Ericsson Launches Its Own Global CDN with Telcos
Ericsson has taken a drastic step into disrupting the CDN market to launch a new ubiquitous CDN called UDN (Unified Delivery Network) which aggregates regional service provider capabilities on a global scale. With leading global service providers including Hutchison, Vodafone, Telstra, and AIS, the system connects content providers with the last mile reach of service providers for content delivery.
Ericsson says that the UDN addresses the requirements of content owners and network owners, both of whom are having to deal with increasing volumes of OTT content alongside growing consumer expectations for the QOE associated with streaming video. They believe that their new UDN service will help content owners getting the reach and QoE they need, network owners monetizing their last miles better and users will get the best possible streaming service.
In addition, content providers Brightcove, DailyMotion, EchoStar, Deluxe, LeTV and QuickPlay also are partnering with Ericsson in establishing the UDN offering in the market. The global content distribution network enables and aggregates network capabilities into the public domain, allowing services to be optimized and scaling the delivery of OTT services and video content. They can optimize and scale services to cope with the demands of video including 4K and UHD, including gaming and (coming soon) virtual reality. They can also add new services faster with time-to-market and cost efficiency.
Akamai Collaborates With Orange On NFV Initiative To Dynamically Scale CDN Capacity For Video Streaming Live Events
The continued growth of video consumption is driving both media companies and CDNs to adopt a strategy to effectively scale the delivery of video across cellular networks in order to stream live events. As networks increasingly are called upon to support large events, it is absolutely necessary to prove how CDN capacity can be deployed and scaled at an immediate rate.
Akamai has recently reported that it has concluded testing their proof-of-concept (PoC) testing at leader telecom company Orange. Orange was able to successfully utilize Akamai’s Aura Virtualized Licensed CDN (vLCDN) solution, integrated with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) NFV Director 3.0 orchestration platform, to provide on-demand CDN scaling for live video streaming of popular events.
For the proof-of-concept, Akamai’s Aura vLCDN solution ran on KVM hypervisors with HPE Helion OpenStack virtual infrastructure manager. Storage and compute resources used for CDN functions were dynamically allocated/de-allocated across a network of physical machines according to the volume and type of content requested from subscribers within a given geography at a given time.
This “elastic” allocation/de-allocation of resources is a key component of an elastic CDN that can be dynamically scaled out or in according to demand. This can be accomplished either manually by network engineers, or automatically, based on certain network or resource conditions.
CloudFlare Registrar Brings Enhanced Security Protection Against Domain Hijacking
CloudFlare is now officially an ICANN accredited registrar providing secure domain registration for high-profile domains. Features include constant use of Registrar Lock and Registry Lock Multi-user, offline confirmation for all DNS changes, and two-factor authentication enforced for all registrant accounts Support for DNSSEC. The CloudFlare Registrar would auto-renew the registrant’s domain a year in advance, aggressively lock it and prevent transfer, and requires multiple people in a registrant’s organization to approve significant changes.
Domain hijacking has been a common issue where attackers trick registrants into changing the nameservers or title information associated with the domain. With the credential changes, the registrar will change the registry and the Internet will recognize the change in ownership. Attackers can even move the domain to a new registrar, making the recovery process for victims much more difficult. When any attacker that has access to the victim’s registrar’s account, it makes appealing to the registrant organization hard to become legally compliant to claims of stolen domain.
Cloudflare is using a highly bureaucratic and formal process (that originated from registrar organization Network Solutions) to ensure the domains are safe and secure, to mitigate the risks involved. Registrant’s organisation will be able to shape security policy and ensure that with the extra layer of security, the real decision makers get to authorize changes. However, Cloudflare is only offering this service to high-end clients and larger enterprises with no plans so far for SMBs.
Microsoft Azure Partners with Imperva Incapsula to Bring WAF and DDoS Mitigation Solutions for Azure
Microsoft has dedicated to holistic agile security platform it touted last November with integrated insights obtained from the company’s intelligent security graph and tighter collaboration with industry partners. The company announced security features for its cloud offerings, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and SharePoint Online. Along with enhanced security management and reporting capabilities, Microsoft integrated identity protection and threat visualization tools to provide real-time insights and predictive intelligence.
In a further effort to bring enterprise Saas security solutions, Microsoft has Web Application Firewall solutions Imperva SecureSphere and Imperva Incapsula. As part of the partnership, Azure customers will be able to access Incapsula reports and events directly from the Azure Dashboard. Users will also have more options deploying a WAF and DDoS mitigation from the Azure Security Center along with the ability to connect multiple web applications to a single WAF appliance and provision a WAF for applications running on Classic Virtual Machines.
