The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

It strikes me as unusual for Cisco to make social activist statements around privacy laws as a company (1). What would be Cisco’s motivation to call for social justice publicly.  Logically there must be reasons. 

To start, Cisco is calling on the U.S. government to develop a US federal privacy law that assures customers their data is protected. The American system should not just look to solve for today’s privacy discussions around monetization of customer data; it should aim to solve for the complex privacy needs of a world where tens of billions of devices are connected to the internet.

Its a great thing that Cisco is adding to the debate on privacy. The lack of direction from government and social forums is astonishing as tech companies eg. Facebook make huge profits by exploiting the lack of controls. 

As Cisco becomes a data company by operating cloud services and holding large amounts of personal and corporate data, its business has new risks to face. 

Woke marketingHaving your brand associated with social activism can be a winner. (2)Legal Clarity

Cisco has a number of products that collect large amounts of customer and corporate data.
For example, Cloudcenter has complete visibility of customers business, Cisco’s WiFi Analytics are tracking people through retail spaces. Cisco licensing collects more than just asset data. Intersight has so much data it can make recommendations on configuration and operations. 

If the law is unclear, Cisco could face legal risks 

Law EnforcementsWe have examples of law enforcement using data from smart assistants, fitness monitor and watches. It seems likely that law enforcement will use data from cloud services when pursuing financial crimes. Divergent LawsToday, Europe is leading in privacy policy and US companies are generally not welcome to influence the process and profits might be reduced. Further, if privacy laws vary widely between countries then it may become difficult and expensive to maintain compliance.ChinaLots of noise about Chinese companies and industrial espionage. Privacy laws could be useful for better protections and prosecutions

I would note that most of these reasons would apply to many US companies operating globally. 

The EtherealMind View

Making a public statement calling for privacy is nice. Free, ineffective and makes good marketing. What we should be looking is genuine action to demonstrate commitment. 

Resources and Notes

Cisco Calls for Privacy to be Considered a Human Right | The Network : https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1965781

* I recognise that John Chambers did some community stuff to reduce boredom but it wasn’t aligned with Cisco.* When Nike make the ad with a controversial sports person (Kapernick) they appealed to their customers. 

It strikes me as unusual for Cisco to make social activist statements around privacy laws as a company (1). What would be Cisco’s motivation to call for social justice publicly.  Logically there must be reasons. 

To start, Cisco is calling on the U.S. government to develop a US federal privacy law that assures customers their data is protected. The American system should not just look to solve for today’s privacy discussions around monetization of customer data; it should aim to solve for the complex privacy needs of a world where tens of billions of devices are connected to the internet.

Its a great thing that Cisco is adding to the debate on privacy. The lack of direction from government and social forums is astonishing as tech companies eg. Facebook make huge profits by exploiting the lack of controls. 

As Cisco becomes a data company by operating cloud services and holding large amounts of personal and corporate data, its business has new risks to face. 

Woke marketingHaving your brand associated with social activism can be a winner. (2)Legal Clarity

Cisco has a number of products that collect large amounts of customer and corporate data. For example, Cloudcenter has complete visibility of customers business, Cisco’s WiFi Analytics are tracking people through retail spaces. Cisco licensing collects more than just asset data. Intersight has so much data it can make recommendations on configuration and operations. 

If the law is unclear, Cisco could face legal risks 

Law EnforcementsWe have examples of law enforcement using data from smart assistants, fitness monitor and watches. It seems likely that law enforcement will use data from cloud services when pursuing financial crimes. Divergent LawsToday, Europe is leading in privacy policy and US companies are generally not welcome to influence the process and profits might be reduced. Further, if privacy laws vary widely between countries then it may become difficult and expensive to maintain compliance.ChinaLots of noise about Chinese companies and industrial espionage. Privacy laws could be useful for better protections and prosecutions

I would note that most of these reasons would apply to many US companies operating globally. 

The EtherealMind View

Making a public statement calling for privacy is nice. Free, ineffective and makes good marketing. What we should be looking is genuine action to demonstrate commitment. 

Resources and Notes

Cisco Calls for Privacy to be Considered a Human Right | The Network : https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1965781

* I recognise that John Chambers did some community stuff to reduce boredom but it wasn’t aligned with Cisco.* When Nike make the ad with a controversial sports person (Kapernick) they appealed to their customers. 

Forward Networks returns to Heavy Networking to discuss its approach to network modeling, verification, and assurance in this sponsored episode. We explore new features, including the ability to leverage Forward's data model for other applications and management systems, and its support for NSX-V and AWS VPCs.

Forward Networks returns to talk more about network modeling and verification in today’s Heavy Networking podcast.

We discuss Forward Networks’ approach to network modeling, verification, and assurance; and examine how the software is being used in production networks.

