Weekly Wrap for Feb. 7, 2020

Plus Cisco scores a 400GbE router deal with Telia Carrier and an SD-WAN deal with TPx Communications

Supply chain security flaws are expected to increase; Telia Carrier is the first with a Cisco 400GbE upgrade; and TPx adds Cisco Meraki's SD-WAN.

NSA Ranks Cloud Security Risks

Cisco Routers Power Telia Carrier 400GbE Network

Cisco Meraki SD-WAN Sashays Into TPx Communications

SDxCentral Weekly Wrap Full Transcript

Today is February 7, 2019, and this is the SDxCentral Weekly Wrap where we cover the week’s top stories on next-generation IT infrastructure.

This week’s episode of the Weekly Wrap is sponsored by Silver Peak. Learn more about the Silver Peak SD-WAN solution.

The National Security Agency released a report that found four specific cloud security risks account for a vast majority of known security flaws.

Those risks include misconfiguration, poor access control, shared tenancy vulnerabilities, and supply chain vulnerabilities.

The misconfiguration issue is the most common and is linked to cloud service policy mistakes or misunderstanding of shared responsibility.

This most often arises from the rapid pace of innovation from cloud service providers that can add complexity to securely configuring an organization’s cloud resources.

Poor access control happens when companies have weak authentication methods in place to allow access to cloud resources, or when these cloud resources have flaws that enable attackers to bypass these methods.

The NSA deems this vulnerability widespread and says it requires a moderate level of sophistication to pull off.

Shared tenancy vulnerabilities are admittedly rare and require a high level of sophistication.

But the NSA noted that these types of vulnerabilities in cloud hypervisors or container platforms can be especially severe.

Supply chain security flaws also remain rare and require highly sophisticated attackers.

However, the report states that they are becoming more common and they expect to see an increase in these types of attacks this year.

Cisco scored a significant win this week as Sweden-based Telia Carrier became its first customer to launch a 400-gigabit Ethernet-ready network based on Cisco’s cloud-scale routing platform.

The network uses Cisco’s NCS5500 series routers, which it first unveiled in mid-2015.

That platform was initially developed to support 100-gigabit speeds per port for wide area network aggregation, with Cisco last year adding 400-gigabit capabilities.

Telia Carrier last year installed more than 10,000 new 100-gigabit ports using the Cisco platfo...