Eweek

Juniper Networks on the Importance of AI in Networking

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 00:47:59 GMT

In March 2019, Juniper Networks announced it was acquiring Mist Systems, one of the pioneers in cloud-managed WiFi. While there were other cloud WiFi vendors in the mix, what made Mist stand out was that its solution is powered by artificial intelligence (AI), emphasizing the importance of AI in networking.

At the time of the acquisition, Mist was used to improve the performance of Juniper’s WiFi solution. Since then, Mist’s AI-based management has been applied to the company’s campus networking products and is soon coming to SD-WAN and data center.

Mist is the foundation of Juniper’s enterprise strategy

To get a better understanding of how Juniper will be expanding the use of Mist and the value it brings customers, I recently interviewed Mist co-founder and CTO, Bob Friday, on a ZKast video interview, done in conjunction with eWEEK. I encourage everyone interested in how AI will impact network operations to watch the video, but I have provided highlights here:

Under CEO Rami Rahim, Juniper has doubled down on enterprise. He expects the enterprise business to soon be larger than Juniper’s business for service providers, although he provided no timeline for the changeover.
Mist was a key acquisition for Juniper’s enterprise business, because it’s become the foundation for its networking services. Since then, Juniper has made two more key acquisitions: 128 Technology in the SD-WAN space and Apstra in the data center. The three companies combined can bring fully automated operations across all aspects of the business network.
Mist was designed from the ground up to leverage the elasticity and scalability of the cloud in order to simplify networking through the use of AI.
The cloud is fundamentally a better way to maintain software. It’s why virtually every other area of IT has migrated to a cloud-first model. The network is the last area to leverage the power of the cloud, and AI will drive this transition.
The goal of Mist is to have the troubleshooting capabilities of a high-level network engineer.
Although there are many vendors that claim their systems are AI-based, a number of them are actually rules-based products. The best way to identify true AI systems is to see if the product improves over time. AI platforms are constantly learning and should get better with more data.
Marvis, Mist’s Virtual Network Assistant, has been increasing over time and is now at 70% efficacy (see chart at 8:20 of video). At 90% it will be on par with a championship-level network engineer.
Marvis / Mist is not designed to replace network engineers. The system should be looked at as a tool that can help network professionals do their jobs more efficiently. ZK Research shows that about a quarter of network engineers spend about one day a week doing nothing but WiFi troubleshooting. Mist can remove much of this heavy lifting and enable engineers to fix problems instead of diagnosing them.
Marvis provides a fundamentally different and more efficient way of running a network when compared to the traditionally manually intensive command line interface.

Zeus Kerravala is an eWEEK regular contributor and the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research. He spent 10 years at Yankee Group and prior to that held a number of corporate IT positions. Kerravala is considered one of the top 10 IT analysts in the world by Apollo Research, which evaluated 3,960 technology analysts and their individual press coverage metrics.

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Product Overview and Insight: LogDNA

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 23:31:24 GMT

Company: LogDNA (centralized log management for DevOps teams)

Company Description: LogDNA is a centralized log-management solution that helps modern engineering teams be more productive in a DevOps world. The product gives users instant access to, and control over, their logs so that they can understand, debug and troubleshoot their applications with ease. LogDNA’s intuitive user interface fits seamlessly into developers’ workflows so that they can get the information they need where they work.

Teams are drowning in alerts, and massive volumes of logs are difficult to parse through. Countless hours are wasted investigating and resolving issues instead of building new products and capabilities that deliver business value. LogDNA is disrupting the log management market with a modern approach that arms DevOps teams with actionable insights to more efficiently develop and debug their applications.

As a provider of centralized log management for DevOps teams, LogDNA supports modern microservices orchestration technology. Features like LogDNA’s Kubernetes Enrichment enable teams to debug deployment problems without separate tools or deep specialized knowledge. With Kubernetes Enrichment, events and resource metrics related to a specific service show alongside existing application logs, giving developers access to pertinent information without leaving their workflow. Whether it’s a simple misconfiguration, application bug or underlying infrastructure issue, all can be surfaced in a single view for seamless troubleshooting.

Founded in 2015, LogDNA is a privately held company headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. Tucker Callaway is the CEO.

Markets: All verticals, but it has seen accelerated growth in health care, financial services and Internet of Things (IoT).

International Operations: LogDNA has remote employees in the European Union and Canada.

Product and Services

The LogDNA log management platform provides detailed insights into production environments, enabling developers and DevOps teams to quickly and easily gather all systems and application logs into one intuitive platform. Users can search and parse through large amounts of data from disparate locations (public or private cloud, on-premise and IoT); segment their logs by namespace, pod or container; and then quickly identify patterns within those segments to troubleshoot and debug their applications.

Insight and Analysis

From a professional reviewer on G2 (February 2021):

What do you like best? “Simplicity. We send logs (via Aptible). We go and search for those logs when we need to. We had to do minimal setup to make it work. Setting up archiving to S3 was a breeze. (We used to do our own Elasticsearch thing. It was horrible.)

“Oh, alerts! It is very useful to get alerted when we have certain types of errors in volume. It has helped us be aware of problems very, very quickly! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.”

What do you dislike? “There are times when there’s an ingestion delay (or an indexing delay), and it can be hard to tell where the problem is. It isn’t always LogDNA, but sometimes it is. Sometimes it is in our logging system before it gets to LogDNA. But there’s no easy way of seeing that.

“Because we have a HIPAA-enabled account, support and account management is a little…different. I have access to usage data that the account and support teams don’t, even though the aggregate usage data isn’t PHI.”

—————————

From a reviewer on IT Central Station (September 2020):

What is our primary use case? “It is our sole cross-correlation logging backend for some IBM services. We have a combination of LogDNA and Sysdig for root cause analysis and customer events.

“LogDNA is related to the operations of the service. Sysdig is somewhat nice in the sense that it also gives us some backdrop when there are any issues with respect to resources and other types of metrics-based constraints.”

What is most valuable? “LogDNA consolidates all logs into one place, which is super valuable.”

What needs improvement? “Every once in a while, our IBM cloud operational implementation gets behind. Sometimes, when we have a customer event, we do not get access to the latest logs for about 30 minutes, particularly for the sites that are heavily utilized. This is clearly not good. It is impossible to do RCA when you can’t look at the logs that pertain to the time period in which the event occurred. It could be more of an operational problem than a feature problem. I don’t have visibility about whether it is a LogDNA issue or just an operational issue.”

For how long have I used the solution? “We have been using this solution for about a year.”

What do I think about the stability of the solution? “It has decent stability. We’re heavily dependent on it. All RCA, customer support issues, and site reliability studies go to LogDNA. It is something we depend on ten times a day. It has much better stability than Elastic.”

What do I think about the scalability of the solution? “Its scalability is fine. We are running significant throughputs on it. It is significantly better than Elastic in scalability.”

How are customer service and technical support? “We do not directly interact with them. We tend to go through the customer support of the services team that manages LogDNA.”

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch? “We were using Elastic. The reason for going with LogDNA was that Elastic was just not able to keep up with the throughput of what our services go through. LogDNA is more stable and scalable than Elastic.”

“Elastic also could not give us the performance for looking at 30 days in arrears. That was another reason for moving away from Elastic.”

What other advice do I have? “We haven’t had anything yet that we couldn’t do through LogDNA. Feature-wise, it is solid for us. From a functionality point of view, that is, finding stuff and doing RCA and other things, we’re able to find what we’re looking for. We don’t have any constraints at this point.

“I would rate LogDNA an eight out of 10.”

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List of current customers: 6 River Systems, Asics, Better.com, IBM Cloud, Intellect, Lifesize, Lime, Mantl, Relatient, Sysdig

Delivery: SaaS

Pricing

LogDNA offers self-service SaaS and contract plans starting at $1.50 per GB per month. For more information or to start a fully-featured, 14-day free trial, go here: https://logdna.com/pricing/.

Other key players in this market: Splunk, Datadog, Sumo Logic, Elastic Stack, SolarWinds Loggly

Contact information for potential customers: For contact information, visit https://logdna.com/contact-us/.

eWEEK is building a new IT products and services section that encompasses most of the categories that we cover on our site. In it, we will spotlight the leaders in each sector, which include enterprise software, hardware, security, on-premises-based systems and cloud services. We also will add promising new companies as they come into the market. Here is a list of examples: https://tinyurl.com/EW-product-overview

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IBM Boosts Its Hybrid Cloud with New Power Systems, Red Hat Features

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 04:22:33 GMT

Vendor discussions of cloud and hybrid cloud computing typically follow a “go where you know” trajectory. That is, server and silicon vendors pitch new and different cloud-focused hardware functions while software and services players focus on new applications and tools that make life easier for cloud-bound code writers, developers and data center staff. However, when it comes to hybrid cloud, IBM’s efforts are in an entirely different class.

IBM is the only systems vendor still developing its own silicon (Oracle might disagree but its SPARC CPUs haven’t been updated since the arrival of M8 in 2017) and optimizing resulting servers for hybrid clouds. Additionally, IBM has sizable portfolios of home-grown enterprise operating systems (AIX, IBM i and z/OS), middleware and business applications it can bring to bear for cloud-based services. Finally, the company’s decades-long support of Linux (the lingua franca of cloud) resulted in strategic partnerships with major open-source vendors, as well as IBM’s 2019 acquisition of Red Hat which has its own substantial cloud-enabling technologies and services.

What this all means for enterprise customers was made abundantly clear in the new Power Systems and Red Hat offerings IBM introduced this week. Let’s consider that announcement.

Removes the friction from cloud-enabled hardware

On the hardware side, IBM introduced two Power Systems offerings:

An updated IBM Power Systems Private Cloud solution, an on-premises private cloud that can be scaled from one core with 256GB of memory to vast systems supporting thousands of VMs. IBM has enhanced the new offering by increasing the maximum number of VMs per pool from 1,000 to 1,500 and the number of systems per pool from 32 to 48. The new solution is also capable of monitoring/displaying minutes of usage for specific Linux distributions, thus simplifying resource consumption tracking and management.
The new IBM Power Private Cloud Rack solution is a pre-configured on-premises system for supporting Red Hat OpenShift. Based on Linux, IBM AIX or IBM i, the solution is designed to help operationalize their hybrid cloud environments. In addition, organizations can use the Private Cloud Rack as an IaaS environment to speed the development and operation of Kubernetes container-based cloud-native applications via the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. According to IBM, the Power Private Cloud Rack can deliver 49% lower cost per request compared to similarly equipped x86-based platforms.

IBM has also extended its Power Private Cloud with Dynamic Capacity function which enables customers using Power Systems Private Cloud solutions to unlock additional compute cores as needed and get cloud-like consumption-based pricing. IBM is extending that ability to hybrid cloud environments with hybrid capacity credits, which can be purchased and used to unlock capacity in on-premises IBM POWER9-based servers and IBM Power Virtual Servers on IBM Cloud. The company is also working with ecosystem partners to extend dynamic capacity across multiple Linux distributions.

Finally, IBM announced that AIX 7.3 (which is planned for GA in Q4 2021) will feature new continuous computing, scalability, security and automation capabilities, including some designed specifically for hybrid cloud environments.

