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Cisco and Kansas City to launch network for smart city services

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Cisco Leave a comment

Components include an incubator for startups to build apps and other services for residents and visitors

Officials from networking giant Cisco Systems and Kansas City, Mo., have signed a letter of intent to launch a new network for smart city services.

Elements of the project call for designing mobile apps for citizen access, digital interactive kiosks, smart street lights and video surveillance in an area called the city’s innovation district.

The project is designed to complement the city’s build out of a two-mile downtown streetcar path, Cisco said in a statement yesterday.

Kansas City, Mo. and its neighbor, Kansas City, Kans., are already getting plenty of outside attention from tech giant Google, which picked the area for its first deployment of Google Fiber, an initiative to install fiber optic cable there and in other cities.

Google won’t say how many households are connected to Google Fiber in the area, but it has already installed 6,000 miles of fiber optic cable. Meanwhile, cable provider Time Warner has provisioned 11,000 Wi-Fi hotspots for its Internet customers to use from mobile devices in various Kansas City area locales, including the popular eight-block restaurant and bar district on the edge of downtown called the Power & Light District.

While some citizen groups have been concerned that Google Fiber isn’t reaching enough low-income families in the area with gigabit fiber, there’s a general recognition by city officials that people of all income levels use smartphones and other wireless devices fairly widely. That can only help the Cisco initiative with Kansas City for wireless services.

Kansas City, Mo. Mayor Sly James said the initiative with Cisco promises to connect city services and information with visitors and residents “like never before.”

Third-party app developers will also have an opportunity to build unique and innovative apps for public use.

Cisco will use its Smart+Connected Communities reference architectures to evaluate the initiative and will work with the city and a business consultancy called Think Big Partners to manage a “living lab” incubator for the tech startup community.

Wim Elfrink, Cisco’s executive vice president of industry solutions, credited city leaders with leading the “charge on innovation in the Midwest.”

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Cisco welcomes Dimension Data to global cloud initiative

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Tech Leave a comment

The company compared its Intercloud to international roaming for hybrid clouds

The sun shone outside the Cisco Live conference on Tuesday even as the clouds gathered within, and that was exactly the kind of weather Cisco was hoping for.

Hosting and cloud provider Dimension Data signed on to use Cisco’s Intercloud platform, Cisco executive Rob Lloyd announced in a keynote address that emphasized hybrid clouds and making IT infrastructure easier to set up and manage.

Cisco will sell cloud services using Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform, including IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) and SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings of Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint, said Lloyd, who is Cisco’s president of development and sales. The services are available now through 10 Dimension data centers worldwide, which will expand to 13 by the end of September, according to Cisco.
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The services coming through Dimension Data will be aimed at medium-sized enterprises and at smaller service providers that want to resell cloud services, especially in the developing world, Lloyd said.

Intercloud is Cisco’s architecture for linking private and public infrastructure around the world into a single cloud. It will let enterprises and service providers host workloads anywhere and move them around based on regional needs and compliance requirements. Cisco is using Intercloud to offer its own services, backing away from earlier pledges not to compete with its service-provider customers, but is still counting on partners to bring their infrastructure to the party.

Australian carrier Telstra, a longtime Cisco customer, was the company’s first announced Intercloud partner. Dimension Data, a Cisco partner for 23 years, and parent NTT have now joined in, Lloyd told Cisco Live attendees.

Lloyd compared the concept to international roaming on cellular networks.

“We’re going to embrace all cloud partners … in the countries where we do business around the world, and in partnership with our cloud partners,” Lloyd said.

Hybrid clouds are the future because they combine the easy expansion possible on a public cloud and the security and control of private infrastructure, he said. Cisco’s platform for building those clouds, and the foundation of Intercloud, is ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure).

This platform, Cisco’s entry into the SDN (software-defined networking) sweepstakes, is designed to simplify network provisioning, management and teardown, and make infrastructure more secure. It works in conjunction with Cisco-designed silicon on the recently introduced Nexus 9000 switch, but its benefits have also been extended to much of the older Cisco gear, including the Catalyst 6000 series and Integrated Services Routers, the company says.

