Network World

VMware is continuing its effort to remake the data center, cloud and edge to handle the distributed workloads and applications of the future.

At its virtual VMworld 2020 event the company previewed a new architecture called Project Monterey that goes a long way toward melding bare-metal servers, graphics processing units (GPUs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), network interface cards (NICs) and security into a large-scale virtualized environment.

Monterey would extend VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which today integrates the company’s vShphere virtualization, vSAN storage, NSX networking and vRealize cloud management systems to support GPUs, FPGAs and NICs into a single platform that can be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud.

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The federal government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a rare emergency directive to federal government agencies to roll out a Windows Server patch within days, an indication of the severity of the exploit.

The directive was issued on September 18, and agencies were given four days to apply the security update. It demands that executive agencies take "immediate and emergency action" to patch CVE-2020-1472, issued August 11.

The vulnerability is in Microsoft Windows Netlogon Remote Protocol (MS-NRPC), a core authentication component of Active Directory from Windows Server 2008 to Server 2019. It has been named "Zerologon" because of how it works.

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If you are a security admin with lots of systems running Cisco IOS and IOS XE software today is decidedly not your day.

Cisco this week posted 25 “High” rated security advisories that stem from 34 vulnerabilities the company suggests should be fixed as soon as possible. The vulnerabilities impact a wide-range of Cisco gear as IOS and IOS XE are the company’s most widely used operating systems. The warnings affect firewalls, wireless access points and switches.

For example, one of the highest rated threats--with an 8.6 out of 10 threat level, are multiple vulnerabilities in the Zone-Based Firewall feature of Cisco IOS XE Software that could let an remote attacker to cause the device to reload or stop forwarding traffic through the firewall,resulting in a denial of service (DoS).

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The mainframe has been declared “dead”, “morphed” and “transformed” so many times over the years sometimes it’s sometimes hard to believe the Big Iron still has an identity in the enterprise world.

But clearly it does and in a major way, too. 

Take recent news as an example: According to IBM, 75% of the top 20 global banks are running the newest z15 mainframe, and the IBM Systems Group reported a 68% gain in Q2 IBM Z revenue year-over-year.

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Secure access service edge (SASE) is a network architecture that rolls software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and security into a cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployment, improved efficiency and security, and to provide appropriate bandwidth per application.

Because it’s a cloud service, SASE (pronounced “sassy”) can be readily scaled up and scaled down and billed based on usage. As a result, it can be an attractive option in a time of rapid change.

While some vendors in this space offer hardware devices to connect at-home employees and corporate data centers to their SASE networks, most vendors handle the connections through software clients or virtual appliances.

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