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Webcast Like children flying the family nest, applications and services are leaving the on-premises corporate environment and theyre not even coming back so you can do their washing.

One of the core features of the ever-topical digital transformation trend is business infrastructure thats less about centralized servers and data centres, and more about endpoints typically managed remotely via a cloud provider.

It can be tricky to secure all these distributed systems and services. If your developers are working within a growing number of complex coding, testing, and operations environments, for instance, theres a lot of moving parts to track and protect.

Its, therefore, a valid course of action to focus on your people, and give them the freedom to do their work while making sure they have the tools and support to stay secure and safeguard your business.

On May 6, 2020, a Register-hosted webcast will turn its lens on exactly this issue.

Our Tim Phillips will be joined by Guy Podjarny of secure development experts Snyk to dig down into how and why traditional security methods dont tend to wash with modern cloud-based developer environments, and how dev-first security approaches can prove a surprisingly painless alternative.

From describing how to equip and educate programmers to manage and reduce risk, yet remain on the ball with day-to-day work, to the behavioural and process shift required of your average working human to maintain a more security-savvy way of working, it will be a valuable conversation for anyone whos worried coders may fall behind the curve as an organisation leaps into the cloud.

Sign up for the webcast, brought to you by Snyk, right here.

Link:
In the cloud, who can hear your developers scream? - The Register

Last week, when we talked to Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer, Jensen Huang, about how the datacenter was becoming the unit of compute and in such a world networking was critical, it was obvious that acquiring Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion was just the beginning of the strategy that will no doubt unfold in the coming months and years.

Huang didnt wait long to make another move, with Nvidia acquiring open network software provider Cumulus Networks for an undisclosed sum and marrying it with Mellanox in its newly formed networking business unit.

Sometimes, to understand what a company is doing you have to take a really hard look at the things that key people at that company have seen and done in their careers. This is one of those cases.

Cumulus Networks was founded in 2010 by JR Rivers and Nolan Leake, and dropped out of stealth in the summer of 2016.

Rivers was the companys chief executive officer and its face until recent years. Rivers got his start as an engineer at 3Com back in 1989m and then had gigs at Gran Junction Networks and Cisco Systems, rising in the engineering ranks in networking. After a decade at Cisco, Rivers move to a short four-month stint at Google, and then went back to Cisco a few years before the Great Recession and stayed until it was mostly over, which is when Cumulus Networks was founded.

Leakes first big job was as a member of the technical staff at VMware for three years in 2002 through 2005, and then he took a job as technical director of software engineering at server startup 3Leaf Networks, which created NUMA big iron from InfiniBand switching and a homegrown distributed virtual machine of the likes of ScaleMP, RNA Networks, and TidalScale. Leake was then a member of the office of the CTO at Nuova Systems, the Cisco spinoff that created its NX-OS network operating system and their Nexus line of switches, which was spun back in as Cisco launched the Nexus 5000 series in 2008 ahead of (and more or less concurrent with and connected to its California Unified Computing System blade servers, which converged servers and switching). Leake was the founder of Tile Networks, which created a virtualized storage fabric for compute clouds, and then joined up with Rivers to co-found Cumulus Networks in early 2010 as its chief technology officer.

Leake left Cumulus Networks in June 2016 and Rivers took over as CTO until he left in July last year. Rivers went to Amazon Web Services to become a senior principal engineer on its network, and Josh Leslie, who headed up sales at both VMware and Cumulus Networks, took over as chief executive officer at the network operating system startup as Rivers switched roles to CTO back in 2016.

Over the past decade, Cumulus Networks has been working on a number of fronts to try to break open the datacenter switch, prying its operating system from the underlying hardware as Facebook talked to us at length about when we first started The Next Platform five years ago. Some history and laying out of the terrain is in order to understand what Nvidia is doing and why it is doing it.

The hyperscalers and big public cloud providers all have their own network operating systems and various kinds of controllers that comprise their networks; in some cases, as with the customers of Arista Networks, companies can use that companys Extensible Operating System, a variant of Linux that is hardened for networking and that has features to allow them to put other features on the box given the CPU, FPGA, of switch ASIC functions in a box. In the case of Microsoft, it created the Switch Abstraction Interface, or SAI, and its own variant of a network operating system called SoNIC, which itself runs on Open Network Linux, a Linux kernel tuned for networking created by Big Switch Networks, which was eaten by Arista Networks in February and which has a stack of software-defined networking software that makes it a valuable asset.

There was a flurry of activity back in the 2015 and 2016 timeframe, when Hewlett Packard Enterprise open sourced OpenSwitch, a new network operating system, based of course on the Linux kernel, that was inspired by (but distinct from) the Comware and ProVision NOSes that were deployed on its respective 3Com and HPE switches. Dell, which had acquired Force10 Networks in July 2011 to add datacenter-class networking to its portfolio, open sourced the FTOS NOS created by that switch company in early 2016, calling it OS10 and running underneath SAI as well. Mellanox Technologies, just acquired by Nvidia last week, had its own open source NOS interface tools, called SwitchDev, which worked in conjunction with Cumulus Linux as well as the homegrown Onyx operating system from Mellanox (formerly known as ML-NX) and the Microsoft Azure networking stack (which is not completely open source) and which come from the same time in early 2016.

