasingly complex methods devised by hackers to take control over remote networks and to spread malware.  Today’s cyber reality surpasses by far the fertile imagination of Hollywood cyber fiction films.   Another hacking invention was recently exposed in Bloomberg Businessweek’s “Big Hack” news story (published on October 2018), which described how a maliciously planted tiny chip on a server board can pose serious security risks to organizations. The information revealed in that story has managed to disturb the waters in the tech and security industries and communities, as it described alleged infiltrations of data centers of some major corporate and governmental organizations. Read the article over at Mellanox here .

Everyone has one, but it’s still not an easy subject for most people. We’re talking about the cost of downtime in their network. It’s not an easy calculation if you want to be accurate, but one would be hard pressed to find anyone that says network downtime today is LESS expensive than in the past. Read the blog post over at Uplogix over here .

Back in December, O2, the Telefonica operating company in the United Kingdom, had a massive outage. According to O2, about 25 million subscribers were affected by a small software issue. The company will need to reimburse customers for the outage, which lasted an entire day. An article in The Independent states, O2 announced “Pay monthly customers will be given two free days on their contract. And pay as you go customers will get 10 percent of their credit for free.” Read the blog post over at SevOne here .

Imagine you’ve just made a million-dollar investment in your business. You’ve done your research and are convinced this is the right investment to take your business to the next level. Yet something is bothering you about your last few emails. Why did the investment company change the banking details at the last minute? And why have some of the key people in the deal not weighed in on those changes?  It’s a lot of money, and you lose a night’s sleep over this. Read the post over at IMP Solutions over here .

SD-WAN introduces new security options, not previously available with legacy networking technologies, that make it easier to manage and secure network traffic. Read the article over at Network World here . 

In recent investigations, Compass recognized a raise in popularity for attackers to compromise Microsoft Exchange credentials. As one of the first steps after having obtained the credentials (most commonly through phishing), attackers created malicious inbox rules to copy in- and outgoing emails of their victim. The attacker’s goal hereby was to guarantee access to emails even after the compromised credentials were changed. Read the article over at Compass security here.

Direct deposit is a common practice in today’s world, and it’s how the majority of Americans prefer to be paid for their work. The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) estimates that nearly 60% of all employees use direct deposit to receive their pay check. On top of that, more than 90 percent of social security checks are paid via direct deposit. Unfortunately, hackers have begun figuring out how to use direct deposit to their advantage, by breaking into people’s accounts and steal money.  Read the article over at psafe here .

PacketSky is the African region agent and support centre of Hepic. Hepic is a Real-Time, modular, end-to-end Capture, Monitoring and Troubleshooting framework for IP based Voice, Video and RTC Services and UC Networks, strategically supported with native agent integration in leading Open-Source telephony platforms and vendor-agnostic software probes designed to grow, scale and evolve alongside constantly evolving Services and Networks. Find out more about the product here .

Studying how tree frogs regulate their communications, so each amphibian in the colony can hear everything, could provide ideal data traffic routings, scientists say. Read the article over at Network World here .

A networking zine by J ulia Evans

This is a song for the lonely, can you hear me tonight? For the broken hearted, battle scarred  I'll be by your side  And this is a song for the lonely  When your dreams won't come true  Can you hear this prayer  Because someone's there for you

The restaurant sector is quickly becoming reliant on Internet connectivity for many of its day-to-day functions. Having an always-on Internet is now critical for many restaurants.  Read the article over at Multapplied here . 

A comprehensive guide for choosing and setting up secure Wi-Fi. Read the article over at Motherboard here . 

Desktop Intel® Atom™ D525 Dual Core/ D425 Single Core 1.8 GHz Processor with 4 PCIe GbE LAN Feature Desktop Network Platform Intel® Atom™ D525 Dual Core/D425 Single Core 1.8GHz Processor Support DDR3 800 Memory up to 2GB 4 x GbE LAN Ports Support LAN Bypass One PCI Expansion On-board CF Socket Internal one 2.5" HDD Bay Find out more about the product here .

The NC-4010, powered by the Celeron J1900 (Codenamed Bay Trail)processor, is a desktop form factor network appliance designed for entry-level network security, gateway or vCPE. View these and other network appliances over at Armortec here .

Vint Cerf, one of the "fathers" of the internet, says the network had two big flaws when it launched Vint Cerf , one of the creators of the internet, said the network had two big flaws when he launched it. The internet didn't have room for all the devices that would eventually be connected to it, said Cerf, now Google's chief internet evangelist. It also didn't have any built-in security protocol

The ER-6 business router provides enterprise-level, highly secure and reliable connectivity to the Internet for small and medium branches. Supports one-click flow control and manual flow control. Professional gateway device based on DPI seven-layer flow control. Built-in high-performance processor suitable for deployment of large-scale commercial scenarios. Find out more about the product over at FS here .