Cisco has a lot riding on ACI, which was announced less than a year ago, and it may take a while to get the mass of its customers on board. Two IT engineers attending Cisco Live, both from large U.S. retailers, said they were just learning about ACI for the first time. The technologies they’re now looking to adopt — converged network-computing-storage platforms for one, and VoIP for the other — are far from the cutting edge of Cisco’s agenda. Cisco says it has 1,000 customers in the pipeline to adopt the Nexus 9000 and ACI.

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Cisco and Kansas City to launch network for smart city services

Posted on October 4, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Tech Leave a comment

Components include an incubator for startups to build apps and other services for residents and visitors

Officials from networking giant Cisco Systems and Kansas City, Mo., have signed a letter of intent to launch a new network for smart city services.

Elements of the project call for designing mobile apps for citizen access, digital interactive kiosks, smart street lights and video surveillance in an area called the city’s innovation district.

The project is designed to complement the city’s build out of a two-mile downtown streetcar path, Cisco said in a statement yesterday.

Kansas City, Mo. Mayor Sly James said the initiative with Cisco promises to connect city services and information with visitors and residents “like never before.”

Third-party app developers will also have an opportunity to build unique and innovative apps for public use.

Wim Elfrink, Cisco’s executive vice president of industry solutions, credited city leaders with leading the “charge on innovation in the Midwest.”

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Cisco mum on future of ThreatGrid’s partnership arrangements

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Cisco Leave a comment

Having completed its acquisition of ThreatGRID this week, Cisco put forward plans for how the TreatGRID sandboxing technology will fit in the Cisco security portfolio. The company also acknowledged it’s not entirely clear yet on what to do about the many technology-sharing relationships that ThreatGRID has had with other vendors, including Cisco competitor, Check Point.

ThreatGRID is the maker of anti-malware sandboxing technology that Cisco says didn’t have a lot of large customers directly but was expanding through many third-party vendor relationships. In one of them, ThreatGRID last month had joined an alliance with Check Point Software Technologies and six other security vendors to share threat-intelligence. In other publicized partnerships, Guidance Software last month said ThreatGRID would provide malware analysis and threat intelligence to Guidance EnCase customers. Cisco declined to discuss any of the partnership arrangements, but said these are now under review.

+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Check Point builds seven-armed threat-sharing alliance | Cisco to acquire malware-prevention company +

“ThreatGRID is used in a lot of services as an OEM today,” said Scott Harrell, vice president of product management at Cisco. “We’ll evaluate each on a case-by-case basis.” Though Cisco isn’t announcing any radical changes yet—and in fact Harrell said Cisco favors “striving to be more open”—the acquisition of ThreatGRID does put Cisco in the position of having to determine how open it can or will be, especially regarding arch competitors such as Check Point.

“Yes, this is a valid concern, ThreatGRID really went to market with vendor integrations as opposed to enterprise deals. Over time, I expect these types of relationships to get less and less focus, as Cisco tries to win over Check Point customers,” said Rick Holland, principal security analyst at Forrester. He suggested Check Point has more focus on a next-generation firewall strategy than Cisco but that Cisco can be expected to provide more of a “roadmap” in the near term which would overcome any perceived disadvantage. Holland also said Cisco’s buy of ThreatGRID could be “an opportunity for companies like LastLine and Seculert to increase their OEM relationships to fill the ThreatGRID need.”

Though strategy on ThreatGRID’s partnership arrangements may still need to be sorted out, Cisco is discussing what its approach is going to be with ThreatGrid’s standalone sandboxing product. “It’s an on-premises appliance, and if the customer has concerns about data leaving the premises, this is an option,” says Cisco’s Harrell. He points out that Cisco’s AMP technology, which includes sandboxing and other malware-detection mechanisms, makes use of a cloud-based back-end as part of the detection process.

Other vendors are also competing in the anti-malware sandboxing arena, including FireEye, McAfee and Fortinet while Check Point has a sandboxing option for its firewalls.

Cisco plans to integrate the foundation ThreatGRID technology into AMP, as well as Cisco web and e-mail gateways, though this will likely occur in “phases,” and “we’re working on the plans for this,” said Harrell.

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Cisco slashing up to 6,000 jobs

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Career, Cisco Leave a comment

Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security.

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The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said.

“If we don’t have the courage to change, if we don’t lead the change, we will be left behind,” Chairman and CEO John Chambers said on a conference call.