There are a lot of open source Linux NOSes out there, or pieces that can be assembled into one. The NOS created by Cumulus Networks is arguably the most popular of the open source ones. Leslie tells The Next Platform it has thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of ports under management and importantly, has a staff of network experts who know how to make it work that will be valuable to Nvidia as it makes its tries to realize its datacenter aspirations. But as we have pointed out in the past, networking doesnt require a Linux kernel Arrcus has created its own ArcOS from scratch starting from a routing base and coded by Cisco routing luminaries, and it is most certainly not open source, just like neither IOS or NX-OS from Cisco or EOS from Arista or the homegrown OSes from the hyperscalers and cloud builders most certainly are not.

In addition to creating the ONIE NOS installer, which the entire industry uses on whitebox switches powered by ASICs from Broadcom, Mellanox, and others, Cumulus Networks also created a fork of the open source Quagga routing stack, called Free Range Routing, or FRR, which runs atop the Linux kernel as well as a bunch of Unix kernels and which addresses many of the shortcomings of Quagga. The Cumulus Linux 4.0 stack and its NetIQ 2.4 telemetry software were last updated in November last year, adding support for the deep buffer Qumran ASICs from Broadcom and the Spectrum-2 ASICs from Mellanox. To date, by the way, Cumulus itself supports 14 different ASICs from Broadcom and Mellanox (on 134 distinct switch platforms), and while it has been evaluating other ASICs, like those from Innovium and Barefoot Networks (now part of Intel), the latter are not yet supported.

All of this work is distinct from Dent, which is an edge Linux NOS aimed at retail and other types of locations that Amazon (the online retailer, not its Amazon Web Service cloud unit) has been building with Cumulus Networks, Mellanox, Marvell, and others over at The Linux Foundation.

There is really synergy here, Kevin Deierling, senior vice president in the networking business unit at Nvidia after the Mellanox acquisition. If you look at these technologies narrowly, you might say they are all competitive open platforms. But if you look at them broadly, there really is a huge amount of complementary as well as common technologies. We will see where each of these open networking platforms prevail, but more importantly, what this means is that Nvidia has embraced the open networking stack and it is going to accelerate the networking business within Nvidia.

We suspect we will learn more about exactly how this will all map out during Jensen Huangs GTC 2020 keynote, which is happening on May 14.

Go here to read the rest:
Hot On The Heels Of Mellanox, Nvidia Snaps Up Cumulus Networks - The Next Platform

Global AWS Cloud Formation Market Forecast 2019-2026

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Table Of Content

1 Report Overview

2 Global Growth Trends

3 Market Share by Key Players

4 Breakdown Data by Type and Application

5 North America

6 Europe

7 China

8 Japan

9 Southeast Asia

10 India

11 Central & South America

12 International Players Profiles

13 Market Forecast 2019-2026

14 Analysts Viewpoints/Conclusions

15 Appendix

Moreover, the research report assessed market key features, consisting of revenue, capacity utilization rate, price, gross, growth rate, consumption, production, export, supply, cost, market size & share, industry demand, export & import analysis, and CAGR.

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Market research is the new buzzword in the market, which helps in understanding the market potential of any product in the market. Reports And Markets is not just another company in this domain but is a part of a veteran group called Algoro Research Consultants Pvt. Ltd. It offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for a wide range of sectors both for the government and private agencies all across the world.

For more detailed information please contact us at:

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Continued here:
AWS Cloud Formation Market Countries Analysis Report 2020 by Industry Size, Share, Growth Rate and Revenue Aminet Market Reports - amitnetserver

Even with growing cloud adoption data centres still house a huge amount of information and for attackers, represent a valuable target that is hard to resist. The vast security measures put in place by enterprises to protect their data centres means attacking and infiltrating a data centre system is a slow process which requires patience. In order to compromise a data centre, a significant amount of time and effort needs to be put into planning and executing the attack.

Subsequently, the attacker needs to operate below the radar of the security teams. Attackers can stay hidden in networks for months, even years, in order to get to their final goal: exfiltrate or manipulate data from the data centre. It is, therefore, incredibly important for security teams to understand what they need to look out for when monitoring for these attacks. In our experience, there are six critical attack vectors and techniques that cyber-attackers use in order to pull off a sophisticated attack against data centres.