Enhance Red Hat for IT modernization and cloud-native development

IBM has also expanded Red Hat capabilities on Power Systems solutions. They include:

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server: The IBM Power Virtual Server is an enterprise Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering built around IBM POWER9 and offering access to over 200 IBM Cloud services. The Red Hat OpenShift container platform is now available on IBM Power Virtual Server, enabling clients to leverage OpenShift to deploy agile hybrid clouds. In addition, IBM Power Virtual Server clients can now run leading business applications like SAP HANA in an IBM POWER9-based cloud.
Red Hat Runtimes on IBM Power Systems: Red Hat Runtimes, a set of products, tools and components designed to develop and maintain cloud-native applications, is now supported on IBM Power Systems. As a result, developers creating cloud-native applications have access to leading open source frameworks and runtimes that offer a single development experience for hybrid applications spanning IBM Power Systems and other platforms.
New Red Hat Ansible Content Collections: Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform (which was made available on IBM Power Systems last year) provides an open-source platform for simplifying automation of common IT tasks. Adding to an already extensive set of Ansible modules for IBM Power Systems, IBM has created 22 new Ansible modules since the start of the year that automate common tasks, like patch management, security management, operating system and application deployment, continuous delivery, centralized backup and recovery, and virtualization management and provisioning. Currently, there are 102 Ansible modules that support IBM POWER available to the open-source community on GitHub. Many are available as production-ready, enterprise-hardened and certified Ansible Collections via the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Final analysis

Many tech vendors “go where they know” in terms of cloud computing, providing solutions designed to address narrowly focused solutions or highly specific use cases. In contrast, IBM knows where it’s going in relation to virtually any hybrid cloud destination. The company’s deep experience in and broad array of silicon, server, storage, networking, OS, middleware, software, developer and open source technologies means that it can assist cloud-bound customers with whatever goals they aim to achieve or challenges they encounter.

These new and improved Power Systems and Red Hat solutions are merely the latest examples of the company’s clear-eyed focus on hybrid cloud. We expect IBM to continue delivering powerful, useful hybrid cloud solutions for many years to come.

Charles King is a principal analyst at PUND-IT and a regular contributor to eWEEK. He is considered one of the top 10 IT analysts in the world by Apollo Research, which evaluated 3,960 technology analysts and their individual press coverage metrics. © 2020 Pund-IT, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Assessing Fallout from the SolarWinds Breach

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 02:28:37 GMT

It’s entirely possible that the U.S. government has undergone—and is still suffering the fallout from—the harshest, most potentially devastating cyber breach in the short history of digital information.

Reuters broke the story last December that foreign entities—the National Security Agency and FBI have identified them as the Russian hacking group APT29, also known as Dark Halo or Cozy Bear (logo pictured)—had infiltrated several federal IT systems, including the Pentagon, National Institutes of Health, Homeland Security and State Department. This has been confirmed by highly-regarded security companies that include CrowdStrike, FireEye, Volexity and Microsoft, for starters.

This was a back-door attack

This was not a cyberattack per se. The perpetrators didn’t smash into these super-important systems; they slid into them on the tails of normal software updates—in this case, network monitor SolarWinds—that hundreds of IT managers activated themselves. SolarWinds, naturally, got hit with a lot of grief for these issues; however, the fact is that any one of hundreds of similar applications used by the government could have been used in the same manner. SolarWinds happens to be a highly-respected–and heavily utilized–platform.

The hackers inserted malicious code into SolarWinds Orion software updates that were pushed out to nearly 18,000 customers. Now untold terabytes of stolen data could well be in the hands of U.S. enemies.

DevSecOps people are still talking about this monumental breach for at least two reasons: a) Due to the vast nature of the U.S. government’s IT systems, it’s likely still in the systems, and b) it can and will happen again, in some form. So the analysis carries on.

In this article, we offer a cogent Q&A session with cybersecurity expert Ofer Israeli, CEO and founder of Illusive Networks. Israeli was interviewed on a segment of eWEEK eSPEAKS last fall, right before this news broke in early December.

Q: Is the SolarWinds breach a clear indicator that on-premises tooling perhaps should give way to SaaS-based tools?

Israeli: No, we don’t believe this, or past breaches, is an indictment for on-premises or cloud deployments; rather it’s a reminder of the attack surface breadth and the importance of continued diligence from all parties involved in security.

Q: If you’re using SolarWinds now and don’t have evidence of a breach yet, what should you do?

Israeli: Based on what we currently know, this attack has been going on for months within organizations’ networks. These organizations all have sophisticated security tools, teams and processes, so this attack shows that they have gaps in their lateral movement detection capabilities. We’re assuming that the attackers have infiltrated many organizations and are just waiting to finish their attack. These attackers are lying in wait and will soon become active.

Consequently, IT teams across all organizations need to do two things. First, assume there are attackers in your network–even if you don’t use SolarWinds Orion. That’s because your suppliers and/or partners might, which could mean attackers could get to you through them.

Second, safeguard possible access to the environment by locating all SolarWinds Orion instances and remediating according to vendor guidance.

Q: Describe your “Shake the tree” actionable insights approach, please.

Israeli: A lateral movement hygiene-and-detection exercise, which we call “shake the tree,” is beneficial for all at-risk organizations. This exercise has four elements:

1. Credential and pathway hygiene

Almost all significant attacks necessitate lateral movement from the entry point to the final target. To achieve this, an attacker needs both credentials and available connections between systems. The attacker prefers to move through the network using native system tools and connectivity – the “living off the land” tactic.

In an average workday, cached credentials and connections proliferate within a network. The access footprint changes continually as users log in and out, change roles, access resources and restart systems. On occasion, people intentionally gain access they shouldn’t have, but most connectivity and high-value cached credentials result from ordinary authorized activity.

Once attackers are inside the network, they use tools to automate and accelerate credential harvesting, network discovery and privilege escalation. The broader the access footprint, the more pathways an attacker has to reach their target–and the faster they can do damage. Assessing and removing unnecessary privileged credentials and connections will reduce the attack surface for this attack and others, which will improve the success security tools and teams have in detecting lateral movement and other suspicious activities.

2. Lateral movement detection

Create a plan to continuously detect any suspicious lateral movement. Don’t rely on security controls that don’t specialize in lateral movement detection, because they can yield inaccurate results. We recommend using a solution that specializes in lateral movement detection to ensure detection accuracy.

3. Reset administrator credentials

Reset all administrator passwords after completing the hygiene and lateral movement detection steps. When you do this, bad actors lose their access and are forced to move laterally and gather new privileged credentials to keep leveraging their presence on the network.

You might be tempted to take a shortcut and simply perform a password reset to prevent privilege escalation and access to key data. But it’s hard to reset every password (e.g., cached). Following these steps in order ensures that all passwords are cleared from stored locations and that the process succeeds.

4. Monitor lateral movement

Because the bad actor may work on a schedule of several days, weeks, or even months to do reconnaissance and attempt lateral movement, maintain your detection activities for an extended period–preferably within a permanent detection capability. Make sure your lateral movement detection includes detailed telemetry for the attacker so that someone can analyze their activities and tactics, and then implement targeted detection and prevention measures.

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How NVIDIA Got Creative with Crypto-Miners

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 03:11:19 GMT

Crypto-miners have become the bane of graphics processor-card companies. Both AMD and NVIDIA have complained about miners who buy their cards in bulk, resulting in retail shortages. When they ramp up manufacturing, they dump those cards back on the secondary market, resulting in massive inventory problems.

Well, NVIDIA finally had enough, but they realized that just making it more difficult for miners to buy cards wouldn’t work because those miners would find workarounds and likely trash NVIDIA in the process.

No, what they did is create a line of cards specifically for miners and then crippled their regular graphics cards, so they wouldn’t work as well. Let’s talk about why this not only is initially brilliant but could evolve into something far more interesting over the next couple of years.

Hating Ethereum

The fast-growing crypto, currently Ethereum, has been the problem, because it explicitly favors graphics processing units (GPUs) for crypto mining. Oh, and if you don’t know what crypto mining is, it is how crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Etherium are created. You run a computer and use some incredibly complex math, mints cryptocurrency that you can spend. The effort uses a ton of power, and you need to keep updating your hardware to make sure you don’t spend more on electricity than you get in currency.

Be aware this process tends to exist in the early days of a cryptocurrency, and Ethereum is expected to move to something called a “proof-of-stage model with Casper Protocol” (who comes up with these names?) shortly. Venture Beat, back in 2018, did an excellent job of pointing out what you need to know if you want to mine cryptocurrency.

But, until it does, miners are screwing up the GPU market.

Embracing miners while protecting GPU sales

So what NVIDIA did, which is fascinating, is create a line of cards called CMP products, which don’t do graphics but are optimized for crypto-mining. These cards lack display outputs, so they don’t generate as much heat, they have lower peak core voltages and frequency, which should provide better coin yields at lower power, and they are tailored explicitly for mining.

Simultaneously, to remove the incentive to buy NVIDIA GPUs instead, they lowered the hash rate on their GPUs, making them inefficient mining solutions. Mining cryptocurrency is all about making sure the currency you get exceeds the cost of mining it. By the way, a lot of people have lost a ton of money crypto-mining or just playing around with cryptocurrency. For instance, Tesla just lost 22% of its value due to a foolish cryptocurrency bet by Elon Musk, who continues to ping pong from being that company’s greatest asset to being its most significant liability.

This sequence of events all points out that messing with cryptocurrency isn’t for the faint of heart or the unskilled, and NVIDIA was wise to create a unique line that isolates miners from their mainstream GPU revenue sources. It also stops NVIDIA from subsidizing these efforts. Because, in effect, when the GPUs no longer served in crypto-mining, they were resold, cutting into NVIDIA’s revenue and making them an unwilling funding partner to this activity.

When they age out, the new CMP cards won’t have any value, so NVIDIA won’t have their revenue streams hurt by mining cards’ resale. This practice assures their sustaining market of gamers is protected from the incremental and soon decline market of crypto-miners.

Wrapping Up

NVIDIA and AMD had a massive problem with crypto-miners buying GPUs, resulting in spot shortages and then dumping the cards into the market resulting in inventory overruns. This problem wasn’t sustainable. So NVIDIA came up with a creative solution of crippling their GPUs for mining and then offering a more efficient solution for crypto-miners that wouldn’t cause them either the initial product shortage problem or the later excess inventory problem.

On paper, this solution is better both for NVIDIA and the miners, but it is a new solution, and we still have to see if the market accepts it. Still, NVIDIA should be congratulated for coming up with a creative solution to what undoubtedly was an annoying problem.

Rob Enderle is a principal at Enderle Group. He is a nationally recognized analyst and a longtime contributor to eWEEK and Pund-IT. Enderle is considered one of the top 10 IT analysts in the world by Apollo Research, which evaluated 3,960 technology analysts and their individual press coverage metrics.

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NASA’s Perseverance Rover a Bigger Breakthrough Than Expected

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 02:30:34 GMT

Beginning with the very first images, it was clear that NASA’s Perseverance rover excursion to Mars was a breakthrough. The video’s opening shot of the supersonic parachute, the dropping of the heat shield, the shot of the descent stage and the view of the rover itself, dangling beneath it were riveting. They were unprecedented.

