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29/12/2023

Wishing you a joyous holiday season and a prosperous New Year! Thank you for your continued partnership. We look forward to achieving new milestones together in the coming year.🎉🎉🎉

09/08/2023

That's so cute 😍

08/08/2023

Ruijie 400G Data Center Core Switches RG-N18010-XH

07/08/2023

Top 6 Most Commonly Used Server Types
Server Server Server Server # FTP Server
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20/07/2023

Newsflash |Top 7 multicloud security solution providers for 2023

cloud point

19/07/2023

Newsflash |Fortinet unveils 2 next-gen firewalls for mid- and large-sized data centers
To expand its portfolio, Fortinet today introduced two new data center next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), one aimed at very large, hyperscale data centers, and one aimed at mid-sized data centers.
As network firewalls evolve into hybrid mesh firewalls, Fortinet claims the single operating system and unified management make its FortiGate NGFWs “an ideal fit” for a hybrid mesh firewall architecture.
Hybrid mesh firewalls are platforms that expand modern network firewall controls to multiple enforcement points including firewall-as-a-service and cloud firewalls, with a centralized and cloud-based manager to help secure the hybrid environment, according to Gartner.
The firm predicts that more than 60% of organizations will have more than one type of firewall deployment by 2026, prompting the adoption of hybrid mesh firewalls.
“Firewalls are not just a silo platform in one deployment; they are evolving to a hybrid mesh firewall across end-to-end technologies,” Nirav Shah, VP of products and solutions at Fortinet, told SDxCentral.
“What’s unique that Fortinet has been driving is that the next generation firewall needs to have a single operating system, it needs to be driving AI [artificial intelligence]-powered services everywhere, and it needs to have a unified management,” he added.
Gartner named Fortinet as one of the leaders in its 2022 Magic Quadrant for Network Firewall report. FortiGate NGFWs utilize a single operating system — FortiOS, and a unified management console — FortiManager, integrated with AI-powered security across a hybrid environment. This includes on-premises, cloud, secure access service edge (SASE) and virtual machines.
Shah touted this hybrid mesh firewall architecture as helping customers stop threats and continue to consolidate and converge. For example, he said, a CIO can have the visibility of the organization’s network across on-premises, OT systems, multi-cloud and software-as-a-service to quickly identify issues and fine-tune policies and compliances, and automate this process with a hybrid mesh firewall architecture.
“Fortinet made deploying and managing next-gen firewalls across our on-premises, cloud and virtual environments simple. With FortiManager, we can view performance, unify policies and ensure our NGFWs are sharing threat information via a single pane of glass,” Joseph Neumann, deputy chief information security officer at Digital Realty, said in a statement.
Fortinet’s new next-gen firewalls for data centers
Fortinet introduced two new FortiGate NGFWs for data centers — 3200F and 900G series.
The 3200F series firewall is the next generation of its high-end 3200 series, purposely built for hyperscale data centers.
Shah said this new firewall, driven by Fortinet’s custom ASIC, has five to 10 times performance improvements and consumes 72% less energy than its competitors. It also offers four 400GE interfaces for high-traffic volume and scale management.
“These types of data center appliances enable a very large enterprise, where they have unique use cases, to provide security protection,” he said. “We’re talking about a very large financial health care organization, where the traffic pattern is so high, [but] there is a need for a low latency; this kind of architecture supports that.”
On the other hand, the 900G series firewall targets the mid-range market, such as firewall deployments for a large campus or a smaller data center. Fortinet claims it offers six times the firewall throughput and three times the threat protection performance (20 Gb/s) than the industry average.
Shah highlighted both the 3200F and 900G series are in a compact appliance form factor but not chassis.
“3200F has 400 gigabits of interface and, oftentimes when you’re looking at 400GE interface and 300 Gb/s-plus performance, many vendors need a chassis. But because of our approach to building an ASIC, we can create this architecture [that] comes in a compact form factor and still we can deliver a very high performance,” he said.