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Cisco has about 74,000 employees, so the cuts will affect about 8 percent of its staff. It will take charges of about US$700 million for the cost of the reorganization, up to half of that in the current quarter, Chief Financial Officer Frank Calderoni said.

Cisco announced the move on a conference call to discuss its financial results for the quarter, the fourth of its fiscal year. Its revenue and profit were roughly flat compared with a year earlier, though Chambers said he’s grown more optimistic over the past few months.

During the quarter, Cisco posted sharply higher sales of software products, up 29 percent, and UCS (Unified Computing System) data-center gear, up 30 percent. In addition, its customer base for the new Nexus 9000 switch line grew from 180 to 580 customers. The Nexus 9000 is at the heart of Cisco’s SDN (software-defined networking) strategy.

However, the company’s core businesses declined overall, with routing down 7 percent and switching down 4 percent.

Sales fell in most emerging markets, including China, Russia, Ukraine and many countries in the Middle East, a trend that Chambers blamed partly on economic and political upheavals. Cisco doesn’t expect the picture to improve in emerging markets for several quarters and thinks things could get worse, he said.

The company’s sales to service providers are also ailing, partly because of mergers and acquisitions that are reducing the number of potential customers, Chambers said.

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Cisco, NetApp mark progress

Posted on June 28, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Cisco Leave a comment

FlexPod integrated IT infrastructure system generated $3 billion in joint sales in three years

Cisco and NetApp say their FlexPod integrated IT infrastructure reference architecture has generated $3 billion in joint sales since its launch in 2010. FlexPod unit shipments have grown 81% year-over-year, with demand reaching a $2 billion annualized run rate.

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This compares to Cisco’s VCE IT converged infrastructure collaboration with EMC, which generated $1 billion in sales in 2013 and is also approaching a $2 billion annual demand run rate.

The companies say FlexPod is deployed with more than 4,100 customers and available in over 100 countries, an increase from 2,300 customers, and 70 countries last year. It is sold by more than 1,000 channel partners.

Three customers for the FlexPod system are Katz, Sapper and Miller, an American Certified Public Accountant; Salford City Council, in Manchester, England; and Boerse Stuttgart, a German investment firm.

VCE, meanwhile, said it sold more than 1,750 Vblock systems to 800 customers in 60 countries since product began shipping three years ago, with seven of the 10 largest telecommunications companies in the world among its customers.

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Cisco buys its way into AT&T SDN

Posted on June 18, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Cisco Leave a comment

Tail-f acquisition will give it entry into Domain 2.0 project, boost SDN/NFV cloud orchestration capabilities

Cisco this week announced its intent to acquire privately held Tail-f Systems, a developer of multivendor network service orchestration systems for traditional and virtualized networks, and one of the vendors AT&T selected for its Domain 2.0 SDN/NFV project.

Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay $175 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of Tail-f, which is based in Stockholm.

With the Tail-f acquisition, Cisco essentially buys its way into AT&T Domain 2.0 initiative, an effort to virtualize the AT&T service network with software-defined networking and network functions virtualization. Tail-f is one of six vendors AT&T has identified publicly as Domain 2.0 suppliers, a list that also includes Ericsson, Metaswitch Networks, startup Affirmed Networks, Juniper Networks and Amdocs.

Domain 2.0 is viewed as a negative for Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure programmable networking strategy due to AT&T’s reported preference for commodity, white box hardware and SDN controllers. VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform is also already present in AT&T data centers.

Cisco, though, is expected to retain its incumbency in AT&T’s WAN.

Tail-f’s products help service providers and enterprise IT organizations implement cloud applications and network services across multivendor networking devices. They also help reduce time-to-market for network equipment vendors building equipment for software-programmable networks, Cisco says.

Tail-f’s network service orchestration technology will help Cisco provide products that simplify and automate the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual networks in the cloud. Tail-f’s software also addresses provisioning of traditional Layer 2/3 VPNs as well as next-generation networks based on NFV and programmability, Cisco says.
screen shot of Tail-f site

“The acquisition of Tail-f’s network services configuration and orchestration technology will extend Cisco’s innovation in network function virtualization, helping service providers reduce operating costs and the time it takes to deploy new services, making agile service provisioning a reality,” states Hilton Romanski, senior vice president of Cisco Corporate Development.