Also unprecedented was the speed at which photos and videos arrived. Previous photos from interplanetary space had always taken hours or days to arrive. When Perseverance landed, the first photos were available in seconds. Images from the first video in a few minutes. When the first videos arrived, they were so good that NASA managers commented during the post-landing news conference that the agency was going to have to start labeling which were real and which were animations.

While Perseverance has yet to begin its trek to the remains of a Martian river delta in search of life, the breakthroughs are continuing. Managers revealed in a statement that the data link between the rover and its relay satellite was operating at 8 megabits per second, nearly the speed of an Ethernet connection. And that was before the high-gain antenna was deployed.

Off-the-shelf components are commonplace

Inside the rover was an off-the-shelf Intel-based computer running Linux. The cameras delivering those magnificent images came from commercial video cameras built by Flir and available to anyone. The only modifications NASA made were to limit the outgassing (the release of gasses from within the device) to protect other components. The microphones that are relaying sounds from the Martian surface are also commercial products.

While Perseverance is a Mars Rover, it hasn’t yet begun to rove. When it does, it will do so as an autonomous vehicle. But it’s already operated as an autonomous spacecraft. The landing sequence was handled by the craft itself. The Perseverance computer controlled the landing, and even used machine vision and radar to choose its own landing spot. NASA officials said at a later conference that it was the most difficult landing ever attempted by a spacecraft, but it allowed the rover to be positioned within five meters of its intended target on a small spot of level ground near the river delta it’s going to explore.

When Perseverance reaches likely-looking spots, it will take samples of soil which scientists hope will show signs of life. Tubes holding those samples will be left behind by the rover for a later mission, in which another rover will pick the sample tubes up, load them into another spacecraft, which will ultimately return the samples to NASA.

Rovers are all about autonomy

Through all of this, a recurring theme is autonomy. Because Mars is too far away to command the rover directly, the best that NASA can do is to tell the rover what it wants it to do, and then let the rover do it. The level of autonomy will allow the rover to accomplish more over time than its predecessors could do.

Of course the rover will do more than drop the occasional sample tube. There’s also Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter. This small drone is currently housed under the rover, where it can be dropped free, and once Perseverance moves out of the way, can explore from the air. Like the rover, the helicopter is an autonomous vehicle that will cover a much larger area than the rover can. It’s unclear how many flights Ingenuity will make, but considering NASA’s luck with spacecraft, it could keep flying for a very long time.

The same is true for Perseverance. NASA says that the rover is intended to operate for two years, and has missions planned for that period of time. But one of its predecessors, Opportunity, was planned to last for three months, and actually lasted for 14 years. The newer Curiosity rover was planned to go for two years, and is still going at eight.

Nuclear power sources

Like Opportunity, the Perseverance rover is nuclear-powered, using electricity generated by the decay of a plutonium power source. Both rovers power systems are rated to operate for a minimum of 14 years. By using the radioisotope thermal generators in the two rovers, the problem of dust that killed two previous rovers is eliminated. Thus it’s likely that both of the most recent rovers will last far longer than 14 years.

So now that we have an autonomous and apparently reliable robot with an aircraft on Mars, what’s next? It’s impossible to know for sure, but it seems probable that given Perseverance’s mission to discover whether life has existed on Mars, we should know the answer to that question by the time the samples are examined, if not sooner.

Wayne Rash, a former executive editor of eWEEK, is a longtime contributor to our publication and a frequent speaker on business, technology issues and enterprise computing.

Photo courtesy of NASA

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Kingston Sells HyperX Gaming Division to HP Inc. for $425M

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 01:26:39 GMT

Off the top, a news item Feb. 24 entitled “Kingston Technology to Sell HyperX Gaming Division to HP Inc.” makes it look like HP Inc. is jumping headlong into the gaming business. While this is not exactly true, because HP has long been in that business, it is indicative of much more than that.

Indeed, Fountain Valley, Calif.-based Kingston Technology, a market leader in memory products and various technology solutions, announced the agreement to sell HyperX, its gaming division, to HP Inc. for $425 million in cash. The acquisition will help enable HP’s strategy to drive growth in its Personal Systems business, where gaming and peripherals are highly profitable segments.

Kingston will retain its DRAM (dynamic RAM), flash and SSD (solid-state disk) products for gamers and enthusiasts. The acquisition is expected to close in calendar Q2 2021.

IT innovation often comes from gaming industry

It’s long been known that a great deal of IT innovation comes out of the consumer gaming industry–innovation that leads directly to major advancements on the enterprise IT side of the business. So that’s how this all fits together; plus, HP Inc. has been busy building more powerful laptops and workstations to handle data-heavy gaming applications that use high-definition video and audio.

HyperX’s product portfolio spans a range of gaming peripherals, including headsets, keyboards, mice, mouse pads, USB microphones and console accessories. HP stands to gain a huge amount of hardware and software intellectual property from the transaction.

“We continue to advance our leadership in Personal Systems by modernizing compute experiences and expanding into valuable adjacencies,” Enrique Lores, HP Inc.’s President and CEO, said in a media advisory. “We see significant opportunities in the large and growing peripherals market, and the addition of HyperX to our portfolio will drive new sources of innovation and growth for our business.”

PC gaming continues to rise in popularity

PC gaming continues to be one of the most popular forms of video gaming, with the PC hardware industry anticipated to be worth $70 billion by 2023. The global peripherals market is expected to grow to $12.2 billion by 2024, with gaming peripherals representing a disproportionate share of this growth.

“Both of our companies thrive because we focus on our employees and share the same core values and culture,” John Tu, Kingston co-founder and CEO, said in a media advisory. “David Sun (Co-founder and COO) and I saw the possibilities for the HyperX business and its employees and we both realized that this change brings a brighter future for HyperX.”

HP has built a large and growing global gaming portfolio in recent years, led by its OMEN brand and a world-class ecosystem of hardware, software, content and services. The company continues to push progression in gaming with platforms like the OMEN 15 gaming laptop and the HP Pavilion Gaming 16 laptop.

Beyond devices, HP has developed the OMEN Gaming Hub, a destination for players to connect, customize and explore their gear and games. Adding HyperX to HP’s broader gaming ecosystem, the company said, will deliver innovative new experiences across everything gamers see, hear and touch.

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Product Overview and Insight: Styra Software

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 01:37:40 GMT

Company: Styra, the company behind Open Policy Agent (OPA) and pioneers in cloud-native authorization.

Company description: Styra is a privately-held, venture-backed company based in Redwood City, Calif. that was founded in 2015 and led by CEO Bill Mann.

Styra enables enterprises to define, enforce and monitor policy across their cloud-native environments. With a combination of open-source (Open Policy Agent) and commercial solutions (Declarative Authorization Service), Styra provides security, operations and compliance guardrails to protect applications, as well as the infrastructure on which they run. Styra policy-as-code solutions let developers, DevOps and security teams mitigate risks, reduce human error and accelerate application development. OPA was initially proven out at scale by the likes of Netflix, Capital One, Atlassian, Pinterest and others. Two years later, it has reached the point of over 1 million downloads per week.

Styra DAS, built on OPA, provides a single control plane for authorization both within applications and for the infrastructure they run upon. OPA and Styra DAS work together to solve typical entitlements/authorization problems for enterprises. For example, enterprise development teams typically build siloed policy in multiple places, use different languages to codify authorization, and have infrastructure policy that is typically unrelated to app policy. OPA and Styra DAS overcome these issues by providing developers with a common policy language, toolset and framework for policy across the cloud-native stack. OPA adds context-aware policy evaluation to tightly control exactly what the proxies allow or deny, and does so with the same policy language and tooling used for all authorization decisions. Styra DAS provides the authoring, distribution, impact analysis, monitoring and audit controls for that policy.

Developers, DevOps and platform engineering teams have proven OPA and Styra DAS in production to mitigate risk, reduce human error and accelerate application development in today’s dynamic multi-cloud world with Kubernetes, Envoy, Terraform, Kafka and more.

International operations: The company has support in Europe.

Products and Services

Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS) is the company’s turnkey enterprise security solution built on the recently Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduated open-source project OPA.

Key benefits:

Consistent, unified authorization logic across services: Styra DAS enables teams to remove custom logic from the app so developers can focus on more critical, differentiated features. Services don’t need to maintain awareness of requests or contain logic for evaluating access rules.
Verify before enforcement with impact analysis: Styra DAS allows you to pre-run policies to see their impact before deployment. Compare changes against historical data, to see what would have been different if the updates had been made. Put rules into monitor-only mode to see where violations occur.
Manage and distribute policy at scale: Styra DAS manages authorization policy across services and proxies with a single management and control plane. Policies are enforced locally, and updated centrally, for comprehensive compliance and security. Ensure authorization policy is enforced across services, without custom policy logic.
Customizable, context-aware policies: Styra DAS lets DevOps and Development teams incorporate context from authentication tokens, the data being requested, the APIs making requests, and more to meet business requirements, and end brittleness.

Key features:

Rego Policy Builder provides a streamlined, graphical, purpose-built, point-and-click policy interface for OPA authorization rules. This visualization of policy-as-code enables DevOps, security and compliance teams to:

- Take advantage of the speed and security of OPA, without investing up-front time to learn all the details of Rego, its custom policy language.
- Speed development of sophisticated security, compliance and operational rules for modern cloud-native applications.
- More easily communicate across teams to prove that security is in place, and built as intended.
Support for microservices and service mesh: With authorization for microservices, Styra DAS helps operationalize the service mesh by controlling what APIs can be executed on what services, both on ingress and egress. As companies increase deployments and software scales to customer demands, these controls are critical in ensuring cloud-native applications adhere to data privacy and compliance regulations, as well as risk mitigation.
Support for mutating webhooks and pod security policies: Support for Kubernetes mutating webhooks enables Styra policies to go beyond “allow or deny,” to automatically append, update or add relevant parameters to ensure workloads are compliant before they reach production. Support for these Admission Controllers means Styra DAS can automatically remediate problems that would otherwise result in blocked workloads and manual review. The Pod security policies (PSP) pack extends the existing best practices and PCI DSS 3.2 policy packs, all of which eliminate the need to research, identify and implement baseline guardrails/policies for Kubernetes. With best-practice guardrails in place from the start, human error and missteps that delay projects, slow delivery and introduce risk are eliminated.

Insight and Analysis

The New Stack has an insightful article from November 2020 on OPAs by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, one of the industry’s best open-source software reporter/analysts. Highlights:

“Long, long before we were coding policy enforcement into our clouds, we tried to code it into our programs. Most of the answers we created were hard-coded, difficult to maintain, and nigh unto impossible to update. But, in 2016, Open Policy Agent (OPA, pronounced “oh-pa”) for cloud native environments was created, and policy enforcement in code became much more practical. Now, its developers, under their company, Styra, have announced a new three-tier product offering for Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS).”

“OPA is an open source, general-purpose policy engine that unifies policy enforcement across the stack. You write these policies in its high-level declarative language Rego, which, in turn, is based on the old Prolog-based Datalog query language. With Rego, you can specify policy as code and create simple APIs to offload policy decision-making from your software. You can then use OPA to enforce policies in microservices, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, API gateways, and more.

“OPA has been used for creating Kubernetes access policies; setting up cloud security policies; Netflix uses OPA to control internal API resources access; Chef uses it to provide Identity and Access Management (IAM) capabilities in its end-user products.