18/07/2023

Newsflash |Microsoft makes ‘late’ entry into busy SSE market, rebrands Azure AD
Microsoft introduced its new zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and secure web gateway (SWG) services under its Entra suite, leading to its official entry into the busy security services edge (SSE) market. The tech giant also rebranded its popular Azure Active Directory (AD) into Microsoft Entra ID.
SSE commonly consists of four elements: ZTNA, SWG, cloud access security brokers (CASB) and firewall-as-a-service (FaaS). And Microsoft’s solution includes Microsoft Entra Internet Access (SWG), Microsoft Entra Private Access (ZTNA) and its existing Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps (CASB).
Microsoft Entra Internet Access is designed to protect software-as-a-service (SaaS), Microsoft 365 apps and internet traffic against malicious and unsafe access, content and other threats from the open internet. It also can extend Conditional Access — Microsoft’s zero-trust policy engine — policies with network conditions, wrote Joy Chik, president of identity and network access at Microsoft, in a blog post.
The service is now in public preview for Microsoft 365 scenarios and Windows clients, and will support general traffic, cloud firewall and threat protection for other operating systems later this year.
Microsoft Entra Private Access is also based on zero-trust principles to expand the existing capabilities of Application Proxy in Microsoft Entra to help organizations simplify and secure access to any private resource, port or protocol.
The service, which is now in public preview, allows users to quickly and easily connect to private apps across hybrid and multi-cloud environments from any device and network, Chik touted, adding it can replace legacy VPNs and offers more granular security.
Microsoft claims its SSE is delivered from Microsoft's global network, which is one of the largest backbone networks in the world that links its data centers across 61 Azure regions with more than 185 global network points of presence (PoPs).
The solution also embraces the open-partner ecosystem. “We’ll continue to evolve our SSE solution as an open platform that delivers the flexibility of choice between solutions from Microsoft and our partners,” Chik wrote.
Microsoft’s SSE is available in select locations in North America and Europe, and additional locations will be added later this year.
Is Microsoft too late to the SSE, SASE market?
Dell’Oro Group Research Director Mauricio Sanchez argued in a blog post that Microsoft is “severely late to market.”
He noted existing SSE major players such as Zscaler, Cisco and Palo Alto Networks have a multiyear head start on Microsoft. “Gaining momentum in a crowded market will take work.”
Sanchez also pointed out Microsoft hasn’t offered a full secure access service edge (SASE) service yet, as it relies on third-party vendors for SD-WAN. But “Microsoft has strong networking chops that could facilitate servicing the full SASE opportunity, including networking and security.”
On the other hand, Microsoft has its own strength to compete in the SSE market, including its large customer base, sales force and partner ecosystem, strong identity foundation and existing public cloud service, Sanchez noted.
“Most SSE vendors partner with cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure to stand up their SSE clouds. Whether cost models or the ability to exploit deeper integrations, the Entra team has a likely advantage,” he wrote.
Rebranding Microsoft Azure AD
Microsoft introduced the Entra brand in May of 2022, which initially included three products: Azure AD, Entra Permissions Management, and Entra Verified ID.
To unify this product family and simplify its product naming, the company decided to rename the Azure AD into Microsoft Entra ID. The process is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
Chik noted no action is required from the customers during the rebranding. “Capabilities, licensing plans, sign-in URLs and APIs remain unchanged; and all existing deployments, configurations and integrations will continue to work as before.”

17/07/2023

Newsflash | Cisco addresses the rising identity-based attacks with Oort acquisition
Cisco today announced plans to acquire Oort, an identity threat detection and response (ITDR) technology provider, in a move to boost its identity security portfolio. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Cisco’s 2024 fiscal year.

Founded in 2019, the Boston-based startup has raised $15 million in funding, including a $3.5 million Seed round and an $11.5 million Series A round co-led by .406 Ventures and Energy Impact Partners (EIP). Cisco Investments notably participated in the Series A round and the vendor has been a strategic investor in Oort since 2022. The two companies did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.

