News in Networking: The Big Misconfig and IoT’s Enterprise Time Bomb

This week’s top story picks from the Kentik team.

This time last year it was the Dyn outage. This week, a network misconfiguration at Level 3 caused a big stir. Comcast, Spectrum, Verizon, Cox, RCN and other telecos across the country felt the effects of the ISP’s outage. Also this week, findings from a survey conducted by Forrester revealed IoT is now an “enterprise security time bomb,” with a huge challenge around being able to identify these types of devices on the network.

Here are those headlines and more:

• How a tiny error shut off the internet for parts of the US (Wired)
  A network misconfiguration at Level 3 took down providers like Comcast, Spectrum, Verizon, Cox, and RCN on Monday. Level 3, which was just acquired by CenturyLink, said in a statement to Wired that it resolved the issue in about 90 minutes. “Our network experienced a service disruption affecting some customers with IP-based services,” the company said. “The disruption was caused by a configuration error.”
• Tata Communications betting big on IoT, to spend $100M in 2-3 years (The Economic Times)
  “IoT is a serious business and will become a significant revenue line for the firm going forward,” an SVP of Tata Communications told the Economic Times. According to the report, the telco will invest about $100 million in IoT over the next few years.
• IoT devices are an enterprise security time bomb (ZDNet)
  “The majority of enterprise players cannot identify IoT devices on their networks,” according to a new study conducted by analyst firm Forrester. “IoT is causing serious security concerns for enterprises worldwide with few companies capable of securing them as they are unable to identify devices properly,” wrote ZDNet regarding the study’s findings.
• Here are more companies VMware may want to buy after VeloCloud (Business Journal)
  Following VMWare’s acquisition of VeloCloud, the San Jose Business Journal has a list of other companies that could be next on the to-buy list. SentinelOne and Carbon Black are two security companies VMware is potentially interested in, according to the story.
• Salesforce bases new service on AWS (Wall Street Journal)
  Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference wrapped up today. During the show, the company announced it is building a new service on the AWS cloud, “a notable shift for a company that generally has used its own computing infrastructure,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
• Researchers developing building-free data centers (NetworkWorld)
  “A new outdoor server farm concept that uses vats of liquid-cooled computers instead of buildings could be literally located in farmland,” according to NetworkWorld.
• Cisco SVP gives deep dive into intent-based networking (NetworkWorld)
  Cisco SVP Scott Harrell gave NetworkWorld a deep dive on its new, much-talked-about intent-based networking. Speed and agility are two key pieces of the company’s networking strategy, according to Harrell. “You need to be able to respond in the network. It’s critical for the network to rapidly evolve to meet those needs with minimal manual intervention,” he said.
• IBM makes 20 qubit quantum computing machine available as a cloud service (TechCrunch)
  “IBM has been offering quantum computing as a cloud service since last year when it came out with a 5 qubit version of the advanced computers. Today, the company announced that it’s releasing 20-qubit quantum computers, quite a leap in just 18 months,” reported TechCrunch.

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