“OPA is also a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubator project. There it averages a rather amazing 1 million downloads a week.

“Styra’s not the only one singing its approach praises. According to the Gartner report, Market Guide for Compliance Automation Tools in DevOps, “As organizations migrate workloads to the cloud or move from virtualized to containerized environments, I&O leaders must evaluate existing tools that protect cloud and container-based infrastructure. These tools enable enforcing infrastructure compliance policies to minimize configuration-related risks. Opportunities exist for the orchestration of policies over distinct agile infrastructure environments. Specifically, the OPA open source initiative has started to emerge as a source for an ecosystem of startups building enterprise capabilities over OPA.”

“You can see for yourself what’s all the fuss is about with the new DAS Free. This is a completely free, self-service option for up to two clusters or 10 nodes to streamline the adoption process. For teams with larger production scale needs, DAS Pro offers a clear and transparent pricing model, for up to 50 nodes, to protect and manage Kubernetes clusters as they grow from initial testing/deployment to full production environments. Finally, DAS Enterprise gives teams unlimited OPA deployments and rules with around the clock support. Regardless of the version, all have access to the same management plane, policy libraries, impact analysis, monitoring, and decision logging.

“These new editions will benefit any number of teams beginning their Kubernetes journey,” said Tim Hinrichs, co-creator of OPA and Styra’s CTO. “It will also help platform engineers new to OPA who want to deploy community best practices immediately without custom coding. Ultimately, this will help lessen the burden for anyone who needs to monitor, validate and test Kubernetes admission control with OPA.”

List of current customers: Frontdoor, SugarCRM

Other key players in this market: Aqua, Sysdig, StackRox, Tigera, Oso Security, Magalix, PlainID (Note: Styra is the only solution to define, enforce and monitor policy rules before runtime)

Delivery: SaaS or on-premises

Pricing

Styra offers a three-tier product offering for Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS). The DAS Free, DAS Pro and DAS Enterprise editions give teams of any size and stage a budget-friendly and fast option to operationalize OPA at scale for Kubernetes. Platform engineers and teams can now deploy DAS in just minutes and have access to more than 100 built-in policies, as well as full enterprise-grade monitoring, impact analysis and decision logging. These new offerings enable a self-service experience and eliminate the need for learning and custom coding OPA policies for Kubernetes admission control.

Platform engineers are able to get started with DAS Free, a completely free, self-service option for up to two clusters or 10 nodes to streamline the adoption process. For teams with larger production scale needs, DAS Pro offers a clear and transparent pricing model, for up to 50 nodes, to protect and manage Kubernetes clusters as they grow from initial testing/deployment to full production environments. DAS Enterprise gives teams an edition that supports unlimited OPA deployments and rules with around the clock support.

Customers of Styra DAS Free (free), Pro ($70 per node per month) and Enterprise (contact for demo and pricing) all have access to the same management plane, policy libraries, impact analysis, monitoring and decision logging.

Contact information for potential customers: https://www.styra.com/

Request a demo: https://registration.styra.com/requestademo

Also available via Amazon Marketplace.

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eWEEK is building an IT products and services section that encompasses most of the categories that we cover on our site. In it, we will spotlight the leaders in each sector, which include enterprise software, hardware, security, on-premises-based systems and cloud services. We also will add promising new companies as they come into the market.

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Grafana Labs Introduces Enterprise Observability Stack

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 21:13:15 GMT

A key trend in the evolution of IT systems now is that enterprises are making moves from basic visibility to network observability. This is where IT pros can use the data to solve critical problems that cause business-interrupting issues. Monitoring is important but incomplete; observability takes the data from monitoring and puts it into action. It creates the ability to understand why networks are slow, what the source of anomalies are, and if a user is compliant.

IT observability, when combined with AI and automation, also holds the promise to deliver the actionable answers needed to ensure cloud-native applications work perfectly and deliver the best experience and value possible to their users.

Self-hosted, cloud-based service

New York City-based Grafana Labs is all about IT observability. On Feb. 16, it unveiled what it calls Grafana Enterprise Stack, a complete, self-hosted observability cloud service that extends functionality for mature IT systems with the need for additional scalability and connectivity.

Grafana Enterprise Stack includes Grafana Enterprise, Enterprise Metrics for Prometheus-as-a-service, and the new Enterprise Logs, a scalable self-hosted log aggregation solution based on Grafana Loki.

This news comes on the heels of the company’s Grafana Cloud/free tier launch last month.

The 7-year-old open and composable monitoring and observability platform provider has more than 1,000 customers, including Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase and Sony, with more than 600,000 active installations of Grafana globally, Grafana said.

The company said the self-managed Enterprise Stack has important features that include:

data source plugins for visualizing other commercial tools in Grafana, such as Splunk, New Relic, MongoDB, ServiceNow, Oracle, Snowflake and others;
reporting, enhanced authentication and security, and
24/7 support from the Grafana Labs team.

Grafana also said Enterprise Stack expands upon the capabilities of some of the most popular open-source observability projects, including Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, and Cortex. Designed and built by many of the original creators and current maintainers of these projects, GES includes features that provide better scalability, collaboration, operations and governance in a self-managed environment.

Unique log indexing approach

Using Loki’s unique log indexing approach, Enterprise Logs enables increased scalability and improved cost efficiency for Grafana customers. Key features included in Grafana Enterprise Logs include:

Instance management, allowing users to visually build and manage instances, access policies, and tokens. Users can also quickly create new data sources and view system configurations.
Access to admin API, making it easier for administrators to distribute and limit access to specific logs and users across large organizations.
Enhanced security, with access policies and tokens built into the platform to ensure enterprise-level accessibility and integrity.

For more information, go here.

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Extreme Networks Signs Deal with MLB for Analytics

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 01:30:22 GMT

Prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital transformation had been a hot topic with both business and IT leaders. In fact, in 2019, ZK Research found that 93% of organizations had at least one digital initiative under way. During this past year, the number of digital initiatives has accelerated because organizations have had to find new ways of selling products, educating students, entertaining fans, treating patients and almost anything else you can imagine. Digital transformation has gone from something many businesses might have been slow-rolling to something that’s needed for survival.

While there are many different types of digital transformation projects, there is one commonality to most of them, and that’s data analytics. The ability to sift through the massive amounts of data generated and find key insights is critical to gaining and maintaining market leadership. Many people think of Amazon as a retailer or Facebook as a social networking company or Netflix as a media company. The reality is, they are data analytics companies that happen to deliver value through retail, social networking and streaming services, respectively.

Last week there were several announcements in the areas of analytics. Details of a few of the more significant ones can be found in my latest ZKast video, done in conjunction with eWEEK; highlights follow.

Extreme Networks named official WiFi analytics provider for Major League Baseball

Every sports league is trying to find ways of improving the fan experience through better engagement. One of the emerging methods of increasing fan engagement is through mobile devices, and that requires high-quality WiFi. Major League Baseball, like all sports leagues, has been thrust in, going partially or fully digital almost overnight because of the pandemic. This season MLB will try a number of initiatives, such as digital tickets and contactless payments for concession and merchandise. Extreme Networks will provide the WiFi for this.

Also, Extreme will provide the WiFi analytics for the MLB teams so they have a better idea of how the network is being used, what fans are doing and which social channels are most popular. Analysis of the wireless data can also be used to understand trends around the stadium that might require action. For example, the WiFi data might show that certain concession stands are significantly busier than others. In this case, the stadium could either increase the staff at the busy ones or provide digital signs guiding fans to less busy ones.

Stadiums are not easy, but Extreme is well immersed in them. In addition to MLB, they also provide WiFi and analytics for the NFL and NASCAR. Earlier this month, I interviewed Extreme’s COO, Norman Rice, about the role it was playing at Super Bowl LV. During the chat, he explained how the NFL made this year’s Super Bowl the first completely digital one.

The actions of MLB, the NFL and NASCAR are a good lesson for CIOs. Digital experiences require best-in-class WiFi and robust WiFi analytics.

Google revamps its collaboration suite for education

Google has fumbled its way around business collaboration for years. It seems every year someone predicts that this will be the year Google breaks out in the collaboration space. Then another year goes by, and it remains on the outside looking in, while companies like Cisco, Zoom and Microsoft, stretch their leads.

There has been one exception though, and that’s Google in the educational space; its products have been well adopted in education, particularly K-12. Recently, the company announced a major upgrade to the education suite.

From a branding perspective, G-Suite for Education will now be known as Workspace for Education, and this makes sense, because the product has literally become a digital workspace for students learning remotely. Google has also added a plethora of new features to the Classroom and Meet apps to improve learning and classroom management.

One of the more interesting new features is the analytics tools that track student engagement, which is one of the biggest problems in virtual learning. In a physical classroom, teachers can measure engagement by monitoring students. This is very difficult to do visually with virtual rooms. The new feature analyzes criteria such as submitted assignments, post comments and classroom interactions to create an engagement score.

There are a number of other features, such as enabling Meet to work better on low bandwidth connections, so students with poor Internet connections can still participate effectively.

Palo Alto Networks acquires Bridgecrew

Cybersecurity has always been important, but the pandemic has raised the visibility of it to company and business leaders. Last week Palo Alto Networks purchased DevOps security startup Bridgecrew for $156 million. The product is designed to enable DevOps practitioners to handle the massive amounts of security data to increase threat protection and work more efficiently.

The startup analyzes security information and code to automate the process of networking monitoring and security remediation. Typically, developers complain about security “getting in the way,” because it slows down the development process. With Bridgecrew, the process of tying security to application development is automated.

As the world becomes more open, dynamic and distributed, the IT environment becomes significantly more complex, making the process of protecting applications difficult, if not impossible, to do manually. Bridgecrew will enable Palo Alto Networks to extend its security platform from the network, cloud and endpoint to application code.

Microsoft uses analytics to make Edge smarter

At one time, Microsoft dominated the browser wars. But not so anymore; the one-time king of browsers is currently an afterthought in most people’s minds. Recently, it made an update to its Edge browser in which it uses crowdsourced data to prioritize or get rid of annoying notifications.

Many notifications are meant with good intentions in mind and remind us of important meetings, upcoming sales or news items. Hackers use the same system to bombard us with scams, malware or simply annoying information.

The latest version of the browser, Microsoft Edge 88, now includes a feature called Adaptive Notification Requests that uses crowdsourced data to determine whether a site’s notification dialog should be displayed. If there are a high number of users clicking no to a site’s subscription request, the browser will suppress it. If enough people like it, Edge shows it.

This feature alone likely won’t get people to dump Chrome or Safari, but it is one feature Edge has that the other guys don’t. It’s important for Microsoft to start driving innovation to chip away at Google and Apple’s lead–one user at a time.

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Can Enterprises Move Fast Without Breaking IT?

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 22:57:50 GMT

No matter how tired people are of the term “digital transformation,” it still represents an imperative strategy for enterprises wishing to survive in today’s dynamic business environment, let alone see growth and increased market value. Companies wishing to reduce operating costs, improve their performance and increase their business velocity must transform.

For IT Ops, this often means the following:

migrating to the cloud or creating hybrid-cloud architectures;
modernizing legacy applications;
embracing automation and AI through AIOps initiatives;
shifting to DevOps / SRE models–autonomous, decentralized teams that are product-focused; and
shifting to remote IT operations (since last year).