Oort offers an API-driven, cloud-native and agentless platform that is designed to help eliminate identity visibility gaps across diverse data sources, uncovers misconfigurations, identifies security vulnerabilities and leverages predictive identity analytics to proactively stop attacks, according to Raj Chopra, SVP and chief product officer at Cisco Security. He added Oort offers the ability to reduce remediation time by giving enterprises a clear understanding of the “blast radius” of an identity-based incident.

The startup integrates with third-party identity providers and human resource systems for identity threat detection, including Cisco Duo, Google Workspace, Microsoft Azure AD (now Microsoft Entra ID) and Sentinel, Auth0 by Okta, Salesforce and ServiceNow. Chopra noted in a blog post this third-party support is in line with Cisco’s commitment to increase interoperability and deliver consistent outcomes regardless of vendor or technology.

The Oort team will join Cisco’s Security Business Group, with the networking and security giant planning to integrate Oort’s technology into its Security Cloud portfolio.

“Leveraging Oort’s identity-centric technology, we will enhance Cisco’s Security Cloud’s user context telemetry and incorporate their capabilities across our portfolio, including our Duo identity access management (IAM) technology and extended detection and response (XDR) portfolios,” Chopra wrote.
Identity-based attacks on the rise
Verizon’s 2023 data breach report showed 86% of breaches involved the use of stolen credentials and 60% involved the abuse of valid identity credentials.

Identity offers “the ability to establish policies at an individual level for humans, machines and services of what they can access and then continuously monitor behaviors to codify what’s ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ in near real-time,” Chopra noted.

That’s why identity security is becoming increasingly important, “largely driven by the rise of remote access, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, and ubiquitous cloud and SaaS [software-as-a-service] adoption that has changed the world forever,” he added.

Cisco’s security acquisitions in 2023
The Oort buy is Cisco’s fourth security-startup acquisition this year. The vendor bought Valtix in February for multi-cloud security, Lightspin in March for cloud security posture management (CSPM), and announced the intent to acquire Armorblox in May for the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) in security.

The vendor is also acquiring Accedian and SamKnows to enhance its observability capabilities, which are converging with security.

05/07/2023

Newsflash | Cisco will buy SamKnows to increase ThousandEyes network visibility
This week, Cisco announced its intent to acquire SamKnows. The latter is a privately held broadband network monitoring company headquartered in London. The acquisition further expands Cisco’s network monitoring and management offering.
The goal of the acquisition is to extend Cisco’s ThousandEyes view of the Internet and hybrid workforce experience. SamKnows operates an internet performance monitoring platform for home routers and mobile devices. Furthermore, its telemetry agents are deployed by service providers such as British Telecom, Verizon, Virgin Media, Vodafone, and others.
“For broadband providers and our customers today, the combination of ThousandEyes and SamKnows will accelerate the delivery of exceptional connected experiences over many more networks”, explained ThousandEyes CEO Mohit Lad in a blog post.
Enhancing the hybrid work experience
“In the last few years, hybrid work has dramatically expanded the role of broadband networks, and companies are increasingly dependent on these networks to connect customers and employees to applications and services”, Lad continues. “Ensuring end-to-end connectivity from home environments is now essential for enterprises supporting remote employees, application providers reaching users, and broadband providers maintaining customer satisfaction”.
Cisco says its acquisition of SamKnows will expand ThousandEyes’ visibility of broadband networks. In addition, last-mile performance will be improved through SamKnows’s “fleet of millions of vantage points”. These are located on home routers and mobile devices connected to ISPs.
The overarching goal, Lad says, is to enable providers to “isolate and troubleshoot issues faster to assure a differentiated customer experience that reduces churn, attracts users, and enables them to better compete in today’s market”.
SamKno ws will complement Accedian
Cisco’s SamKnows acquisition comes just a week after the company announced its intent to acquire Accedian, a Canadian network performance management vendor.
With visibility into over 400M endpoints, we have the most comprehensive set of network and user experience data for today’s Internet as well as the primary SaaS applications used by businesses, public clouds, and enterprises, wrote Jonathan Davidson, EVP of Networking at Cisco in his own blog post.
“With the acquisitions of Accedian and SamKnows, we are providing a whole new level of network assurance and experience monitoring for our customers”, Davidson added.

