Network World

With IT and security teams stressed due to the COVID-19 crisis, it’s more important than ever to make sure you’ve prepared your network for a disaster.

With an eye towards significantly bolstering its edge networking offerings, Palo Alto has entered into an agreement to buy cloud-based SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix for $420 million in cash.

Palo Alto said upon the completion of the acquisition it will integrate CloudGenix's cloud-managed SD-WAN products to accelerate the intelligent onboarding of remote branches and retail stores into its Prisma Access package. 

More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method •  SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN?

Announced in May 2019, Palo Alto’s Prisma is a cloud-based security package that includes access control, advanced threat protection, user behavior monitoring and  other services that promise to protect enterprise applications and resources.

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With the COVID-19 (coronavirus) global pandemic, many employers are recommending additional telework to help keep employees safe and productive. More and more, companies are embracing “remote teams” and allowing their employees the opportunity to work from home or telecommute.

Yet home IT devices are still subject to many of the same threats as on-site business devices. Unsecured off-site routers, modems, and other network devices can cause big headaches for employers, and poorly configured home devices can affect the entire organization. They can still be attacked from any device on the Internet, but they are also vulnerable to unauthorized access from neighbors and passersby.

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If you’re responsible for the security of your organization's digital environment, staying up-to-date with the latest hardware, environment, and software vulnerability patches can be a challenge. Migrating your workloads to the cloud can help address these challenges in new, unique ways. Waiting to migrate to the cloud can create unforeseen consequences. Here are four risks of waiting to migrate to the cloud and how CIS resources can help mitigate them. 

1. Lack of independent security configurations

By leveraging virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud, systems admins and CISOs can deploy a single image across multiple workstations. Starting with a base image is an option, but base images lack vendor-agnostic security configurations.

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Reading a list of cybersecurity compliance frameworks is like looking at alphabet soup: NIST CSF, PCI DSS, HIPAA, FISMA, GDPR…the list goes on. It’s easy to be overwhelmed, and not only because of the acronyms. Many frameworks do not tell you where to start or exactly how to become compliant. Cybersecurity best practices from the Center for Internet Security (CIS) provide prioritized, prescriptive guidance for a strong cybersecurity foundation. And, they support your efforts toward compliance with the aforementioned alphabet soup.

When developing your cybersecurity compliance plan, consider the elements below to ensure you have a solid foundation:

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Just over 50% of the Internet’s busiest websites – including Dropbox, Netflix, and WordPress.com – are served or proxied on NGNIX (Source: W3Techs).  But how can organizations secure this popular open-source web server?

At CIS, our mission to help everyone have a secure online experience drives us to develop cybersecurity best practices. We take those best practices, use them to harden machine images, and make them available in the cloud. That’s why we’re excited about the CIS Hardened Images for NGINX on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This pre-configured virtual image is available on a CIS Hardened Linux base image and container image.

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As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.  What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation.  Check back frequently!

UPDATE 3.27

Broadband watchers at BroadbandNow say users in most of the cities it analyzed are experiencing normal network conditions, suggesting that ISP’s (and their networks) are holding up to the shifting demand. In a March 25 post the firm wrote: “Encouragingly, many of the areas hit hardest by the spread of the coronavirus are holding up to increased network demand. Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, and San Francisco have all experienced little or no disruption. New York City,  now the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., has seen a 24% dip out of its previous ten-week range. However, with a new median speed of nearly 52 Mbps, home connections still appear to be holding up overall.”

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As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.  What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation.  Check back frequently!

UPDATE 3.27

Broadband watchers at BroadbandNow say users in most of the cities it analyzed are experiencing normal network conditions, suggesting that ISP’s (and their networks) are holding up to the shifting demand. In a March 25 post the firm wrote: “Encouragingly, many of the areas hit hardest by the spread of the coronavirus are holding up to increased network demand. Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, and San Francisco have all experienced little or no disruption. New York City,  now the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., has seen a 24% dip out of its previous ten-week range. However, with a new median speed of nearly 52 Mbps, home connections still appear to be holding up overall.”

