The Hub and Spoke!

This publication describes the Risk Management Framework (RMF) and provides guidelines for applying the RMF to information systems and organizations. The RMF provides a disciplined, structured, and flexible process for managing security and privacy risk that includes information security categorization; control selection, implementation, and assessment; system and common control authorizations; and continuous monitoring. The RMF includes activities to prepare organizations to execute the framework at appropriate risk management levels. The RMF also promotes near real-time risk management and ongoing information system and common control authorization through the implementation of continuous monitoring processes; provides senior leaders and executives with the necessary information to make efficient, cost-effective, risk management decisions about the systems supporting their missions and business functions; and incorporates security and privacy into the system develop

O ver the past decade, we have seen a rapid growth in Internet usage in all sectors of our society, from children as young as 10 with smartphones, to small and medium enterprises that rely on the Internet to get business done, to large enterprises that would struggle to exist without global connectivity.  With the costs of data dropping, the large-scale roll-out of fibre, what added value do you as a service provider offer that gives you an edge over your competitors?  You could develop your own solution that provides your client with early detection and notification systems, but this would use valuable resources like time and money in an area that is not your main business focus. You could also purchase prebuilt systems and attempt to integrate them. Either option is going to cost you significantly in time and money.  Emerging global trends are beginning to indicate that the largest and most successful connectivity providers all have at least one thing in common: a cl

Organizations across all vertical markets are turning to SD-WAN to simplify global networks, improve WAN performance, lower costs and streamline management .  According to Quadrant , the SD-WAN market is expected to continue growing at a compound annual growth rate of 56.1 percent (2018-2023), and it’s on pace to exceed $12 billion. Over this stretch, Quadrant says, North America will provide the highest business opportunities for SD-WAN vendors. Currently, North America holds 83 percent of the global SD-WAN market with Asia Pacific and EMEA also gaining market traction.  The technology is widely appealing to enterprises that are looking to address connectivity to on-premises and cloud applications. This is fueling market growth. According to Gartner, there are now more than 60 vendors in the global WAN edge market, combining technologies like SD-WAN, WAN optimization, edge security and branch office routing.  Looking ahead over the next decade, Gartner predicts that WAN

In the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), prepending is a technique used to de-prioritize a route by artificially increasing the length of the AS_PATH attribute by repeating an autonomous system number (ASN). Route selection in BGP prefers the shorter AS path length, assuming all other criterion are equal. Therefore, a prepended route should be selected less often. Read the blog post over at oracle:  Excessive BGP AS Path Prepending is a Self-Inflicted Vulnerability

SD-WANs have changed the way IT departments approach networking—and that’s not an understatement.  In the old days, networking from headquarters to a remote location required manual management. With a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) , networking engineers can configure and implement an enterprise WAN — based on software-defined networking ( SDN ) — to more effectively route traffic to branch offices and other locations. Read the blog over at Cisco: Debunking five myths about SD-WAN technology

All too often though, customers are left with a “ watermelon SLA ” – one that contains a metric target that, when assessed against, states that all is well. When in reality we’ve left a trail of unhappy customers in our wake. Think about it – have you ever been in a service review meeting where the service provider was reporting everything was on target when in reality you’ve experienced unscheduled downtime, poor performance, or end-user complaints? This is a watermelon SLA – green on the outside but red on the inside. Please read on for tips on how to recognize and fix them. Read the article over at Joe the IT guy:  ITSM BASICS: HOW TO RECOGNIZE AND DEAL WITH WATERMELON SLAs

Read these 5 tips for better SLAs over at Joe the IT Guy: ITSM BASICS: 5 TIPS FOR BETTER SLAs

  Police seize servers from bulletproof hosting provider that harbored tens of DDoS botnets. Read the article over at ZDNET:  Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets

S outh African-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Cape Networks has been snapped up by US enterprise IT giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for an undisclosed amount.  Formerly known as Asimmetric, Cape Networks made headlines in September 2015 when it became the first South African company to join San Francisco hardware accelerator programme, Highway1. The company changed its name in 2016.  It went to Highway1 to produce the next generation of its hardware - a network sensor used to test Internet quality for WiFi providers and mobile operators. Read the article over at ITWeb:  Cape start-up snapped up by HP Enterprise