04/07/2023

Newsflash | When the firewall meets the SD-WAN, "with one stone" to achieve manufacturing network security
With the deepening of the application of the new generation of information technology in the manufacturing industry and the acceleration of the process of digital transformation, the network security problems faced by enterprises are endless and affect the whole body.
At present, the manufacturing network security mainly faces three major risks: the level is not clear, inadequate isolation; Unknown system security vulnerabilities, lack of risk and threat intelligence; Extensive access control means, difficult to control and manage effectively. Enterprise security lacks flexibility.
Cisco firewalls contain hundreds of industrial IPS rules and have threat detection capabilities across a wide range of industrial protocols and communication modes, including SCADA, DNP3, CIP, Modbus and other OT protocols. It monitors and identifies network traffic associated with industrial control systems and analyzes potential threats. By deeply understanding the details of industrial protocols and communication patterns, the signature database can detect and prevent attacks against industrial environments in a timely manner, protecting industrial networks from malicious activities.
Cisco recently introduced Cisco Secure Firewall 3105, designed for high-growth enterprise branches. The new 3105 offers up to a 500% performance improvement over past midrange platforms. With a new hardware framework and software, fully enhance the security resilience of partner and user network deployments.

Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 is a family of threat protection-focused security devices that provide superior threat defense and help enterprises build security resilience. Each model delivers excellent performance for multiple firewall usage scenarios, with throughput ranging from the Internet edge to the data center and private cloud to meet the security needs of enterprise business development and operational scale growth.
Cisco's firewall is powered by Snort3, the next generation IPS engine. For more than 20 years, Snort has become the de facto standard by which all network intrusion detection systems are measured. Snort3 is a major upgrade to proven network security tools, providing powerful performance and security capabilities optimizations for Cisco firewalls. More powerful and easier to use, while also reducing the use of system resources. Cisco's firewall with Snort3 provides manufacturing customers with stronger, more efficient, and more resilient security.
In addition, the blessing from Cisco's strong security intelligence team Talos also makes Cisco's firewall series products have more intelligent and more targeted security protection capabilities. The Cisco Talos Intelligence Group, one of the world's largest commercial threat intelligence teams, creates accurate, fast, and actionable threat intelligence for Cisco customers, products, and services, protects customers from known and emerging threats, finds new vulnerabilities in common software, And intercept threats before they further compromise the entire network. Talos leverage its extensive threat intelligence to create a more secure network infrastructure for each customer, significantly enhancing the security capabilities of Cisco customers.
See Chapter for application
With the increase of MPLS dedicated lines required by large manufacturing enterprises, the cost of WAN deployment is also increasing. Traditional WAN networks may suffer from slow cloud application performance and reduce transmission efficiency. The spread of factories and the increase in the number of devices have multiplied the cyber attack surface... These networking challenges can now be easily solved by deploying Cisco Secure Firewall 3105 with an integrated SD-WAN solution.
First, Cisco Secure Firewall 3105 integrates advanced threat detection and defense technologies, including firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS), and virtual private networks (VPNS), providing powerful security performance to effectively defend against various network threats.
Cisco Secure Firewall 3105 is deployed on the public cloud through the NGFWv, enabling interconnection between virtual private clouds (VPCS) and public cloud service providers (such as AWS and Azure), as well as between branches. When branches connect to the Internet, enterprise IT can observe and analyze network traffic in real time, identify and prevent potential threats, and protect sensitive data and business applications.
The Cisco Secure Firewall 3105 achieves significant performance gains through a hybrid hardware architecture of CPU and FPGA. The new hardware architecture optimizes the processing capabilities of firewalls, encryption, and threat checks, directly increasing the cost performance of Layer 7 security capability by three times, and improving the cost performance of VPN encryption throughput by nearly six times. Its seven-layer throughput capacity of 10Gbps and rich new features are ideal for enterprise network security border access and SDWAN interconnection networking, as well as small data center isolation and policy control.

