Clearpath’s Blog on IT Infrastructure, Hybrid Clouds and IT Security

Remember those childhood games of “hide and seek”?  All the neighborhood children would get together in breathless anticipation of both finding the best hiding spots and the thrill of being discovered.  But the last thing you want when you are thinking about your network security is to play a game of hide and seek with malicious threats like hackers or ransomware.

Sure—your first line of defense is your firewall.   But it’s not, if some threat gets inside, but when threats get inside.  What is your response? Does finding out what’s happening turn into a game of hide and seek?  Or worse—is your approach strictly a forensic one?  Wouldn’t it be better to stop the threats as they are happening rather than simply reporting on what happened? 

There’s no doubt that your enterprise is consistently looking toward greater security, especially in the face of today’s BYOD trend, which seems to present a whole new set of threats as you aim to defend your business, operations, and clients. 

People bring their own devices to work--- and despite everything, they want to use those personal devices on corporate or government networks.  And the reverse happens as well: employees want to use company-issued mobile devices to work from home or while on-the-move.  Given that the majority of end-point users have no idea what mobile device hygiene means, employees who either take the BYOD approach or use corporate devices outside the firewall are putting their organizations at risk.

As you are aware, it is nearly impossible and cost prohibitive to monitor East-West network traffic in traditional networking and virtualization environments. Additionally, management tools were never designed to address the complexity or virtualized aspects of today’s networks. This, among many other reasons, has IT turning to VMware NSX.

Transforming operations across virtual, physical, and cloud networks.

VMware NSX creates a software network overlay that enables flexible, scalable networks as well as micro-segmentation - firewall - level security for total control over traffic between servers. But while NSX has revolutionized network security and operations, in order to optimize performance and minimize security risks, one needs a user-friendly tool to help regulate and fine-tune VMware NSX.

The hybrid cloud model is becoming an attractive option for a growing number of businesses 
looking to differentiate, innovate, and quickly meet expanding business requirements.  In addition to offering greater agility, flexibility, and scalability, hybrid clouds also help maintain security and high performance for business critical applications and data.  The software-defined data center (SDDC) enables this transition to the cloud by providing an infrastructure that is virtualized and fully automated by software. 

The concept of virtualization has revolutionized today’s data center – from server to storage and now networking. As a result, it has paved the way for many cloud offerings such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Small and medium businesses, or really enterprise customers of any size, can now implement comprehensive disaster recovery plans that were once out of reach due to cost or lack of resources.

“Yahoo says 500 million accounts stolen” – CNN Money

“Snapchat and Seagate fall prey to new W-2 scam” - CBS News

“Cyber hack got access to over 700,000 IRS accounts” - USA Today

“LinkedIn Data Breach: 117 Million Emails and Passwords Leaked” - Fortune

“The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the US” – New York Times

Headlines like these are increasingly more common as data breaches, leaks, and hacks continue to affect companies of all sizes, types, and prominence.  Unfortunately, no one is immune to the sophisticated attacks performed at the hands of cybercriminals.  And despite greater focus and effort on defending the data center, the speed at which technology is evolving creates new challenges for implementing a secure network. 

For customers looking to adopt a software-defined networking (SDN) approach to automating their data center network, Cisco ACI and VMware NSX are likely not foreign terms.  These SDN platforms, being two of the leading solutions in the market, have often been positioned against each other as apples-to-apples competitors.  In fact, of the 250 SDN-related inquiries that Gartner fielded in 2016, more than 50 specifically requested comparisons between VMware NSX and Cisco ACI.

We recently implemented NSX in an existing vCenter/vSphere environment and ran across an interesting issue when attempting to prepare the hosts. SQL Server Reporting Services was co-installed with vCenter, so to prevent a conflict on TCP/80 the customer specified a custom HTTP port during vCenter installation. At this point we should have been conflict free on TCP/80 but as we soon found out, that was not the case.