Firstly, there is the co-opting of administrative access. Due to the privileged access administrative accounts have to the data centre; they are natural targets for attackers. The protocols used by administrators give attackers powerful access into the data centre if they are able to authenticate. Ultimately, this is a much easier way of accessing the data centre because it removes the need to exploit an application vulnerability. By using standard admin tools and services such as SSH, Telnet or RDP, attackers can easily blend in with legitimate admin traffic, meaning they can go undetected for a long time. Consequently, any attacker that has breached the system is even harder to track and recognise. It is vital that security teams stay vigilant to any changes in the observed privilege behaviours.

Data centre admins sometimes implement local authentication options, or additional admin accounts to be used in an emergency in order to access the hosts and the workloads they need to manage. These local authentication options and accounts are usually not logged so there is no record of them being used. Furthermore, the login details are often shared across hosts and workloads to simply make life easier. Naturally, this poses a huge risk because attackers will find these authentication credentials by compromising an administrator, and then they carefully and silently access the data centre with the knowledge that their presence and activity is not being logged.

Authenticated local access also allows the attacker to extend further into the data centre hardware. For example, virtualisation is tantamount to the running of a data centre. This virtual environment lifecycle in the data centre is an interesting one because, in order to work, it needs to run on the physical hardware. Therefore, the virtual discs found in data centres can only work with the presence of physical disks, and the physical disks run in physical servers. Physical servers are independently managed by management planes. The management planes are designed to have a lights-out and out-of-band management, with their own memory, power, processes and protocols. This enables administrators to mount disks and re-image servers in situations where the power to the main server is powered off.

Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is an example of a protocol which allows an action such as the one above. There are a variety of own branded versions of IPMI, such as Dell iDRAC or HPE Integrated Lights-Out (ILO) which some hardware servers use. However, they are all established on the IPMI framework and they perform the same functions.

Despite this, IPMI and similar protocols are renowned for having security weaknesses and vulnerabilities that attackers can utilise and take advantage of. Worryingly, in September 2019, researchers at Eclypsium found over 47,000 workstations and servers that were running on Supermicro motherboards and were exposed to the internet, and wide open to attacks, due to the vulnerabilities found in baseboard management controller (BMC) which is a component of IPMI. This is not a-typical for IPMIs and naturally represents an attractive target for attackers looking for an easy route into a data centre.

IPMI is not the only vulnerable aspect of a data centre. Because data centres are such an attractive target, physical servers, routers, switches, and firewalls are targeted by the most advanced attackers, including nation-states. The attackers are clever and sly so will aim low and use methods to enter the data centre at a critical level but stay beneath the radar. This is often at the level of the operating systems which ultimately makes them incredibly difficult to detect with traditional methods. Techniques such as these are used by attackers because it enables them to infect the security devices which are meant to protect the data centre network. They can then use those devices to launch attacks that penetrate an even deeper level of the network.

It is vital that administrators keep an eye on their data. The end goal of an attack is to steal or manipulate this data. Attackers seek to create monetary value from the data they find, so it is prudent to start viewing data centres essentially like a bank vault full of money. Like any criminal, attackers will try and steal data with as little disruption as possible. They do not want to draw attention to themselves, so depending on the skillset of the attackers, they will use a variety of approaches to smuggle data out of the data centre. One approach may be to take the data in bulk, or alternatively, take it a little bit at a time in an attempt to avoid detection. The latter example is the more obvious approach as it stops attention being drawn to the attacker. The data is then often moved directly to the Internet, or to a staging area in the campus network.

No one data centre is the same; they vary according to users and organisations. There is however a method to the attacks and a series of events which unfold prior to the attack on the data centre. This usually involves starting at the bottom of the chain. For example, their first point of penetration may be through a compromised employee account, that may have been compromised though a phishing email, or a malware riddled application, for example. This allows them access to the network where the attackers look to expand their presence by targeting other devices, and while doing so, plant backdoors or hidden tunnels to communicate with each other inside the now compromised network. Patience and resilience are key to their next stage because they then spend time recognising and identifying valuable assets and resources within the network which they can utilise to make their time and presence worth the effort. The administrators credentials are an attackers golden trove and once they access this, the attack is usually at its most mature. This enables them to attack an organisations data centre because administrators are often the only individuals who can access the data. The movements prior to access of the administrators credentials build up to the peak attack on the data centre.

Attackers are usually more inclined to focus on the physical infrastructure of a data centre and understand the levels required to gain access. They have no problem starting at the bottom of the chain and working their way up through the network in order to reach the pivotal level of data centre access. Therefore, organisations need to look at the bottom of the chain, from employee accounts and client devices, and work their way up through the system, employing security at every level to ensure attackers cant gain access to what is arguably their most valuable asset their data centre. By doing this, even if attackers were to find a way to start accessing information which will give them the key to a data centre, they will expose themselves to multiple detection opportunities that provide security teams the best chance to find attackers early. Early detection can make the difference between a contained incident or a successful takeover that costs the organisation time, effort, reputational damage and money.

Matt Walmsley, senior technology industry marketer, Vectra

See the rest here:
The attacker and the data centre - ITProPortal