The Cisco Secure Firewall 3105 Intelligent Routing function dynamically selects the best data transmission path by monitoring and evaluating the performance metrics of different connection paths, such as latency, bandwidth utilization, and packet loss rates. It makes intelligent decisions based on real-time data and application requirements, ensuring that data is transmitted over reliable and efficient network channels. The intelligent routing function combines advanced application identification and traffic analysis technologies to classify and process data flows based on application type and security group label SGT. In this way, business-critical applications can be prioritized, while low-priority traffic can be restricted or redirected to make full use of available bandwidth resources, providing enterprises with greater flexibility and scalability.

Not only that, manufacturing enterprises are increasingly relying on SaaS and IaaS applications for business operations as they transition to the cloud. These applications are scattered across multiple locations and operated by different people. Under traditional WAN, these applications run slowly and inefficiently, with increased latency, poor performance, low network security, and more prone to errors. Cisco Secure Firewall 3105 integrates an SD-WAN solution that dramatically speeds up multi-cloud access for SaaS and IaaS applications. It also automates workflow management for all major public clouds. This means that critical SaaS applications can optimize the visibility and control of smart manufacturing in real time over SD-WAN. Another piece of good news is that Cisco Firewall is coming soon with support for smart routing for SaaS.

Cisco firewalls with highly integrated management features simplify the configuration and management of SD-WAN networks. It provides an intuitive user interface and powerful automation tools that enable administrators to easily manage network performance, security policies, and connection status. This ability to integrate management saves businesses time and effort, allowing them to focus on their core business without worrying about the complexities of network management.
Cybersecurity is one of the most important capabilities of SD-WAN in manufacturing. Cloud-based applications are scattered everywhere, and the cyberattack surface increases, making it difficult to protect. SD-WAN provides the best threat protection and makes it easy to manage malicious activity and policy violations in your network. It also enables enterprises to build a robust Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture that protects network data access and improves network operational efficiency and performance by merging security and network functions into a single cloud delivery service. It uses Zero Trust Network Access, which never defaults to trust, and establishes trust for each access request, ensuring that only the right users and devices can access applications and networks, thus ensuring consistent data protection.
Cisco Greater China Vice President, General manager of the Security business unit, Tony Bu, said:
“With the emergence of new technologies, new models and new forms of business, the digital environment is changing at an accelerating pace, and manufacturing enterprises in particular need a simple and centralized security platform to manage and protect their expanding and rapidly evolving IT infrastructure. The launch of the new Cisco Secure Firewall 3105 has injected "fresh blood" into the Cisco firewall product family, greatly improving the firewall performance, providing customers with a simplified, secure and consistent experience in complex IT environments, and helping manufacturing enterprises to create a unified security network. Further provide more secure support for customer localization innovation.”