Upon completion of the acquisition, Tail-f employees will join Cisco’s Cloud and Virtualization Group led by Gee Rittenhouse, vice president and general manager. The acquisition of Tail-f is expected to be completed in Cisco’s fiscal fourth quarter, which ends in July.

Tail-f has 90 customers, including seven of the top 10 network equipment providers, as well as a number of Tier 1 service providers in addition to AT&T. Deutsche Telekom is also a Tail-f customer.

Rittenhouse says Tail-f will allow Cisco to participate in all service provider SDN/NFV transformations in addition to AT&T and Duetsche Telekom. He also says the acquired technology will be a “critical component” of Cisco’s InterCloud strategy to federate cloud networks from different providers, and from Cisco and its partners.

“It’s a leading way of orchestrating and service chaining security, firewalling and virtualized CPE together with the NETCONF/YANG (interface),” he says. NETCONF/YANG is fast becoming a preferred southbound interface in the service provider industry for SDN/NFV orchestration and configuration.

“Cisco recognizes the importance of NETCONF/YANG,” Rittenhouse says.

He also says Tail-f fits into Cisco’s broader SDN portfolio, such as the policy and analytics framework devised by the company’s Insieme business unit and embodied in ACI and the Nexus 9000 switch product line. Rittenhouse said Cisco won’t tightly couple ACI and Tail-f the way ACI and InterCloud are intertwined, but will tout the benefits of the combination of the two.

“We will respect the openness of the NETCONF/YANG platform and model,” he says, adding that the Tail-f acquisition is one of strategic value in time-to-market as well.

Cisco’s ACI uses the internally developed OpFlex southbound protocol for policy abstraction and instantiation. Cisco claims OpFlex is open through its submission to the IETF and the OpenDaylight open source SDN project.

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Cisco announces security service linked with new operations centers

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Cisco

Managed security services provided through SOCs in N.C. and Australia

Cisco today announced Managed Threat Defense, a set of security services for the enterprise that Cisco is providing through two new operations centers to remotely support intrusion-detection, incident response and forensics, among other services.

Cisco Managed Threat Defense requires the enterprise to deploy an appliance on its internal network so that telemetry information can be collected and securely shared with Cisco staff involved in analytics at the two new operations centers, one based in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham area and the other in Sydney, Australia. The Cisco appliance for Managed Threat Defense includes a number of Cisco security capabilities, such as Cisco Advanced Threat Detection based its anti-malware FireAMP technology gained in the Sourcefire acquisition.

+ Background: Cisco takes aim at security services with new division | Cisco details Sourcefire security threat integration, open source direction +

According to Bryan Palma, Cisco senior vice president and general manager of services security practice, the idea is that the important corporate information that the enterprise wants to protect doesn’t ever leave the customer’s network.

Staff at the Cisco SOCs remotely monitor round-for-clock for cyberattacks using analytics and anomaly detection and at that point, immediately begin to work with the customer to tackle any problems. The focus is on malware-related incidents and advanced persistent threats where stealthy attacker might try to exfiltrate critical information from the enterprise, Palma said. If an investigation and forensics are needed, Cisco’s Managed Threat Defense would undertake that as well.

Although the Cisco 24×7 managed security service is just getting started, IDC analyst Christina Richmond said Cisco’s approach is putting forward a comprehensive strategy for defending against advanced threats. “Cisco customers have been asking for this from them,” said Richmond.

One question, though, is how this might impact how Cisco sells its standalone security products since Cisco Managed Threat Defense consists of “an integrated bundle of components,” as Palma described it. That remains unknown, but Palma notes that the type of customers likely to have the most interest in Cisco Managed Threat Defense are large enterprises. Though costs for the monthly service provided through the Cisco SOCs will vary based on each customer’s needs, it’s likely to start in the $100,000 per year range with multi-year contracts. General availability of it is expected within the next 60 days.

Another question is how well Cisco’s managed security service will be able to work in networks that are not based entirely on Cisco network and security products. Palma said Cisco anticipates there will be a need “to support telemetry from non-Cisco sources.”

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Can anti-virus technology morph into breach detection systems?

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Tech

Can anti-virus technology morph into breach detection systems?
Such breach detection systems would need a centralized management reporting system and cloud-based analysis of gathered threat data.