This builds on existing capabilities, which will help deploy Barracuda Web Application Firewall and F5 BIG-IP solutions as well as endpoint protection from Trend Micro. Alerts from all these partner solutions are integrated in Security Center for users and respond to security issues impacting Azure resources in one place.
Qwilt and Altiostar to Showcase Integrated Open Cache and V-RAN Solution at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress
Qwilt, a leading provider of online video delivery and open caching solutions, announced a technology and go-to-market partnership with Altiostar, a leader in NFV Cloud RAN (C-RAN) infrastructure for mobile operators during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Feberuary 22-25. This partnership was created in response to the ongoing trend that over half of mobile users will stream video on their devices and networks must be equipped to optimize live and on-demand OTT services.
During the event, Qwilt and Aliostar presented their live event video streams delivery through Open Caching Virtual Network Function (VNF) – using Qwilt Open Cache running in a fully virtualized network environment integrated with the Altiostar V-RAN. The solution streams video on mobile devices at a much faster rate and dramatically reduces network latency and improves viewer Quality of Experience (QoE) which resulted in substantial increase in RAN efficiency, network capacity and dramatic improvement in capital utilization.
In addition, mobile operators can optimize their backhaul capacity spend so that they can be prepared for the next series of bottlenecks in LTE networks. Together, Qwilt’s Open Caching technology and Altiostar’s eNodeB technology will create a fully integrated C-RAN and open cache offering for mobile operators.
PeerApp Announces Availability of Mobile Edge Computing Solution
During the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, intelligent media caching software provider PeerApp presented the availability of its MEC-compliant edge-based OpenCache solution. The new virtualized solution will be part of the effort in providing next-generation current mobile core offerings to bring Internet content acceleration to the edge of mobile networks.
Fully virtualized OpenCache hosts and accelerates delivery of mobile video and other content based at the Mobile Network Edge, either at backhaul aggregation points or in the RAN. The PeerApp Mobile Edge Computing solution, powered by Saguna, will work in tandem with the existing PeerApp mobile core solution by bringing optimization functionality such as content caching and DNS caching to the RAN. The new solution will also maximize RAN link utilization, and deliver hierarchical caching that expands into the RAN.
Ultimately, PeerApp’s OpenCache solution enhances end-user QoE and increases RAN utilization, saving 20-25% on backhaul traffic and expenses while supporting edge-based, mobile content monetization.
Verizon Digital Media Services Announces General Availability Of DNSSEC
Verizon Digital Media Services, leading networking services provider who has recently acquired EdgeCast Networks, announced that they will be supporting Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) as part of its DNS services offering. The addition of the DNSSEC will add digital signatures to a domain name’s DNS to determine the authenticity of the source domain name.
This will be an important security feature since DNS was originally conceived to simply translating domain names into IP numbers. Without extra layers of security protection, it’s possible that DNS servers can be susceptible to attacks such as man-in-the-middle where an attacker actively eavesdrops and manipulates communication between two parties who believe they are directly communicating with each other through an unencrypted Wi-Fi access point and cache poisoning, a type of attack where data is introduced into a DNS resolver cache, causing the name server to return an incorrect IP address and diverting traffic to the attacker’s computer.
With DNSSEC, the extension support will authenticate the resolution of IP addresses with a cryptographic signature, to make sure that answers provided by the DNS server are valid and authentic. The cryptographic signature key exists in both the client resolver with the other in the domain’s authoritative DNS server. The resolver then matches its signature to the authoritative server for verification and to avoid possible tampering.
ZENEDGE Announces First Machine Learning And Big Data Cybersecurity Solution For Adaptive, Real-Time Threat Detection And Mitigation
Cloud-based cybersecurity firm ZENEDGE just announced ZENEDGE AI™, the industry’s first web application firewall that uses artificial intelligence to automatically update security protocols. Using machine learning techniques such as learning algorithms and data-driven models, it inspects web traffic in real-time to detect suspicious behaviors and anomalies and responds to them instantly to protect web-based applications.
ZENEDGE will offer this as a competitive edge against security enterprises that uses signature-based models to describe malicious behavior, but often missing the mark to actually detect cyber threats and behavior anomalies and displaying false positives from their software. Since more sophisticated threats such as 0day attacks can find vulnerabilities easily in web applications and websites, enterprises are often slow to incident response since threats can become undetected and unresolved without the next available security patch.
The platform, through machine learning, will continuously learn what legitimate and malicious behaviors look like and will find and identify patterns common web attacks like SQL injection and XSS while reducing the rate of false positives. The application is currently in beta testing and is expected to be available in Q2 of this year.