28/06/2023

Newsflash | Cisco Engage Greater Bay Area 2023: Cisco's innovative solutions enable digital transformation and sustainability in the Greater Bay Area
Cisco Engage Greater Bay Area 2023 was held in Hong Kong to explore innovative technology topics such as connectivity, security resilience, digital transformation and sustainability.
Cisco lays the foundation for customers and partners to move toward sustainability and is committed to helping organizations reduce their business impact on the environment through digital solutions.
Cisco introduces sustainable innovation to add new capabilities to data centers and Webex collaboration software.
June 28, 2023, Hong Kong - Cisco Engage Greater Bay Area 2023, Cisco's annual event, was held in Hong Kong today, bringing together Cisco executives and industry leaders to discuss how companies can prepare for digital transformation in the Greater Bay Area.
The theme of Cisco Engage Greater Bay Area 2023 is: ALL IN: Expanding Greater Bay Area Horizons, the discussion will focus on a variety of innovative and technological issues in the Greater Bay Area, such as connectivity, security resilience, digital transformation and sustainable development. The event also dissected the opportunities and challenges for enterprises in the Greater Bay Area, exploring the possibility of helping enterprises go global and how to use innovative technology to achieve this possibility.
In the context of Hong Kong's recent economic priorities and the Greater Bay Area's economic stimulus measures, Cisco organized this event to help enterprises enhance their competitiveness in the Greater Bay Area, implement digitization faster, and help enterprises to face the world.
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Ms. Feng Xiaoyun, General Manager of Cisco Hong Kong, Macau and South China, said: "With the full recovery of society, we have witnessed a gradual recovery of economic activity in the Greater Bay Area and are expected to grow rapidly, which is a huge opportunity for companies interested in developing in the Greater Bay Area and overseas. Cisco Engage Greater Bay Area 2023 provides an important platform for organizations to actively drive business through technology. Cisco has built a strong foundation in the industry by providing customers and partners with innovative solutions to help them scale their businesses in digital transformation and connectivity. We hope to continue to play a key role in helping businesses seize the opportunities in the Greater Bay Area."
Cisco Engage Greater Bay Area 2023 also explores the usefulness and sustainability of Cisco's innovative solutions, such as how Cisco's innovative solutions meet the changing needs of enterprises and help enterprises expand overseas markets. The event also further demonstrates Cisco's commitment to developing its business in the Greater Bay Area, as Cisco strives to drive its growth strategy and continue to focus on key businesses such as software, recurring revenue business and supporting services to achieve continuous transformation.
As part of its strategy to support companies in leveraging technology to expand their businesses, Cisco lays the foundation for customers and partners to move toward sustainability and is committed to helping companies reduce their business impact on the environment through digital solutions.
Use eco-innovation programmes for sustainable development
Cisco is committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions across its value chain by 2040, while promoting sustainable development through a number of eco-innovations, including the use of digital technologies to reduce carbon emissions, improve resource efficiency and implement circular economy business models. According to Cisco's "State of Global Innovation Report", more than 90% of IT directors, IT decision makers and developers in Mainland and Hong Kong enterprises believe that their business operations are more sustainable and energy efficient because of innovative solutions, which is consistent with the industry view. In the same way, more efficient and simplified enterprise data visibility is also the key to the success of enterprises to expand their business advantages and unlock more value.
New features from Cisco Data center and Webex collaboration software showcase innovative solutions based on sustainability principles, including the Cisco Nexus Dashboard for cloud and data center networking with an intuitive user interface. And the Webex Control Hub, a core control panel that manages usage data for all Webex services and software. Both solutions are equipped with a range of features that help improve resource efficiency and reduce the company's carbon footprint.
● Nexus Dashboard provides a real-time visualization platform for effective resource management: In addition to providing a basic visual platform to manage, refine, and secure complex network environments, Nexus Dashboard provides an overview of energy usage when enterprises use the Cisco Networking Cloud, making energy management more centralized and easier to do. The Nexus Dashboard, in conjunction with features developed by selected Cisco API partners, provides a wealth of real-time and historical data on energy consumption, costs, and emissions for Nexus switches and other IT devices in the data center. In addition, room temperature monitoring helps to improve device cooling efficiency while ensuring that servers, switches, and storage devices are connected to the specified system.
Monitor emissions to achieve long-term Carbon reduction goals: Webex Control Hub's latest feature, Carbon Emission Insights, provides insight into the energy use of Webex devices and cloud services and their impact on the data center through key metrics such as monthly consumption, monthly emissions reductions, and emission trends. This capability helps strengthen your ability to track and improve your internal sustainability strategy to achieve your data center sustainability goals.
Cisco is committed to providing sustainable solutions within and across the enterprise ecosystem to help companies drive value, strengthen resilience and build an inclusive future through sustainable technologies.