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What You Must Know Before Establishing a Recovery Plan ?

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations are increasingly adopting the zero trust model, primarily due to the expanding attack surface that leaves critical systems and data exposed. This shift is also fueled by the heightened sophistication of cyber-attacks, which have become more complex and harder to detect, surpassing traditional security measures. Additionally, the existing operating models within organizations are often inconsistent, typically characterized by distributed and siloed environments.    This fragmentation creates vulnerabilities and makes it challenging to implement uniform security protocols. The zero trust model addresses these challenges by assuming that threats exist both inside and outside the network, necessitating continuous verification of all users and devices. Its adoption represents a proactive stance in the ongoing battle against cyber threats, ensuring a more robust and resilient organizational security posture. The Evolution ...
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A comprehensive guide to ransomware distribution in VMware environments

In a virtualized on-premises environment based on VMware, ransomware distribution scenarios can be somewhat unique due to the nature of virtualization technology. However, many of the traditional attack vectors still apply. Here are some ransomware distribution scenarios specific to a VMware-based virtualized environment: Phishing Attacks Targeting Administrators: Administrators with access to the VMware environment might receive phishing emails. If they fall for these and their credentials are compromised, attackers can gain access to the virtualized environment. Exploiting Vulnerabilities in VMware Software: If VMware software or the underlying operating system is not kept up-to-date with security patches, vulnerabilities can be exploited by attackers to deliver ransomware into the virtualized environment. Compromised Remote Management Tools: Tools used for remote management of the virtualized environment, such as vSphere, can be a target. If these tools are compromised, attackers ca...

Edge Computing Demystified Book

After a while I'm back and pleased  to share in this post my first book around Edge computing Technologies. Edge computing has been a very hot and interesting topic nowadays for communication service provider and Enterprise so far. Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality, Smart cities, Healthcare, industrial IoT and many others use cases require a change in the way we operate and host application in the cloud.  IA, Big Data and analytics are often used today to understand the behavior of the customer and even the health of services. Real-time and high throughput demand are the characteristic of the new business services. Edge computing technology promises to resolve different challenges and brings compute, storage and bandwidth close to the data source. I tried in ‘the Edge Computing Demystified’ book to explain Edge computing technology referring to different use cases from communication service provider and enterprise industry. I h...

Acceleration technics for Data Intensive VNF

Recently I was leading the acceleration technics from virtualization point of view and how they can satisfy the “ need for speed ” requested by data intensive VNFs. Although virtualization brings flexibility, resource management and scalability, it adds an overhead of resource represented by the amount of dedicated resource to run an hypervisor. Virtualization introduce also the OVS component: Open virtual switch. This component is responsible of network bridging and routing in the virtualization domain. Historically, Openstack framework was built for IT and web application. Then it was adapted by Telecom vendor as the Telco cloud framework to implement the NFV shift in the telecom industry. OVS component is not a carrier grade component and represents a bottleneck point for data intensive VNFs. Understanding the Data path in a virtualization environment. Referring to VMWare technology, the below figure represents the data path in a virtualization environment. ...

5 lessons for a successful virtualized EPC RFP

vEPC or virtual Evolved Packet Core is the most important platform in the telecom operator architecture. EPC is the core network of LTE system and responsible of handling the payload efficiently from performance and costs perspective. Modern EPC architecture platforms separate the user plan from the control plane in order to make the scaling independent. Thanks to this architectural split, the operators can dimension and adapt their network easily. Many operators have started virtualizing some not data intensive applications (IMS,TAS, PCRF, ..) and are looking today to continue the virtualization effort across the data core functions. Here is the list of some common functions that are becoming candidates for virtualization within the packet core: ·        Packet Data Serving Node Gateway (PGW) ·        Serving Gateway (SGW) ·        Mobile Mangement Entity (MME) · ...