We all know that the current pandemic has greatly accelerated this transformation, but new survey data from McKinsey starkly illustrates the scale of change. In 2020, IT operations teams everywhere struggled with the gargantuan task of quickly moving everyone remote while keeping IT systems alive and running for uninterrupted business operations. In the process, they accelerated not only remote operations, but the rest of the trends mentioned above.

McKinsey stated: “In just a few months’ time, the COVID-19 crisis has brought about years of change in the way companies in all sectors and regions do business … the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by a shocking seven years.”

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If you are seeing the data above for the first time, you could be forgiven for wondering if you’re interpreting it correctly. But you’re not; customers McKinsey surveyed reported that transformation projects expected to take well over a year to complete were actually accomplished in less than a month.

While this is good news in many ways, it also poses growing challenges for IT operations teams: When you are moving that quickly, the risk of breakage increases as well.

The growing challenges of moving fast

The challenges of innovating and modernizing infrastructure and applications, often exacerbated by the necessity of speed, can be generally divided into three main areas:

Tooling and visibility issues: Missing monitoring tools, the wrong monitoring tools, or often too many monitoring tools can lead to the same problem: gaps in visibility. Teams are disoriented by too many sources of conflicting information. They are either missing critical events because of the lack of alerting capabilities, or they are bombarded with overwhelming alert noise.
Poor diagnostic capabilities and slower remediation: When teams are presented with competing, concurrent streams of data, they often end up with many false positives. This leads to IT Ops falling back to outdated processes for resolving issues, and this, in turn, leads to multiple teams involved in different applications or services participating in long and ineffective bridge calls or debugging sessions. This inefficient exchange of information across many stakeholders can end up wasting resources and increasing costs.

Manual workflows: All of the above leads to IT Ops teams not having time to adopt automation, as they are busy trying to put out fires. Teams and tooling often end up disassociated and siloed, leading them to continue to rely on manual processes.

The price of moving fast and breaking

Basically, IT Ops teams are stuck in reactive firefighting:

Despite investing in world-class monitoring tools, they’re still experiencing long outages, incidents and performance problems, which they are trying to solve in a myriad of individual consoles.
High-value experts are being pulled into fire-fighting and bridge calls from hell.
No easy answers to the “What changed?” and “What’s impacted?” questions, even for those experts.

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So how do you move fast, get the full value of your existing tooling investments, and avoid performance issues and outages?

Taking the risk out of innovation

First, put your observability in order. Ensure that you have observability tools that provide full visibility across your organization (to developers, operations teams, security, and even business executives) by monitoring everything, from your infrastructure and network to your applications and services, all the way to your end-users. Make sure your tools can connect your metrics, traces and logs, so you can see what is happening in your infrastructure and understand the context. The ability to view metrics from your infrastructure, applications and users and correlate them to traces and logs is essential. If possible, add in anomaly and outlier detection for intelligent alerting.

Then, add an event correlation and automation layer on top. Correlate the alerts your observability tools create into a drastically reduced number of high-level, insight-rich incidents by using machine learning and AI. Add context to these incidents by ingesting and understanding topology sources as well. Then use ML and AI to determine the root cause of these incidents, including correlating them with data streams from your change tools: CI/CD, orchestration, change management and auditing–to identify whether any changes that were done in your environment are causing these incidents.
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Finally, automate as many manual processes you can. Seek out manual aspects of your incident management lifecycle and automate them, in order to free your IT Ops team from time-consuming tasks. By integrating with collaboration tools, you can also streamline the way your IT Ops teams work, allowing them to focus on modernizing and innovating the business.

eWEEK Industry Perspective Guest Author is Anirban Chatterjee, Director Product Marketing at BigPanda.

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Training Employees on Best Practices in Data Privacy

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 22:56:46 GMT

By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created daily; that’s the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs per day! Where is all this data going to be stored and who is responsible for keeping this information safe? This amount of data creates a large cyber-surface area and leads to its potential exposure.

Based on the most recent Pew Research survey, more than 81% of Americans believe they have little or no control over the data collected. At the same time, attackers are becoming more sophisticated: Criminal enterprises are pursuing the best market opportunities that minimize their costs and maximize profits. As enterprises, we must consider all possible ways data can be compromised to minimize exposure risks. Data privacy postures can be improved by focusing on protecting data of employees and customers as well as complying with privacy regulations.

Train your employees on best practices in data privacy

It is important that your internal house is in order at the same time you focus on the privacy of your customers’ data. Exposure of customer data by employees is one of the largest risks to data privacy, so everyone in the company must be trained on actionable steps they can take to protect their privacy and exposure of your customers’ data.

Best practices include:

Employees must avoid downloading personal data from the network to their laptops. Data sitting on employee laptops is at higher risk of loss or theft than when it is maintained by internal systems with proper controls.
Keep work and personal accounts separate; no company data containing personal information should be transferred to personal machines or accounts. Do not transfer any company data to cloud services that have not been approved. Tools may contain security vulnerabilities or carry greater disclosure risks than tools that have been vetted by your enterprise security team.
Be wary of calls (or e-mails) from unknown individuals seeking information. There are cases of callers impersonating company personnel and claiming to need information desperately for a customer call or other urgent need. It is very easy to add the wrong email address to a message and send the wrong person sensitive or personal information.

Protect customer Personal Identifying Information (PII)

Are you prepared for a customer (PII) breach? While it’s a broad question, it’s probably one of the most important when it comes to protecting data and safeguarding your customers. Create a well-documented security incident and event strategy process. These exercises help your team gauge and improve the ability to handle security incidents and data breaches in the future. If you take a “privacy-by-design” approach to security, you approach your security projects by incorporating privacy and data protection from the start.

Best practices include:

Managing customer data privacy is about creating a comprehensive governance framework that’s suited to your business. If you don’t know what data assets you hold, it’s difficult to assess what impact you might have from a data breach. You must identify and confirm with key stakeholders what data the organization stores or processes. This can be done via interviews that determine where your data repository locations reside.
Your organization needs to keep a record of how and when data records are processed. Find out what systems use personal data records for processing and storage. This will help your security team understand how systems need to be protected, and they can help create a strategy for layered threat defense and protection.
Encryption of data is key, yet most encryption software only encrypts information at rest or in transit, leaving sensitive data in plaintext and potentially vulnerable to exposure during processing. It is critical to review encryption and privacy data practices of your vendors and their vendors.

Comply with government privacy regulations

Demonstrating compliance with global data privacy regulations is a long-term outcome of implementing the right privacy and security controls with your people, processes, governance and technology. It requires a steadfast approach to each of these areas. There is enormous pressure on businesses and government to get behind a unified strategy and tame the data behemoth.

Under the 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation, individuals can now request access to their data, find out if their data is being processed and request a transfer of their data to another system. You must put in place a mechanism by which to retrieve all their data and securely transfer the data to the individual.
With new global data privacy laws, organizations need to take an in-depth look at how they acquire personal data of all types. This even includes basic personal data such as first and last name. Any personally identifiable information could be used by threat actors to compromise your network. And, under global data privacy laws, you can be fined heavily for a data breach with significant impact to individual data subjects.
Your organization must be upfront, informative, concise and support lawful data processing. A privacy notice or policy must be delivered to data subjects before or as soon as reasonably possible after the organization collects their data. The privacy policy should be executed with key stakeholders in your organization, including legal, marketing and any other department that participates in active data collection and processing. Write your privacy policy in clear and plain language. Avoid legalese!
You need to understand how data should be properly deleted or destroyed. Your employees need to know how and when to destroy or delete data. Your security department should also follow an industry standard like NIST’s Guidelines for Media for sanitizing and clearing storage devices.
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which went into effect Jan. 1, 2020, is soon to be replaced by California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). The CPRA requires a business to provide greater disclosures in their notices of collection than what currently exists in the CCPA. The full 53-page text of the CPRA can be found here, most provisions of the CPRA, if adopted, will become operative in January 2023.

All these actions will lead you to have a better privacy and security structure in place. The sooner they are implemented, the greater success you will have in minimizing time and reducing the cost of a data breach.

See this chart for time and cost estimates of data breaches across all industries:

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Data breach costs correlate to the amount of time it takes to identify and contain the breach (the data-breach lifecycle). In 2020, a breach with a lifecycle of fewer than 200 days on average cost an organization only $3.21 million. But for a lifecycle greater than 200 days, the average cost jumps 30% to $4.33 million. Potential human error or system glitch can extend the lifecycle of the data breach and costs by millions of dollars.

The statistic, from IBM and the Ponemon Institute’s annual “Cost of a Data Breach” report, put a real-world price tag on the costs associated with a breach.

Businesses can improve their data privacy liability by having a data breach business continuity plan, automated encryption and security plans as well as complying with privacy regulations. Data breaches can impact a business for years; do not delay. Get started with your program today.

INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE AUTHOR: Vicki Reyzelman is a cloud and security strategic engagement manager with Akamai. This is her first article in eWEEK.

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SmartNICs’ Role in Supporting the Future of the Network

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 06:46:35 GMT

Enterprises using SmartNICs are reaping the benefits of network performance due to their ability to accelerate traffic and boost agility through programmability.

What exactly is a SmartNIC, and what does it do? A NIC (network interface card) plugs into a server or storage array to enable connectivity to an Ethernet network. A DPU (data processing unit)-based SmartNIC goes beyond a NIC’s simple connectivity by implementing network traffic processing on the NIC that would normally be performed by the CPU (central processing unit). Using its own on-board processor, the SmartNIC is able to perform any combination of encryption/decryption, firewall, TCP/IP and HTTP processing.
In this article, we offer five data points on why SmartNICs are currently seeing an upswing in use in next-gen enterprise systems.

Data Point No. 1: Networks are under unprecedented stress.

The rise of trends including AI, ML, increased cybersecurity, hyperscale architectures and cloud services has placed an unprecedented demand on the network, particularly with respect to performance and uptime. These factors, along with the COVID-induced spike in network use, are driving an increase in network bandwidth, number of users and number of active network flows – all with increased compute complexity. The growth in network traffic and increasing sophistication of attack vectors are placing enormous strain on the CPUs of compute nodes in server infrastructure.

Data Point No. 2: What’s driving the demand for network performance.

There are a number of factors driving the demand for better network performance, including higher throughput and lower latency. Many services demand far lower latency in support of real-time applications and services deployed close to the network edge for these applications to be effective. Examples include video sessions (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.), 5G and autonomous vehicles.

Other factors include the need to support traditional network services as well as those on the cusp of incredible growth, such as 5G and IoT. These assert incredible performance demands on networks. Similarly, there’s a new for a higher number of sessions and flows to accommodate more users and applications in a stateful flow.

Additional factors include:

feature velocity to keep pace with the speed of innovation in software-defined networks;
the need to improve the security posture in a distributed cloud and edge network design requires additional compute power at higher network bandwidths; and
operation, orchestration and management for a massive number of network elements at scale.

Data Point No. 3: Offloading the packet processing workload

One of the ways these systems are adapting is by offloading more of the packet processing workload from the CPU to an FPGA-based SmartNIC. SmartNICs boost server performance in the cloud and private data centers through offloading networking processing workloads and tasks from server CPUs. Driven by the expansion in data center network traffic and compute complexity, adopting SmartNICs provides a processing architecture where the SmartNIC offers compute for certain workloads and offloads those from the general-purpose compute cores, thus adding efficiency to the overall solution.

