Interop 2012: Virtualize, Mobilize, Exercise (Bring Walking Shoes)

M. Spanbauer

Summary Bullets:

• Interop 2012 promises to be larger than the 2011 show, a good sign of enterprise interest and investment in network technologies.
• Mobility, virtualization, fabrics, and cloud services will dominate much of the discussion surrounding the trade show.

With the 2012 Las Vegas Interop just over a week away, inquiries and invitations have been flooding in.  From wireless to fabrics to virtualization and everything cloud-related, there is a great deal of energy and excitement around enterprise challenges and how best to address them (with a great deal of differentiation between offerings).  UBM has brought together a compelling track list and the open sessions are almost certain to be full every day, so get registered and get to the rooms early to ensure a seat.  Last year, many popular sessions were standing room only, and this year is almost certain to command similar audiences.  Virtualization challenges, evolving management platforms, and vendor interoperability will be key for data center-centric pitches, while most campus and organizational issues touch upon consumerized IT and the host of challenges around BYOD.

Vertical Target: Financial Services Firms Under Threat

A. DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• The nature of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is evolving with more frequent and intense events of shorter duration now the norm
• Cyberattackers are training their sights on high-profile targets such as financial services but no organization is immune

The threat landscape is in a constant state of flux as hackers’ strategies shift and the targets of their attacks change.  DDoS attacks offer one very revealing window into how the threat environment is changing.  Incidents tracked by DDoS vendor Prolexic’s Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert) in Q1 2012 show that while the number of attacks remained relatively constant this quarter and last, the frequency of incidents surged 25% from Q1 2011.  Financial firms proved a particularly attractive target for DDoS attacks:  In Q1 2012, financial services firms were inundated with 65TB of data and 1.1 trillion packets of malicious data leveled against them during DDoS attacks, up from 19.1TB of data and 14 billion packets the previous quarter.  This represents an almost 80-fold increase malicious traffic volume.