EdgeConneX Launches Data Center in Amsterdam
With developments in streaming 4K content, interactive gaming, industrial IoT, and the explosion of cloud computing, more and more infrastructure is needed in proximity to end users, and today EdgeConneX announced that they will expand their efforts to fulfill that demand in Europe. Currently, they are building an Edge Data Center in Amsterdam to addressing the growing customer demand for fast and reliable physical delivery of content, and the resulting spikes in cloud-based traffic that is consuming the network overseas.
This marks their first data center in Europe, with EdgeConneX hoping to implement their U.S. model internationally to bring their business into the global market. Their Amsterdam facility is only the beginning, with plans in motion to deploy new data centers in Ireland, Italy, France, Austria, Germany and the UK.
Riverbed Acquires SD-WAN Provider Ocedo
Riverbed technologies, a leading provider in application performance infrastructure, announced that they have acquired Ocedo, a Germany-based provider of Software-Defined Networking and SD-WAN solutions. SD-WAN solutions help to enable administrators to provide fast and secure delivery of applications, hosted on-site or in the cloud, with much greater ease. Gartner reports that by the end of 2019, 30 percent of all enterprises will be using SD-WAN products in their branch offices.
For Riverbed, this acquisition is a smart move, as Ocedo was an early pioneer in SDN, which means they can help Riverbed to lead the way in deploying next generation networks with innovative, high performance software solutions. Riverbed also revealed plans to bring to market new SD-WAN solutions that will eliminate the need for traditional branch routers, providing cloud-based zero-touch provisioning and management on software they project to release in early 2016. It will be interesting to track the SD-WAN market in the coming years, as more and more companies begin to integrate this technology into their infrastructure.
Nexusguard Announces Nexusguard AI
Nexusguard introduces Nexusguard AI, a new security solution that brings Software Defined Networking to DDoS security, creating the industry’s first DDoS solution powered by automated route engineering using SDN. Without this pairing of SDN and DDoS, ISPs have to building their own DDoS mitigation solutions, which has restrictions based on customer framework, meaning that customers who don’t fit into that specific mold are dropped and left unprotected.
But with Nexusguard AI, ISPs can deliver security to all of their customers that is scalable, with automated orchestration and traffic shifting to help divert mass numbers of users, in real-time, across their servers. This will reduce outages for high-profile sites and brands, which is partly a response to outages over the holidays that greatly affected many companies. This pairing of SDN and DDoS could be revolutionary for cybersecurity, helping ISPs manage their customer base while protecting against evolving threats that continually put companies and their web-platforms in jeopardy.
Arista Networks Rolls Out Next Generation Operating System
Arista Networks has released their new EOS operating system, geared towards improving cloud infrastructures, optimizing container support, and allowing administrators to run Docker containers while tracking performance. This new version also supports Net DB, a network-wide state repository designed to increase scalability, network efficiency and resilience. With NetDB, EOS offers over 1 million routes and 100,000 tunnels to support their spine-routing platforms to help to improve scalability. For hybrid clouds they also support features for workload migration between private and public workloads, and also CloudVision management.
Ericsson Expanding in World of Television
Ericsson has announced plans to acquire a TV-data company called FYI, which analyzes content and scheduling data from more than 9,000 TV networks on a daily basis. Ericsson is already one of Europe’s leading content discovery platforms, delivering metadata, images, searches, and recommendations to more than 3000 TV channels in over 30 languages across Europe. Acquisition of FYI marks their first venture into the U.S. market for content discovery, with Ericsson officials citing the growing need for “content discovery technologies,” given the wide range of TV and video services offered to customers today.
Noting this demand, Ericsson has been focusing on expanding their footprint in the world of TV and media, reporting end of year projections showing a 10 percent growth in their company’s involvement in TV and new media. This expansion into television data analysis will only help diversify Ericsson, while also bringing their industry defining innovation to content discovery. Upon acquiring FYI, Ericsson is already reporting that later this week they will unveil a new video data analysis tool to help further increase the functionality of their TV-data ventures.
FireEye and Parson Form Cyber-security Partnership
FireEye, a cybersecurity company, and Parsons, a technology-driven engineering service firm, announced a partnership that will provide customers with enhanced protection for their critical infrastructure and IT solutions through technologies and services aimed at reducing risk and strengthening security. Due to Parson’s skill as a critical infrastructure provider, they find themselves with an increased vulnerability for cyber attacks given their connection between the physical and cyber worlds.
As they optimized technology to improve visibility and control for administrators, they also made their infrastructure more susceptible to attacks. Partnering with FireEye’s technology, they will be able to develop a whole new system of comprehensive security solutions to combat these issues. As the cyber-threats evolve, so too does the technology to combat these attacks, so it’s imperative to keep an eye on partnerships like this that help to accelerate the evolution of security.
Akamai’s Threat Research Division Uncovers New Attack
Akamai has released information regarding a sophisticated search engine optimization (SEO) attack campaign that uses SQL injections to target websites. A specialist from their security team states that websites affected with this injection distribute hidden HTML links that trick the search engine bots and disrupt page ranking so as not to reflect the accurate findings. Over a two-week period in 2015, they report finding more than 3800 compromised websites and 348 unique IP address participating in the campaign.
The SEO attackers created a chain of external links to mimic normal web content and impact search engine algorithms to manipulate page rankings. Akamai officials recommend and that web application developers implement proper input validation checks for all user-supplied data, as well as deploy WAF in a blocking mode for SQL injection attacks. These attacks can greatly affect the revenue and reputation of companies and organizations, which makes security that much more imperative.
INetU Chooses CloudFlare for Security and Content Delivery
INetU, a customer-centric cloud company for hosting on Windows and Linux dedicated server clusters, announced that they are updating and consolidating their security offerings through CloudFlare. They are adding CloudFlare to their existing security measures, allowing customers to have greater options when it comes to WAF, advanced DDoS protection, content delivery and DNS. This solution will prove to be more cost effective for INetU customers by consolidating security solutions through one provider with an integrated security solution that is more easily manageable. This just marks further growth for CloudFlare, with more than 5 percent of all global Internet requests flowing through their network, which extends their reach to over 2 billion people worldwide.