This legacy was picked up from 60,000 – 80,000 years ago, when successive waves of modern humans began migrating from Africa into Asia and Europe, encountering and interbreeding with their Neanderthal cousins who had evolved there from around 250,000 years ago.  Their hybrid children bore genes from both lineages, but eventually modern human genes diluted Neanderthal genes to the extent that the species seemed to disappear from the archaeological record around 30,000 years ago.  Those Neanderthal genetic mutations which were not beneficial to modern humans were  partially swept out by natural selection over time.  The remnants are alive in the genomes of Europeans and Asians . Recent genetic studies have shown that Neanderthal DNA spanning at least 20% of their ancient genome survives in modern humans of non-African ancestry. If you are of European or Asian heritage, then around 2% of your genome originated from Neanderthals. This legacy was picked up from 60 – 80,000 ye

Enterprise clients increasingly want service providers to deliver defined business outcomes. They are no longer satisfied with not being able to reconcile traditional service level performance metrics against the outcomes they wanted from the service.   This is forcing providers to re-think the way they take managed services to market. Being held accountable for a business outcome requires a fundamental shift of risk for the provider and an evolution of their capabilities. Read the article over at Dimension Data here .

It’s a typical day at the office, and you head to the conference room for a weekly status meeting with colleagues. The team greets you when you arrive, yet you’re the only one physically in the room. Everyone else has joined the meeting from different locations around the globe. As you get to work, an AI-powered voice assistant tracks the updates and assigns action items as they arise.  Read the article over at the Washington Post here .

In his most recent post, Webex Meetings or Zoom? Peering into Performance, posted January 10, 2019, at NoJitter.com , analyst Zeus Kerravala  performed a side-by-side comparison of Webex Meetings and Zoom. His positive assessment of the Webex Meetings interface, and equally importantly, its powerful communications backbone, reflects what many other clients and researchers have said: the new Webex Meetings works, and works better than others in this space. Read the blog over at Cisco here .

Berlin's flourishing tech scene attracts talent from across the globe. At a startup incubator in the western part of the city, an international team recently launched an app called SPRT, which connects sports enthusiasts.   Amy Cooper, a 20-year-old SPRT employee who moved to Germany from Britain last June, complains that Berlin's Internet speed is so slow, it feels like the old dial-up days she has heard her parents reminisce about. Read the article over at npr here .

Once upon a time, IT environments were far less complex. The chief challenge of monitoring tools was to gather data reliably and simply display it. Users were tech-savvy experts on their IT environments. Once they had the data, they knew exactly what to do with it.   It’s a good thing they did because monitoring systems offered little to no interpretation of the findings. Read the article over at Network Computing here .

Imagine. Everything seems to be working fine until ‘click’ – no more power from your electricity provider.   With some data centers requiring megawatts of power delivered at levels as high as 20 kilovolts, backup power has to be solid and sufficient to keep everything going till normal power is restored. The data center generator is the way most enterprises and service providers go. However, there’s more to a decent generator solution than meets the eye. Read the article over at SP Homerun here .

It's a test used widely around the world by large corporations, universities, churches and even the US military, but it has very little science behind it.  The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) sorts people into one of 16 categories, offering to find different personality types their perfectly aligned job.  According to the MBTI, a person's personality can be categorised by their preferences within four dichotomies: extroversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving.  But author and Oxford University associate professor Merve Emre, who has researched the history of Myers-Briggs, says it's hardly an evidence-based approach.  Read the article over at ABC here .

Going beyond energy savings and security, into ambient intelligence requires big-picture thinking. However complex it may seem, digitisation is imperative  – and it’s happening now.  Read the blog post over at Dimension Data here .

If you want to simplify support and get better performance from your infrastructure at lower cost, these are the tough questions you should ask your vendors about their support plans. Can you support a multi-vendor environment? Can you support multiple technologies? Do you offer a single contract to cover all assets? Is diagnosis time included in your SLA? Can you provide support in numerous local languages? Do you apply patches and configure replacement equipment for us? Do you stay on site until service is restored? Do you invoice in all our local currencies? Can you offer a single management portal giving me visibility of my whole estate? Can I vary the level of service on certain assets if they’re mission critical? Do you keep an archive of all our configurations settings to speed up restoration? Do you use automation tools to perform MACDs faster and more accurately? Do you proactively find the root cause of problems to avoid future incidents? Will you keep c

IPsec is a critical element in building a scalable and secure SD-WAN fabric. The right IPsec is key to making it happen.  Robert Sturt published an article title “ SD-WAN vs. VPN: How do they compare? ” While Robert tried to illustrate when and how to use SD-WAN vs. VPN, the objective of this blog is to look deeper into existing IPsec approaches and challenges in building and securing an SD-WAN fabric, and how IPsec UDP can help address these challenges. At the end of this blog, I have included a link to a Silver Peak white paper that provides a detailed explanation of IPsec options. Read the blog post over at Silver Peak here .

Access the newspaper article here .

The Ockam open source Software Developer Kit (SDK) contains a library for Golang developers and a Command Line Interface (CLI). Additional language support, features, and tools will be included in future releases. The Ockam SDK allows a developer to build Ockam functionality into their applications or embedded software. When a developer adds the Ockam SDK to the firmware in their connected devices they become clients to the Ockam Network , receive a unique Decentralized ID (did:ockam) , can share data as a verified claim with another device, and can verify data that they receive from other IoT devices that are registered with the Network. Read the article over at Medium here .

Listen out for The ‘Hillbilly Rock’ performed by The Campbells next time you’re at Spur.

The articles you read in the Availability Digest result from years of experience in researching and writing a variety of technical documents and marketing content. It’s what we do best, and we provide our services to others who value high-quality content created by IT specialists. Access the articles over at Availability Digest here .