We also explore new features and capabilities, including the ability to leverage Forward’s data model for other applications and management systems.

It also supports NSX-V to give network engineers more insight into how overlays and the underlay intersect, and lets engineers build queries and verification for both network layers.

Forward now also models AWS VPCs for hybrid cloud analysis.

Our guests are Peyman Kazemian, Co-Founder; and Chiara Regale, VP of Product Management.

Show Links:

Forward Networks/packetpushers

Forward Networks on Twitter

Forward Networks – YouTube

Show 374: Network Modeling & Verification With Forward Networks (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

The following is a transcript of the audio podcast you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s February 7, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Plixer today.

Plixer Scrutinizer, Flow Records, And Context

Plixer is in the world of flow record analysis, solving issues for both network and security operations folks. “Oh, so they’re a netflow collector?” Yes, that’s how Plixer started back in 1999, but there’s much more to the story than just collection of flow records now that they’ve got nearly 20 years of software development under their belt.

Plixer’s Scrutinizer platform doesn’t simply collect netflow records. Rather, Plixer grabs all sorts of flow records, including netflow, sflow, IPFIX, and more. How much more? Thousands. Plixer has made a point to integrate with several different industry vendors to be able to parse not just the standard flow records, but also many of the proprietary record types that are out there, for example, from Gigamon and Ixia.

The big idea is to, as a first step, collect a bunch of records from a bunch of sources–all the sources you have on your network. Collection is good and needful, but the real issue (and one we’ve been harping on in the Packet Pushers world) is how that data is interpreted. Records aren’t interesting by themselves. Context is. Software that collects flow records and parses through them so that you have transactional context up and down the stack is what operations folks need. You don’t have the bandwidth to be providing context yourself.

And that’s the next step Scrutinizer takes–providing context to help you make sense of all the flow records being collected from the network. Ahhhh…”Scrutinizer” – I see why they called it that now. While a standard netflow record might give you 12 data points (IP address, ports, and so on), Plixer with all of the integrations they’ve done with other platforms, can tap into as many as 5,000 data points around a transaction.

Plixer describes it as a “massively contextual database” containing L2-L7 information. The context stitches together all of the data you might care about when troubleshooting a problem or performing a forensic investigation. Metadata like application, user name, jitter, latency, SSL cert details, geo IP location, etc. are all examples of elements Plixer understands to help clarify what’s really going on and why.

The FlowPro Network Probe For Those Hard-To-Reach Network Segments

Flow records from sources all over your network including the funky proprietary ones are good, but what if you’ve got some dark spots on your network? Areas where the network equipment in play doesn’t have good flow information to send to Plixer Scrutinizer?

Plixer has announced the FlowPro network probe to shine some light on these dark areas. Available both as hardware and virtual appliances, FlowPro observes network packets via SPAN or ERSPAN and can, based on its observations, create and export flow records to Scrutinizer. But that’s not all that FlowPro can do. There’s a bunch of analytical capability baked into the tool.

For example, Plixer described rich DNS security functionality to me. FlowPro can inspect DNS via domain reputation checking, look and inspect for DNS tunneling, monitor queries for A and AAAA records, note hits on “whatismyip.com”, and then detect behavior indicating that malware folks are trying to get paid based on lookups against the public IP address of a compromised host. All of that work is done locally on the FlowPro, with anomalous events kicked up to Scrutinizer.

The virtual FlowPro runs on VMware, KVM, or Hyper-V. The hardwa…

The following is a transcript of the audio podcast you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s February 7, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Plixer today.

Plixer Scrutinizer, Flow Records, And Context

Plixer is in the world of flow record analysis, solving issues for both network and security operations folks. “Oh, so they’re a netflow collector?” Yes, that’s how Plixer started back in 1999, but there’s much more to the story than just collection of flow records now that they’ve got nearly 20 years of software development under their belt.

Plixer’s Scrutinizer platform doesn’t simply collect netflow records. Rather, Plixer grabs all sorts of flow records, including netflow, sflow, IPFIX, and more. How much more? Thousands. Plixer has made a point to integrate with several different industry vendors to be able to parse not just the standard flow records, but also many of the proprietary record types that are out there, for example, from Gigamon and Ixia.

The big idea is to, as a first step, collect a bunch of records from a bunch of sources–all the sources you have on your network. Collection is good and needful, but the real issue (and one we’ve been harping on in the Packet Pushers world) is how that data is interpreted. Records aren’t interesting by themselves. Context is. Software that collects flow records and parses through them so that you have transactional context up and down the stack is what operations folks need. You don’t have the bandwidth to be providing context yourself.