Anti-virus software is still often considered a “checkbox” item for enterprise deployments, especially on Microsoft Windows, but over the decades, anti-virus software changed to do far more than just signature-based virus blocking. Today, the question is whether the type of anti-malware product that evolved from virus checking can transform again to be a part of a “breach detection system,” or BDS

“The premise of breach detection is things will get through all your defenses and you need to contain it as soon as possible,” says Randy Abrams, research director at NSS Labs, which has begun testing what it calls BDS products that can identify evidence of stealthy cyberattacks, track down what corporate computers and networks were hit and quickly mitigate against any malware dropped in that attack which would be used to spy and exfiltrate sensitive data. BDS products, however they do it — through sandboxing, an endpoint agent or other approach — should be able to at least catch the breach within 48 hours, he says.
The premise of threat detection is things will get through your defenses and you need to contain it as soon as possible.
— Randy Abrams, research director at NSS Labs

BDS products are largely immature, Abrams acknowledges, but enterprise customers are keenly interested in them and asking to have them independently tested. NSS Labs started doing that last year with products from AhnLab as well as FireEye and Fidelis Security, which was acquired by General Dynamics. These three did fairly well in that first round of basic testing, Abrams says. But the main limitations appeared to be there needs to be more protocol analysis done in to ensure attackers don’t have “a hidden tunnel out of the enterprise,” he adds. The next round of BDS tests anticipated for later this year will be tougher, he says.

+More on Network World: McAfee plans enterprise security package for fast threat detection and response | Is rapid detection the new prevention? | IDC tabs ‘Specialized Threat Analysis & Protection’ as new segment +

The vendors that NSS Labs consider to be part of the emerging BDS market today include Cisco, FireEye, Symantec, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, Damballa, Fidelis and AhnLab. The security industry itself is abuzz with the utterances of “indicators of compromise,” the “IOC” clues such as anomalous outbound traffic that might indicate an attacker successfully broke in. Abrams thinks any BDS will need a centralized management reporting system and probably a lot of cloud-based analysis of gathered threat data.

Where this will all go is uncertain. The term BDS isn’t universally applied as a description. One research firm, IDC, last year started tracking what it calls “Specialized Threat Analysis and Protection” as a new segment that seems similar to BDS.

The question is whether the established vendors in the traditional antivirus industry, particularly Symantec and McAfee which lead in market share, can transition over to anything close to the NSS Labs’ view of BDS. Abrams notes the problem with any anti-malware product, however good, is that criminals determined to break into corporations are testing the attack and espionage code they’ve developed for that against existing antivirus products to find something that will get through and not be noticed, at least for a while.

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Cisco fixes remote access vulnerabilities in Cisco Secure Access Control System

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Lindsay Posted in Cisco

Flaws in the network access control product can give attackers access to administrative functions, Cisco said

Cisco Systems has released software updates for its Cisco Secure Access Control System (ACS) in order to patch three vulnerabilities that could give remote attackers administrative access to the platform and allow them to execute OS-level commands without authorization.

Cisco ACS is a server appliance that enforces access control policies for both wireless and wired network clients. It’s managed through a Web-based user interface and supports the RADIUS (Remote Access Dial In User Service) and TACACS+ (Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System Plus) protocols.

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Versions of the Cisco Secure ACS software older than 5.5 contain two vulnerabilities in the RMI (Remote Method Invocation) interface that’s used for communication between different ACS deployments and listens on TCP ports 2020 and 2030.

One of the vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2014-0648, stems from insufficient authentication and authorization enforcement and allows remote unauthenticated attackers to perform administrative actions on the system through the RMI interface.

The other vulnerability, identified as CVE-2014-0649, allows remote attackers with access to restricted user accounts to escalate their privileges and perform superadmin functions via the RMI interface.

A third vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2014-0650, was discovered in the system’s Web-based interface and is the result of insufficient input validation. An unauthenticated remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability to inject and execute OS-level commands without shell access, Cisco said in a security advisory. This vulnerability affects Cisco Secure ACS software older than 5.4 patch 3.

There are no configuration workarounds available to mitigate these vulnerabilities, so updating the software to the new versions released by Cisco is recommended.

“The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerabilities that are described in this advisory,” the company said.

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