Data Point No. 4: Many data plane workloads are best supported by SmartNICs.

In any virtualized network infrastructure, there are significant data plane networking requirements within the server. These are outside of the scope of the application. The networking workloads are particularly costly compute-wise. Virtual switching alone can take up as much greater than 90% of a server’s available CPU resources. Network administrators and architects focus on the applications running in VMs that are monetizable or that monitor and protect the network. Offloading networking tasks gives those important resources back to the application layer.

Cryptography algorithms are one of the most rapidly changing aspects of dataplane processing and also the most complex and compute-intensive. SmartNICs enable the offloading of this costly task while being programmable, thus providing the option to deploy a new crypto algorithm in hardware simply by updating the SmartNIC software.

Data Point No. 5: Truths about SmartNICs

Organizations need to understand the alternatives and criteria for SmartNIC deployment. The simple answer is just to add compute power to the next generation of x86 processors, but the undeniable fact is that Moore’s Law no longer holds true. Therefore, the notion of just “throwing compute” at the problem cannot work.

SmartNICs can be price- and power-competitive with standard NICs, which takes away the argument that SmartNICs are too expensive and too power-hungry. SmartNICs are not too complex, either. Deploying SmartNICs can be done as easily as with standard NICs and software.

The use of SmartNICs dramatically reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) of deploying network services at scale. By increasing the computing power of each compute node with SmartNICs, fewer servers can provide the same compute as a solution using standard NICs, thus reducing upfront costs, footprint, power and cooling requirements.

SmartNICs are future-proofed. Because they are completely programmable, SmartNICs can assure organizations that their investment in the network deployment will stand the test of time. Non-programmable solutions are hampered by the long design times for ASICs that provide good performance but at the cost of being completely static. With how quickly networks, protocols, encapsulations and crypto algorithms change, not to mention the rapid posture security professionals need to maintain, the ability to change hardware at the speed of software is paramount to success.

If you have a suggestion for an eWEEK Data Points article, email cpreimesberger@eweek.com.

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Microsoft Surface Pro 7: Best Laptop for Pandemic?

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 02:37:33 GMT

Virtually every laptop currently in the market was designed before the pandemic. I get to see many laptops long before they are released, and, to date, I have yet to see a laptop specifically designed for how we work now. Think about it: Before the pandemic, portability was essential, long battery life was critical and the ability to work on an airplane also a critical consideration. Most of us aren’t flying very often; we are almost always near power, and doing Zoom meetings with an external camera is a best practice.

Our portability needs have moved from getting on planes to moving from room to room to watch the kids or the pets. If we are wise, we have a large monitor and separate keyboard and mouse. So, if we were to develop a laptop for this new normal, what would be different?

I received the new Surface Pro 7 a few days ago and, while I’ve never been a massive fan of tablet-forward designs, it may be the best configuration for our post-pandemic world. Let me explain.

Microsoft Surface Pro 7

Much like the Xbox was created, this tablet forward-designed laptop was created to deal with a potential competitive issue. Just as the Xbox was created to counter Sony’s initial plan to turn the PlayStation into Sony platform PC, the Surface and Surface Pro were created to counter the iPad. The Surface Notebook, which is my personal favorite in the line, is a better counter for the iPad because it fights from Microsoft’s PC strength and not its tablet weakness. But it was a substantially better effort than Zune was, which was created to fight the iPod.

But when I came to that conclusion years before the pandemic, I now find that tablets are handier than pre-pandemic.

New usage model

The current model has many of us working and overseeing our homes at the same time. We aren’t going into work; well, many of us aren’t; we are working from a home office, kitchen, bedroom, patio, living room, or even garage. We aren’t going to meetings, but with tools like Microsoft Teams, the meetings are coming to us, and we have to participate in them while doing all that other stuff.

Many of us do have home offices where we have monitors, keyboards, mice, etc. But when we have to oversee our pets, we need to grab our computer and go and often don’t have room for any peripherals but still have to stay connected and functional.

Suddenly, a tablet makes sense because it allows for the flexibility of working anywhere, even standing up (I have yet to figure out how to work with a clamshell laptop standing up reliably). Laptops often have trouble dissipating heat when they are closed. That is why Crypto miners are flipping them over, opening up the keyboard, and using them in a tented configuration, which not only isn’t very attractive, it takes up a lot of space. With the Surface, you can use it as a kickstand, take off the keyboard, and use it as a desktop computer while in your office. And, if you have the room, the Surface Pro display can be used as an extra monitor without dealing with the space a laptop keyboard would take up.

When you have to watch the pets or kid, you can grab it, either attach the magnetic keyboard or leave it off, and whether you are standing, sitting or lying down, you have a functional PC solution. If you want to watch a video, it works like a little portable TV without the keyboard. It has Dolby Audio Premium, though; I’d use headphones most of the time to keep from annoying my wife. You can also use the kickstand to put it in portrait mode, which lines up better if you want to use it as an extra display but, were it me, I’d redesign the kickstand, so it sat more securely on the desk. A little bit of an angle on the edges would significantly stabilize it, but it does work. Don’t bump the table, because it will fall over in that mode.

If WAN was necessary, I might favor the Surface Pro X instead (though I’d likely wait for the 5G version at this point). Still, most of us have Wi-Fi at home and would probably appreciate an Intel processor’s extra performance, and the Surface Pro 7 supports Wi-Fi 6 (the Surface Pro X is both Wi-Fi 5 and LTE).

Oh, and one other thing. If you’ve ever had a laptop that is plugged in and then tripped over the cord, only to see the laptop hit the cement or tile floor and break, you were likely a fan of Apple’s magnetic connection. Well, Apple got rid of it, but Microsoft picked it up, and with pets, kids and spouses moving around you, that alone could be a critical feature when working from home.

Wrapping up

The tablet-forward design works uniquely well during the Pandemic. It more easily shifts to how many of us work today, either with a monitor and keyboard or mobile, keeping the pets and kids from killing each other or destroying the house. As a result, while it wasn’t designed for the Pandemic, it may be the closest to an optimized solution and a good starting point for that future design.

For me, I’ve never liked tablet-forward designs up until now, but suddenly this design has a purpose, and that purpose is keeping me sane during my pandemic-imposed isolation. So, until a purpose-designed product comes out, the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 may be the best laptop choice during our new normal.

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Cisco Systems Earnings Indicate Coming Economic Rebound

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 00:59:31 GMT

Earlier this month, Cisco Systems announced its Q2FY21 financial results, and the numbers were strong but not spectacular. While there are lots of publicly-traded companies in the markets Cisco populates (networking, security, collaboration, service providers), the company is viewed by many as a bellwether for tech spending because its portfolio is so broad. In fact, in many of the segments in which it sells products, it is the de facto standard market-share leader. So as goes Cisco, so goes the industry.

I provided some detail on the quarterly results–in addition to my thoughts on what they meant from an industry perspective–in my most recent ZKast video podcast. I also touched on two other key newsworthy items: Masergy’s partnership with Cisco Webex and the relaunch of Box Shuttle. Co-host Mark Reed-Edwards and I also touched on what’s going on with Zoom and virtual filters. Highlights of the video talk follow.

Cisco posts a slight ‘beat’

The company reported a modest Q2 beat ($11.960 billion versus $11.925 billion) but noted demand was improving across all of its verticals. Product detail announced was somewhat expected as areas of strength were security (up 10% YoY), Webex, Meraki, Catalyst 9000 and Nexus 9000. Most of these products have a direct impact on work from home impact, so growth here would be expected.

Areas of weakness included routing, on-premises UC and data center–technologies that are used in traditional offices. The interest came in post earnings commentary, where CEO Chuck Robbins discussed how Cisco customers have stated there is pent-up demand for employees wanting to return to the office.

He added that workers like the option of working from home but don’t want to be forced to do so 100% of the time. This is consistent with much of the feedback I’ve had when talking to business leaders about a return to the office. This means there is likely to be a surge in infrastructure spending in the back half of the year as companies beef up their in-office technology

Masergy launches Webex based collaboration service

Managed service provider Masergy announced last week that it is enhancing its UCaaS offering with the addition of Webex. Previously, Masergy had offered its own branded collaboration platform, but this will now give way to the market-leading Webex product. This will enable Masergy to combine its cooling service with Webex meetings and video creating a single application experience.

Customers also have the option of purchasing SD-WAN from Masergy, which should be a no-brainer for its customers. When collaboration is shifted to the cloud, WAN traffic patterns change dramatically.

Legacy networks were not designed for the rigors of cloud calling and video, where SD-WANs and SASE can handle real time services much better. Masergy has a very sophisticated network that was designed from the ground up for real time, giving it a distinct advantage over many of the incumbents, such as Verizon and AT&T.

Box retools Shuttle content migration service

Box, the industry’s top cloud content management provider, announced it had revamped Box Shuttle, its content migration service. While it may seem desirable, particularly in a work-from-home world, to move content to a single cloud, the reality is migrating the data from on-premises solutions or other clouds is filled with complexity. Shuttle is a managed service that includes migration tools as well as the necessary services to ensure the transfer of data is done quickly but accurately.

This newest version of Box Shuttle businesses to migrate data from more than 15 sources, including Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, SharePoint and others. Other cloud providers, such as Google and Microsoft, offer “free” migration services, but the lack of pro services leaves the customers at risk. There’s an axiom that states “you don’t get what you don’t pay for,” and that’s certainly true with content migration. Customers often find that free gets very expensive quickly.

Zoom and cats highlight the need for invisible artificial intelligence

Last week there was a news report of a Texas lawyer, Rod Ponton, who showed up in court as a cat because of a Zoom filter. This brings up an interesting challenge for the collaboration vendors: Products like Zoom, Cisco Webex, Avaya Spaces and others are loaded with AI features now, like virtual backgrounds, filters, emojis and others to make the platforms fun to use. What happened to attorney Ponton underscores how AI still has a long way to go in becoming easier to adopt–not just by the technically savvy, but by everyone.

As an example, at one point, attorney Ponton stated: “I am not a cat.” At that point, an AI bot could have prompted the user to ask if he/she wanted the filter removed. To be clear, I’m not blaming Zoom. They built features based on user feedback and demand, and there are people who certainly do have fun with many of the features. However, they need to be designed in a way that makes it dead easy for everyone to use, and that’s the power that AI can bring.

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Dell’s U4021QW: The Ultimate Work-from-Home Monitor?

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 02:57:48 GMT

I’m putting a question mark (others didn’t) on the title because what you and I have as work-from-home space is quite different. For instance, I have a custom desk that can handle a monitor of any size. Still, my wife likes to work out of the kitchen, and her space is limited both horizontally and vertically in such a way that a huge monitor wouldn’t fit without remodeling the kitchen.

I’m starting with the Dell 40-inch monitor, because it was recognized as one of the best monitors launched at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, and it is the latest monitor I have in the house. I might add that the monitor I use most often is a Dell 49-inch monitor, and before that, I used a Dell 42-inch monitor. Each had its advantages and disadvantages.