And that’s the next step Scrutinizer takes–providing context to help you make sense of all the flow records being collected from the network. Ahhhh…”Scrutinizer” – I see why they called it that now. While a standard netflow record might give you 12 data points (IP address, ports, and so on), Plixer with all of the integrations they’ve done with other platforms, can tap into as many as 5,000 data points around a transaction.

Plixer describes it as a “massively contextual database” containing L2-L7 information. The context stitches together all of the data you might care about when troubleshooting a problem or performing a forensic investigation. Metadata like application, user name, jitter, latency, SSL cert details, geo IP location, etc. are all examples of elements Plixer understands to help clarify what’s really going on and why.

The FlowPro Network Probe For Those Hard-To-Reach Network Segments

Flow records from sources all over your network including the funky proprietary ones are good, but what if you’ve got some dark spots on your network? Areas where the network equipment in play doesn’t have good flow information to send to Plixer Scrutinizer?

Plixer has announced the FlowPro network probe to shine some light on these dark areas. Available both as hardware and virtual appliances, FlowPro observes network packets via SPAN or ERSPAN and can, based on its observations, create and export flow records to Scrutinizer. But that’s not all that FlowPro can do. There’s a bunch of analytical capability baked into the tool.

For example, Plixer described rich DNS security functionality to me. FlowPro can inspect DNS via domain reputation checking, look and inspect for DNS tunneling, monitor queries for A and AAAA records, note hits on “whatismyip.com”, and then detect behavior indicating that malware folks are trying to get paid based on lookups against the public IP address of a compromised host. All of that work is done locally on the FlowPro, with anomalous events kicked up to Scrutinizer.

The virtual FlowPro runs on VMware, KVM, or Hyper-V. The hardwa…

In the latest episode of IPv6 Buzz we examine IPv6 deployment among cable providers. We'll discuss industry trends, financial and technical drivers for adoption, and how the cable industry is working to transition IPv4 out of the providers' access and distribution networks. Our guest is Dan Torbet.

Welcome to the second episode of Day Two Cloud. This podcast is a frank discussion of what happens when cloud stops being polite and starts getting real.

The promise of the public cloud is both tantalizing and frightening.  There’s the promise of moving all your infrastructure to the cloud and magically simplifying your operations.

Then there’s the terror of moving all your infrastructure to the cloud and immediately putting yourself out of a job.

It turns out that neither of those prospects are necessarily true, and that reality is far more nuanced. So was is that reality? That’s the topic we explore today on the Day Two Cloud podcast.

My guest is Kenny Lowe, Senior Principal Azure Stack Technologist, EMEA at Dell EMC.

We discuss how public cloud, including IaaS, PaaS, and serverless, differ markedly from running virtualized applications on premises, and what enterprises need to be aware of when migrating applications or building new apps in the cloud.

We also look at the gotchas of migrating to PaaS, such as feature gaps between what’s available on premises and what’s available in the cloud.

Kenny also makes the case for why cloud won’t eat your job. That said, you will need to learn new things, and Kenny has some suggestions for where to focus your efforts.

Show Links:

Azure Stack Tips – Kenny Lowe’s blog

Kenny Lowe on Twitter

IT Implementer – Microsoft

On today's Heavy Networking we discuss DNS Flag Day, the day a group of DNS software and service providers ended backwards-compatibility with domains that don't support EDNS. We also discuss the potential impact on non-compliant domains. Our guest is Cathy Almond, Sr. Support Engineer and Team Lead at the Internet Systems Consortium.

DNS Flag Day was February 1st, 2019. On this day, a number of major DNS software and service providers, including Google, Cisco, and Cloudflare, stopped supporting workarounds for DNS authoritative systems that didn’t support EDNS (Extentions to DNS).

EDNS, which was standardized in 1999 and updated in 2013, makes DNS more efficient and allows the creation of new functionality such as DDoS protection.

However, workarounds deployed to accommodate non-compliant systems added complexity and made the service harder to operate. By ending backwards-compatibility, service providers, Web giants, and organizations such as the Internet Systems Consortium hope to compel operators to upgrade and take full advantage of DNS’s capabilties.

On today’s Heavy Networking we discuss DNS Flag Day and its potential impacts on non-compliant systems, examine EDNS, and more. Our guest is Cathy Almond, Sr. Support Engineer and Team Lead at the Internet Systems Consortium.

Show Links:

DNS Flag Day – February 1, 2019 – Internet Systems Consortium

Tech Notes: DNS Flag Day – February 1, 2019 – EtherealMind

2019 | DNS flag day – DNS Flag Day.net

Knowledge Articles-DNS Flag Day – will it affect you? – Internet Systems Consortium

Knowledge Articles-DNS Flag Day – Notes for Authoritative Zone Owners and DNS Hosting Companies – Internet Systems Consortium