After much deliberation and internal discussions we made a tough decision that stretched way beyond improving data center efficiency.  We have moved our office to downtown Kennebunk, Maine.  The new office provides over a dozen improved benefits some of which include walking distance access to:

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Cisco music sensation Mix Master Mitch has released his latest video titled: Cisco Medianet: Application Performance Monitoring with NetFlow .  This newest video includes a larger cast and BIG stars including Mix Master Mitch (Mitch Wilson), Kristin Korda, Tyler Beck, Evan Van Orsdel, Rick Hustus and Paul Lablond.  It even has a cameo appearance from the Plixer President and CEO – Michael Patterson.

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Managed Security Service Providers need solutions that deliver unique features that aren’t always a top priority to enterprise consumers.  According to Gartner, “MSSPs in the Leaders quadrant are typically appropriate options for enterprises requiring frequent interaction with the MSSP for analyst expertise and advice, portal-based correlation and workflow support, and flexible reporting options.”

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I came across this article in infosecisland.com on Securing PCs posted by Michelle Drolet who is the founder and CEO of Towerwall. In the post, she noted several interesting vulnerability facts that most businesses need to be aware of. Right off the top, I found these to be shocking:

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What is your company’s BYOD policy?  Do you have one?  Does BYOD traffic monitoring exist in your network monitoring routines?  BYOD policies  need to be put in place as this new technology paradigm is costing most companies BIG TIME!

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Over 100 SonicWALL field people have been brought up to speed on the IPFIX capabilities of their next generation firewall.  This includes training on configuring SonicWALL IPFIX and NetFlow.

“As a Sonicwall system engineer, I’d have to say the level of support and rich reporting Scrutinizer provides to SonicWALL customers is phenomenal. So far, Scrutinizer is the only product on the market to report on all the unique template data we export via IPFIX. For example, Sonicwall is able to provide insight to actual users, applications (not just port based ones), urls, IPS events, and tons more via IPFIX. This functionality really helps network admins with regards to troubleshooting, reporting, and capacity planning. Further, Scrutinizer provides additional situational awareness of securtiy and network events with the Flow Analytics module.” Rob Andrews – SonicWALL Systems Engineer.

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We spent some time awhile back building some host baseline logic for a future Flow Analytics release. If you’re not familiar with the term “host baseline”, it is a history of an IP node’s historical traffic behavior. Items that go into this communication baseline are behaviors observed in a specified time frame.

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I have a question for you marketing folks out there. Why are so many companies renaming their implementation of NetFlow or IPFIX? Here are some examples:

• NetStream is 3Com’s rename of NetFlow
• JFlow is Juniper’s rename of NetFlow
• AppFlow is the Citrix’s rename of IPFIX
• Nortel called it IPFIX when really it was NetFlow

Why not just call it what it is (i.e. NetFlow or IPFIX)? Why do these industry leaders have to rename it? Many of the same companies above support SNMP, why didn’t they rename that? They export syslogs, why didn’t they rename that? I think it is causing confusion in the industry.  Here are some vendors that didn’t change their implementations:

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I recently learned that Cisco is planning to have integration with DPI (Deep Packet Inspection).  What does this mean to your NetFlow collector and NetFlow Analyzer?  More good stuff!

Seriously, it means more information on the applications on your network.  What good is a NetFlow Reporting tool that only tells you the application is ‘HTTP’ (i.e. port 80)?  Many applications today are using port 80 and a whole slew of others use random ports. This is a real problem for NetFlow monitoring tools because there often isn’t enough information in the traditional NetFlow v5 tuple to determine the actual application (e.g. skype, BitTorrent, H.323, GoToMeeting, etc.).  It has to be done by the hardware or software that exports the IPFIX or NetFlow information. Read more »

Last week Plixer released version 7.0 of Scrutinizer NetFlow and sFlow Analyzer, which is absolutely free. We celebrated by starting a two-part blog series detailing three free and fabulous resources for Cisco NetFlow admins. Today, we talk about the third free resource, plus share with you some of the free tools that your friends at Plixer use often.

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