Verizon buys teleconferencing provider BlueJeans Network, Dropbox offers bug bounties for vendors, Alkira comes out of stealth, and Google releases advanced remote access tools. Tom Hollingsworth and Rich Stroffolino discuss all the IT news of the week on the Gestalt IT Rundown, streaming live at 12:30pm ET.
This week on the Rundown:
Google Healthcare API
Nvidia-Mellanox Deal Approved in China
Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud
Is BGP Safe Yet?
Cloudflare launched the Is BGP Safe Yet site, allowing people to check if their ISP have implemented checking routes using Resource Public Key Infrastructure to make the internet routing Border Gateway Protocol more stable and secure. The site prompts a browser to load two pages, one legitamately routed,the other invalid, to similate a route leak. ISPs that only load the legitimate route pass. Cloudflare says ISPs like AT&T, the Swedish telecom Telia, and the Japanese telecom NTT all pass, while Verizon, Comcast, Orange, and Vodaphone are among ISPs listed as failing.
MS ML Bug Detection
Microsoft announced it developed a system that can distinguish between security and non-security software bugs 99% of the time using an ML, with the ability to identify critical, high-priority security bugs 97% of the time. This system was trained on 13 million work items and bugs from 47,000 developers across GitHub and AzureDevOps repositiories, with the dataset approved by security experts. Microsofy says the model is in production internally and plans to open source the methodology on GitHub.
Dropbox Vendor Bug Bounties
The New York Times reports that, according to three former Dropbox engineers, since 2018 Dropbox offered bug bounties on Zoom vulnerabilities,as well as other services used by the company. Dropbox reportedly had its own security engineers review the bugs and look for related problems before passing them on to Zoom. The researchers said that when vulnerabilties were discoverd, Zoom was slow to fix them, citing a major vulnerability found at a 2019 HackerOne event in Signapore which took three months to patch, only after other researchera publically disclosed a vulnerability with the same root cause.
Verizon Buys BlueJeans
Last week Verizon announced it intended to acquire the videoconferencing and event platform company Blue Jeans networks, in a deal the Wall Street Journal reported worth $500 million. Verizon said they were targeting the acquisition for about a year and Blue Jeans was already a Verizon authorized reseller. Verizon seems bullish about building in Blue Jeans teleconferencing capabilities into their 5G rollout.
Alkira Comes Out of Stealth
The startup Alkira came out of stealth with a networking-as-a-service offering called Cloud Services Exchange to allow for simplified multi-cloud networking. They do this thorugh a network of globally distributed multicloud PoPs, which handle the routing and network services. Alkira presents customers with a point and click interface to select network, services, and clouds to connect, which they claim can get a cloud infrastructure up in 40 minutes. The company was founded by Viptela founder Amir Khan, so there’s a track record.
Google Remote Access
Google began rolling out BeyondCorp Remote Access this week. This is a zero-trust cloud-based remote access tool that requires verification of context to grant remote access to an application. All data is routed to a proxy which handles verification and reviews if the user has data access approval. This can allow admins to allow access only on machines up to data with patches and authentication. This is the latest expansion of Google’s BeyondCorp platform, which is also used internally by the company.
Amazon Snowball Updates
Amazon updated its edge Snowball offerings, aka Amazon ships some AWS to your location. The actual Snowballl Edge Storage Optimized hardware is getting an upgrade, now offering 40vCPUs running at 3.2GHz and 80GB of RAM, along with 80TB of storage and 1TB SSD. There’s also an option to tether up to 12 Snowballs into a single S3 bucket for almost 1PB of data. Perhaps more interesting is the AWS OpsHub for Snow devices, which offers a GUI for management and configuration that can be used offline for secure locations.
The Gestalt IT Rundown is a live weekly look at the IT news of the week. It broadcasts live on YouTube every Wednesday at 12:30pm ET. Be sure to subscribe to Gestalt IT on YouTube for the show each week.