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As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.  What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation.  Check back frequently!

UPDATE: 3.26

• Week over week (ending March 23) Ookla says it has started to see a degradation of mobile and fixed-broadband performance worldwide. More detail on specific locations is available below. Comparing the week of March 16 to the week of March 9, mean download speed over mobile and fixed broadband decreased in Canada and the U.S. while both remained relatively flat in Mexico.
• What is the impact of the coronavirus on corporate network planning? Depends on how long the work-from-home mandate goes on really. Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. takes an interesting look at the situation saying the shutdown “could eventually produce a major uptick for SD-WAN services, particularly in [managed service provider]    Businesses would be much more likely to embark on an SD-WAN VPN adventure that didn’t involve purchase/licensing, favoring a service approach in general, and in particular one with a fairly short contract period.”
• Statistics from VPN provider NordVPN show the growth of VPN usage across the globe.  For example, the company said the US has experienced a 65.93% growth in the use of business VPNs since March 11. It reported that mass remote working has contributed towards a rise in desktop (94.09%) and mobile app (0.39%) usage among Americans. Globally, NordVPN teams has seen a 165% spike in the use of business VPNs and business VPN usage in Netherlands (240.49%), Canada (206.29%) and Austria (207.86%) has skyrocketed beyond 200%. Italy has had the most modest growth in business VPN usage at just 10.57%.

UPDATE: 3. 25:

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The coronavirus crisis is just beginning. But it will end. And how you fare after the pandemic depends on what you do right now. Here are four areas to focus on.

Cisco has issued five  warnings about security weaknesses in its SD-WAN offerings, three of them on the high-end of the vulnerability scale.

The worst problem is with the command-line interface (CLI) of its SD-WAN Solution software where a weakness could let a local attacker inject arbitrary commands that are executed with root privileges, Cisco wrote.

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One class of companies is already equipped to work in a fully distributed employee model. Another going to have a difficult time adapting to most employees having to work from home. Some won’t survive if this lasts more than a few weeks.

As the coronavirus spreads, many companies are requiring employees to work from home, putting unanticipated stress on remote networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.

Businesses have facilitated brisk growth of teleworkers over the past decades to an estimated 4 million-plus. The meteoric rise in new remote users expected to come online as a result of the novel coronavirus calls for stepped-up capacity.

Research by VPN vendor Atlas shows that VPN usage in the U.S. grew by 53% between March 9 and 15, and it could grow faster. VPN usage in Italy, where the virus outbreak is about two weeks ahead of the U.S., increased by 112% during the last week. "We estimate that VPN usage in the U.S. could increase over 150% by the end of the month," said Rachel Welch, chief operating officer of Atlas VPN, in a statement.

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Digital innovation is disrupting businesses. Data and applications are at the hub of new business models, and data needs to travel across the extended network at increasingly high speeds without interruption. To make this possible, organizations are radically redesigning their networks by adopting multi-cloud environments, building hyperscale data centers, retooling their campuses, and designing new connectivity systems for their next-gen branch offices. Networks are faster than ever before, more agile and software-driven. They're also increasingly difficult to secure. To understand the challenges and how security needs to change, I recently talked with John Maddison, executive vice president of products for network security vendor Fortinet.

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Containers have emerged over the past several years to provide an efficient method of storing and delivering applications reliably across different computing environments. By containerizing an application platform and its dependencies, differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructures are abstracted away. 

Networking has emerged as a critical element within the container ecosystem, providing connectivity between containers running on the same host as well as on different hosts, says Michael Letourneau, an IT architect at Liberty Mutual Insurance. "Putting an application into a container automatically drives the need for network connectivity for that container," says Letourneau, whose primary focus is on building and operating Liberty Mutual's container platform. 

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