Monitors can make all the difference globally, and I’ve been working on monitors in the 40-inch size class for several years now. Using this Dell monitor as a starting point, let’s talk about how you might pick the best work-from-your-home monitor.

The benefit and problem with a big monitor

As I’ve noted, I’ve been using large monitors for a couple of years and, before that, I used a multiple-monitor rig, the largest using nine 15-inch monitors. Multiple monitors can be cheaper than a single large monitor, but you have to deal with the bezels. The folks who like the multi-monitor rigs best have to use multiple PCs and workstations, but that 42-inch Dell monitor I was using allowed up to four different PCs, resulting in a far more elegant multi-PC setup. The 42-, 49- and this new 40-inch monitor have built-in KVMs that allow you to use one keyboard and mouse on all the machines connected to the monitor. But this feature isn’t much use if you have, like most of us do, one desktop or laptop PC.

I’m a fan of having more than one PC, because IT can generally see and may object to what you do on your company PC. You can still do whatever you like on your PC, providing a little extra privacy and career protection if you have more than one PC. Besides, companies probably won’t agree to buy you that high-end gaming PC if you are into that but likely won’t care if you use the monitor they gave you for gaming, falling under the “what they don’t know and can’t find out won’t hurt you” rule.

So the massive benefit of a large monitor is that you can get a lot on it, and, for me, the bigger, the better, but if it doesn’t fit where you need to work, you’ll be screwed. Twin monitors can be cheaper, but you have to deal with the bezels and gaps that will be dead center in front of you. If you do go the multiple-monitor route, make sure they are matched and adequately sequenced, or you’ll have issues navigating your cursor between screens. Now there is one other option: Take a big monitor like the 40-incher, then get a second and stack it. That allows you to put things like a news feed, security camera feed or something else (streamed event) on the higher screen while your work goes on the lower screen. This approach is surprisingly handy when working from home or when needing that extra screen real estate for other stuff.

Resolution vs. refresh rate

The Dell U4021QW is a high-resolution, low frame-rate monitor. The resolution speaks to eye fatigue and detail. The refresh rate is mostly used in terms of gaming. If you are mostly using a monitor for work, you don’t need a high refresh rate, but you may need a high resolution. I spend nearly eight hours a day in front of a monitor working, and my favorite games are strategy games, which don’t require high frame rates. As a work-focused monitor, for which this 40-inch monitor is designed, to keep the price affordable, Dell made the appropriate tradeoff for a business-focused product.

Blue light reduction

This feature is relatively new in the market, and you have to look for it. But blue light can do a lot of damage to your eyes, and it can adversely impact sleep. One of the significant issues people are reporting during the pandemic is that staying inside so much is a problem getting a good night’s sleep. I’m a big believer in this feature, which should be, but isn’t yet, standard on all monitors. At least those I’ve tested, Dell monitors have generally had this feature, and you can find it in many of the monitors from major vendors, but you should look for it.

Laptop hub

Since I mostly use a desktop computer in my home office (like the power), this isn’t critical for me but could be a game-changer for those who live off laptops. This 40-inch Dell is unusual in that it has a full USB-C Thunderbolt dock built into it. This hub allows a one-wire connection to your laptop that handles wired ethernet, up to three USB peripherals (such as your mouse and keyboard), and it will power your laptop if it accepts power through its USB-C Thunderbolt port.

Flexibility

Cheap monitors have fixed bases. More expensive monitors like this Dell allow you to move the monitor or tilt it as needed. I was getting substantial neck pain years ago, and the fix was that an engineer had to come into my office and raise the fixed monitor, so I wasn’t doing damage to my neck and back. Since then, I wouldn’t buy a monitor unless I had a way to adjust it to the proper height. I had to go into physical therapy, and I’m convinced the healthcare workers that do this type of work enjoy my screams of pain way the hell too much.

Curved screen

We tried curved-screen TVs, and they sucked because only the person sitting in the middle got an excellent experience, and many folks watch TVs as a family. But monitors are very different, and the curved screen wraps the information around you, putting less stress on your eyes and helping you see stuff on your periphery better. So I like them and this 40-inch Dell is curved as is my 49” monitor. I haven’t met anyone that doesn’t like a curved screen, but it is worth trying out first to see if it works for you.

Color accuracy

This feature is only necessary if you are working with color and doing things like image or movie editing. And this Dell has high color accuracy. But for gaming or living off of productivity products, it isn’t that necessary, and it does increase the price of the product. But even if you do casual photo editing, this can be important. I’m Red/Green colorblind, which means I have an inherent color problem that this monitor can’t overcome even though it has high color accuracy. Given that one of the fixes for colorblindness is to shift the colors, I expect at some future point there may be a monitor feature that could help me address my problem; I just haven’t seen it in an end product yet.

Wrapping up

The Dell U4021QW is a premium monitor in the $2K price range that will work best for those that need a lot of screen real estate and have room for a 40” monitor. These are predominantly productivity work users, not professional gamers, and those that work with colors will likely be best able to justify the cost. It also favors those currently living off a higher-end laptop that will support a 5K display because it will reduce the number of wires on your desk, particularly if you have a wireless mouse and keyboard. But, in the end, I’d start off looking at the room you have, which will set the monitor’s size, then how you want to use it (high frame rates vs. high resolution), and favor products that have adjustable bases and blue light mitigation features over monitors that don’t. Once you’ve figured out the features you need and the size you can live with, you can then go shopping, trading those features and size off if you are budget constrained.

Oh, and yes, this 40-inch monitor from Dell is the best monitor I’ve so far tested; for the right person, this is the best work-from-home monitor.

Good hunting!

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Comparing In-Browser-Based, Commercial Password Managers

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 02:01:02 GMT

By David Balaban

Most of us visit numerous websites every single day, including online stores, social networks, email services and e-banking resources. To interact with some of these sites as a customer or simply a registered user, you need to enter a login and a password. However, since it is impossible to remember those numerous combos of letters, numbers and special characters, some people reuse passwords in different sign-in scenarios.

This tactic is a slippery slope, though. A malicious actor who manages to infect your device and crack one such combination will be able to impersonate you by accessing your multiple accounts. Of course, you can keep a separate file with all your credentials or use similar characters in a different order, but these methods are not safe enough either.

The silver lining is that there are hugely convenient services you can use to step up your authentication hygiene. They are called–you guessed it–password managers. In a nutshell, these are tools that enable you to securely store numerous login-password pairs for various web resources.

How are password managers used?

Broadly speaking, there are two types of password managers to choose from: in-browser ones and standalone third-party apps. In this review, we will go over both categories. Regardless of the type, these tools store all your sign-in credentials for different sites and automate the authentication process.

This makes complex things easy and adds an extra layer of security to your data. Plus, it prevents anyone who compromises one account from accessing other accounts, thus helping you avoid the scourge of a single point of failure (SPOF).

Overview of popular in-browser password managers

To begin, let us dive into the password management features built into popular web browsers. One of their key advantages boils down to user-friendliness, because the browser prompts you to save a password and then allows you to view it in a dedicated interface whenever you want.

Another perk is the ability to synchronize your credentials between different devices. Passwords can also be encrypted and stored that way in the cloud. The browsers listed in the following rundown are free to use and so are their built-in password managers.

Google Chrome

Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android.

Chrome’s built-in password manager offers you to store passwords under the umbrella of your Google account. It is convenient and easy for users with any level of tech skills to get the hang of.

This service can generate passwords for you, but keep in mind that the resulting combos are not as strong as the ones most commercial counterparts can create. For instance, there is no option to specify a larger number of characters than the default set-up offers or to use special characters.

Overall, this is a mainstream and very intuitive tool. The only caveat is that many security experts find it fairly unreliable because there is no master password, and if an account is hacked, the intruder may get hold of all the data in one hit.

Another thing worth considering is that user data is Google’s main product leveraged for targeted advertising and other sketchy things. Therefore, it might not be a good idea to store all your credentials using a single built-in password manager, especially when it comes to extremely sensitive information.

Mozilla Firefox

Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS.

Firefox allows you to encrypt your passwords with a single master key. Furthermore, it is open-source and does not share users’ data with a parent company as some competing web browsers do.

The tool is equipped with a classic feature set: storing login-password pairs, encrypting the master password and the option for Windows users to import passwords from Chrome and Internet Explorer. It uses the symmetric 256-bit AES algorithm to encrypt users’ sign-in details. The manager also includes a component that generates complex passwords.

Opera

Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS.

Although Opera’s built-in password manager is fairly rudimentary because it simply stores passwords and web forms, it has two significant advantages over some competitors. First, as is the case with the Firefox counterpart, it allows you to add a master password that will be required to unlock passwords in the browser’s storage. The master password matches the string used to log into the computer, though. The second advantage is the availability of a VPN.

Unfortunately, Opera is not immune to security incidents. In April 2016, the company reportedly suffered a breach in which hackers obtained more than 1.7 million Sync passwords and login credentials. However, the likelihood of such an attack occurring again is minuscule because Opera software engineers have since provided the option to add an extra passphrase to the Sync feature, which can now encrypt passwords, or all data synchronized between devices.

Safari

Supported operating systems: macOS, iOS.

Unlike Chrome or Edge, Apple does not allow its proprietary browser to handle sign-in credentials in isolation from the operating system. Passwords are kept in the iCloud Keychain, which functions seamlessly on Macs as well as iPhones and iPads.

Other than that, there are hardly any functional differences from the browsers mentioned above. Be advised, though, that you cannot specify a master password. The built-in password generator boasts decent efficiency: it distinguishes between authentication, registration and password change forms; moreover, it harnesses individual password creation algorithms for some sites.

The Safari browser is not available for PCs or Android devices, so this password manager is only suitable for those entirely committed to the Apple ecosystem.

Microsoft Edge

Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS.

Since the redesigned Edge is based on the same open-source Chromium core as Google Chrome, the password manager configuration mechanisms in the two browsers are very similar. The browser has been recently enhanced with a password generator, which appears to work better than Chrome’s counterpart. Previously saved passwords must be deleted individually so that they are eliminated from Edge on other synced devices.

To sum it up, whereas built-in password managers are easy for the average user to master, they should be treated as a handy extension rather than as a separate solution that secures your passwords from different angles.

Their weakest link is that if someone gains unauthorized access to your computer and opens your browser, all passwords may be compromised in a snap because additional defenses such as extra user verification mechanisms are missing in most cases.

Commercial alternatives: Pros and cons

Password managers made by third-party developers offer more functionality. These products are cross-browser, provide more sophisticated mechanisms for generating passwords and have additional bells and whistles under the hood.

Dashlane

Price: $0 – $5.99 per month.
Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS.

In addition to basic password management, this tool allows you to check your stored passwords for strength and have them automatically replaced with more complex ones in a single click if necessary. You also get 1GB of secure storage and a VPN service with no traffic limitations.

Dashlane supports Windows Hello, giving you the ability to log in with biometrics, including face and fingerprint scans. Plus, it allows you to check if your email addresses, passwords and financial information have been compromised and leaked on the dark web. The app has a free version, but with the caveat that it cannot store more than 50 passwords.

Keeper

Price: $2.91 – $6.01 per month.
Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS.

Keeper boasts a streamlined and user-friendly interface while providing 10GB of secure storage. Like Dashlane, it supports biometric authentication with Windows Hello. This password manager additionally offers a two-factor authentication (2FA) mechanism dubbed Keeper DNA, which generates one-time passwords on mobile devices. Keeper has built-in dark web monitoring and encrypted chat features that allow users to share files securely.

1Password

Price: $3.99 – $7.99 per month.
Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS.

Just like the apps described above, 1Password is compatible with Windows Hello and scans the dark web for leaks of your sensitive data. It provides 1GB of encrypted storage. One of the awesome things about it is the family account option that supports up to five users simultaneously with an unlimited number of devices. 1Password also comes with a built-in parental control feature that prevents your kids from changing passwords for important services.

LastPass

Price: €0-€3.9 ($4.73) per month.
Supported operating systems: Windows, macOS, Android, iOS.

The free version of LastPass provides the broadest range of features across the whole spectrum of commercial password managers. It allows you to store an unlimited number of passwords on an unlimited number of devices with an extra option of granting access to one more user. The premium version lets you give access to multiple users and includes biometric authentication features, 1GB of secure storage, as well as 24/7 email tech support.

In summary …

Password managers make it much easier to work with web services and to secure your accounts. This way of handling passwords is definitely more secure than old-school approaches, such as reusing passwords or using terribly similar combinations. It comes as no surprise that these apps are gaining a good deal of traction among users these days.

Nevertheless, when choosing a password manager that suits you the most, be sure to scrutinize its features. In-browser services are convenient and understandable for most users. Still, they tend to lag behind their commercial analogs in terms of generating strong passwords, availability of two-factor authentication and the option of switching between browsers. As a result, most InfoSec professionals think of these tools as garden-variety browser extensions and advise against using them to store sensitive data such as e-banking credentials.

Commercial password managers offer overarching functionality and work as standalone apps. Although many experts consider them more reliable than those built into browsers, the vast majority of users prefer the latter for their day-to-day web surfing.

Amsterdam-based David Balaban is the founder of the Privacy-PC.com project and is a computer security researcher with more than 17 years of experience in malware analysis.

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Rethinking Customer Experience in Post-Pandemic Era

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 05:11:31 GMT

Customer experience (CX) became the top brand differentiator in 2018, outpacing price, product quality and everything else. Businesses that offer a superior and differentiated CX have the opportunity to become and sustain market leadership. Those that do not prioritize customer service will struggle to compete effectively in this “experience” economy. One interesting data point that supports this is from ZK Research where it found that, in 2020, two-thirds of millennials admitted changing loyalties to a brand becomes a single bad experience.

The rise in importance of customer experience hasn’t been lost on companies. In interviews with company leaders, everyone from technologists to marketers to sales leaders have put customer experience at the top of their priority list. However, CX today isn’t what it was only a year ago. The pandemic changed more than the way we work. It changed everything — from the way we shop, exercise, travel, entertain and almost everything else in our lives.

Factors that will define a new era of CX

Business success moving forward requires an understanding of what CX looks like in the post-pandemic era. Below are the top six factors that will define a new era of customer experience.

Maximize the mobile experience. The shift to mobile is the biggest change many organizations will have gone through since the pandemic began. A year ago, mobile was an optional method of interacting with customers. Now, because of social-distancing requirements, it’s the only way we can interact with some organizations and it’s likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Mobile provides many benefits, such as the ability to tap into location services, push notifications, a simplified experience and other factors. The reality is most organizations have barely tapped into harnessing mobile data. Moving forward, companies should think about CX being mobile-first.
Eliminate data silos. There’s an axiom in data sciences that states, “good data leads to good insights”. A corollary to this is also that partial data leads to fragmented insights and that’s what most companies are dealing with today. Businesses are generated more data than ever before but most of it exists in silos. This can cause companies to have blind spots in their analysis and make business decisions that aren’t based on the complete picture. The only way to have a complete, holistic view of customer experience is to create a single data set comprising everything from the contact center, sales information, website data, marketing information and anything else that touches the customer.
Use the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence. When it comes to digital transformation, there’s no such thing as moving slow. The fact is that slow decision-making equates to a broken business and will cause a company to fail faster than you can say “What happened to Toys R Us?” Also, the difference between being a market leader and a laggard is minuscule today. Finding the right insights today is akin not just to finding a needle in a haystack but rather a single needle in a stack of needles. The reality is that people, even the best data scientists, can’t work fast enough to analyze the massive amounts of data being generated today. Machine learning and artificial are the only ways of finding the “a-ha’s” in the data quickly and accurately.
Be predictive, not reactive. CX has historically been reactive in nature. A customer calls into a call center, is upset and good companies quickly implement a change. Today, customer preferences, buying habits and loyalties change overnight, making it critical for businesses to not just react to customer sentiment but also predict what’s next. This could include the use of social channels, buying patterns or even changes that need to be made to the website. The data is there; businesses just need to think differently and be willing to disrupt themselves.
Make CX improvement part of the company culture. While there may be a number of departments inside the organization that care about CX improvement, the reality is, it’s something that must be driven from executive leadership down. This is no longer something that’s the mission of one or two departments but something the company as a whole needs to embrace. Making it part of the company mission ensures everyone in the company has a focus on it. Also, company leadership can ensure there’s consistency in CX initiatives, so that one department isn’t overspending while another is underfunding.
Play the game and not the score. It’s critical that a company sets a vision for CX and then puts a plan in place to execute it. It’s equally important to not be distracted by every move the competition makes. Trying to react to every competitor is akin to focusing on the score in a sports competition and can cause the organizations to make bad decisions. Winning in the area of CX requires a dedication to the corporate mission with changes coming with major market inflections as opposed to trying to make too many changes too quickly.

The pandemic has had a profound impact on how businesses deal with customers, and these changes are here to stay. Organizations that follow the above steps will be set up for long-term success. If you would like to learn more about CX in the post-pandemic era, please join me on an upcoming webinar – “The Roaring 20s: Defining a New Era of Customer Experience.” I’ll be joined by Contentsquare, and we will discuss the above and much more.

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Photo by Torsten Dettlaff from Pexels

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Natural Language Processing Trends That Impact Enterprises in 2021

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 02:42:45 GMT

Natural language technologies are quickly gaining traction in the enterprise. We are seeing huge numbers of companies every week rolling out text analytics solutions, speech recognition systems, chatbots and every other language-processing use case imaginable.

It’s no surprise that over the past three years natural language processing (NLP) has become one of the most dominant domains in data science. NLP also is an umbrella term for subfields such as natural language understanding (NLU), natural language generation (NLG) and natural language interaction (NLI).

With companies such as Google and Microsoft producing new discoveries on a consistent basis, NLP has made quantum leaps in terms of accuracy, speed and methodology to aid computer scientists as they tackle complex issues. Today, NLP is one of the most researched fields in artificial intelligence (AI).

In this eWEEK Data Points article, Dillon Erb, co-Founder and CEO of Paperspace, describes five important natural language processing trends impacting the enterprise in 2021 and helps distinguish between trends that have legitimate promise and those that are overhyped.

Data Point No. 1: True NLU has a long way to go.

Human language is complex — language is a proxy for human thought after all. That makes NLU (natural language understanding) one of the so-called “AI-hard” problems — because to “solve” NLU is to “solve” generalized AI.

But as a subtopic of AI, NLU gets a lot of attention because the possible applications are so exciting and there are so many enabling technologies that are showing real value in the wild already as partial NLU solutions.

So while the first data point is that complete NLU is not close right now, it’s also true that NLU applications are already proving themselves in the enterprise.

NLU is used to perform sentiment analysis on customer help requests and to understand questions posed to digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. It also translates text between languages in multilingual neural machine translation services, like Google Translate.

NLU is all around us, but we must accept that there will still be years of partial NLU before there is full generalized intelligence on the web.

Data Point No. 2: Models are improving rapidly, and this is inspiring enterprises to prepare.

Arguably the most famous AI model in the world right now is GPT from OpenAI. The latest version GPT-3 was released earlier this year.

In terms of GPT’s progress, GPT-2 launched in February 2019 and made a significant impact because it was trained on 1.5B parameters. GPT-3 launched nearly 18 months later and pre-trained on 175B parameters–an increase of two orders of magnitude. These releases instantly generate worldwide media attention because of the implications for fake news generation, generative art, codebases that write themselves and more.

The progress of language models like GPT is inspiring many new approaches and applications for machine intelligence in the enterprise–from being able to write web apps by describing them in English to mimicking language patterns of public figures to training on medical literature to provide diagnoses.

Data Point No. 3: Narrow use cases are bringing success.

Hundreds of thousands of people do GPU computing, machine learning (ML), and deep learning–especially at the enterprise level. One thing that comes up repeatedly is that projects must be narrowly scoped in order to achieve success and drive business value.

Many of the AI projects like OpenAI’s GPT-3 that attract significant media attention are doing so because of the inspiring visions that these technologies enable for our collective future. But the enterprise projects that are driving real value today are narrowly scoped, narrowly deployed and drive very specific business value.

For example, when Adobe Photoshop ships a feature that automatically selects the subject of an image from the background, this is a narrow use of computer vision that immediately provides real value to the end user. Photoshop users don’t have to spend hours knocking out backgrounds with painstaking pixel-by-pixel precision. This is a perfect example of narrow focus leading to definitive success.

Data Point No. 4: Model maintenance

Unlike traditional software, ML models in production require maintenance, since they can and do degrade in performance over time. This fact combined with the complicated makeup of a production ML model (a model is composed of code, data, computation and performance metrics) has resulted in a boom of CI/CD and MLOps tooling and infrastructure abstraction products.

One of the most exciting things about NLU or NLP (or really any ML application) is that it is possible to improve the model over time. In many applications, a nominal improvement in accuracy of a model by a few percentage points can yield millions of dollars of value to the underlying business. Specific examples include applications such as recommendation engines, financial modeling applications and others.

It’s therefore important to have predictable deployment systems in place to continue delivering value over time.

Data Point No. 5: Treating ML as a software discipline

One of the most valuable ways an enterprise can prepare to drive business value from ML is to establish ML as a software discipline within the business. Since the vast majority of ML projects get stuck as research experiments run locally on developer or data scientist laptops, it’s important to prioritize systems that help your company deploy models to production and deliver value.

Treating ML as a software discipline means having an established pipeline to take projects from research into production. It means giving ML the same DevOps attention and resources as the rest of your software stack. It also means versioning code, data, and ML models themselves. It’s also critical to streamline infrastructure provisioning so that anyone within the organization is empowered to deploy a model at scale.

The end goal is to make AI a strength within the organization. In the realm of ML, it makes sense to have strong processes in place so that value can be created as soon as possible. The most profitable models get more profitable over time — so starting now is essential. There is no time to wait.

If you have a suggestion for an eWEEK Data Points article, email cpreimesberger@eweek.com.

The post Natural Language Processing Trends That Impact Enterprises in 2021 appeared first on eWEEK.

Natural Language Processing Trends That Impact Enterprises in 2021

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 02:00:00 GMT

eWEEK DATA POINTS: With companies such as Google and Microsoft producing new discoveries on a consistent basis, NLP has made quantum leaps in terms of accuracy, speed and methodology to aid computer scientists as they tackle complex issues. Today, NLP is one of the most researched fields in artificial intelligence.