On-Box Python for Cisco Devices – the Why, What, and How

As a junior network engineer at a university I wrote a lot of management scripts in Perl.  I had scripts to do things such as check switchport configurations and upgrade switch code. Times have changed a lot since then. The university’s web server now runs in the cloud, rather than on my personal workstation, and Python has surpassed Perl as the scripting language du jour. Network automation with Python is now a major focus, making Python an extremely important tool.

Today I’m going to show you how to use Python scripts hosted on the box and integrated into IOS. This is far more powerful than my earlier-career scripts, and I have some simple examples for PCI compliance, Dynamic DNS ACL updates, and configuration validation.

As with many things in IT, we seem to be continually oscillating between “centralized” and “distributed.”  On-box hosting of Python scripts is an example of moving back toward distributed. My view on the argument is that it’s never about the extremes, but more about the balance—a bit like a pendulum constantly swinging as technology advances change what’s possible and practical.

Today, I want to demonstrate why Python scripts running on-box can be awesome.  I also want to explain how easy it is, based on the application hosting environment we’ve just released.  In addition, I’ll give some examples of how Python is even more powerful when combined with some of the existing IOS infrastructure such as Embedded Event Manager (EEM).

Why on-box Python?

There are three main advantages for Python scripts running on the device itself rather than externally.

◈ Scale: If I have a “sanity” script that I need to run regularly and it takes six seconds per device * 1000 devices, that would be 6,000 seconds, or one hour and 40 minutes.I could run them in parallel, but that still consumes resources on my management station, processing the data. It also potentially transports lots of data back to the management station, only to discard much of it.  An alternative is to distribute the work to the devices and get them to provide an update when they’re done.

◈ Security: Instead of having “utility” logins that connect into devices and export information for external processing, you can have the device process its data locally and just export the summary state. Data stays on the device, and less external connections are required.

◈ Autonomy: The biggest limitation of centralized processing is that it needs a network connection to the device. There is a set of use cases to modify device behaviour when it loses connectivity to other devices.  This can only be done on-box.

To illustrate the “what,” I’ve provided some sample scripts and use cases for the three points above. The code is published @  https://github.com/aradford123/on-box-python.git

To get started, we’re going to want to make sure Git is installed on your network device, run the following commands (after you’ve enabled guestshell; see section at the end for details).  The reason for using /flash/gs_script is that it’s a persistent directory and will be available on a switch stack switchover.

# install git

[guestshell@guestshell ~]$ sudo yum install git

# now install scripts into /flash/gs_script

[guestshell@guestshell ~]$ git clone https://github.com/aradford123/on-box-python.git /flash/gs_script

Example 1 – PCI compliance

Here’s an example of a use case that I think you’ll find interesting. One of our customers had a PCI requirement to ensure that any switch ports that were unused for more than seven days were disabled. (This was to prevent people from plugging in unauthorized devices.)

The script looks at all interfaces on the switch, and those that have been inactive (no traffic send/received) for more than seven days are shutdown. All interfaces that were shut down in a logged in a Cisco sparkroom. The interface description is updated with a message indicating the time/date it was shutdown by the PCI-check application.

To run the script, we’ll use the Embedded Event Manager.  EEM is a really powerful piece of IOS infrastructure that can be used to schedule the Python script to run.  The EEM cron job runs the Python script at 15 minutes past the hour, Monday to Friday.

event manager applet PCI-check

 event timer cron cron-entry "15 * * * 1-5"

 action 1.0 cli command "enable"

 action 1.1 cli command "guestshell run python bootflash:gs_script/src/pci-tool/pci_check.py --apply"

This script can now be run hourly (instead of weekly). It’s an example of scaling using on-box Python.

Example 2 – DNS ACL

Another customer had a requirement to keep an ACL updated with the latest DNS entries. For example, they wanted the ACL to reflect the real IP addresses of www.cisco.com and www.amazon.com.

This script automatically schedules its next execution based on the minimum Time To Live (TTL) of the DNS response. It ensures we don’t attempt to update more often than necessary.

The script logs entries that are added to the ACL via syslog, but that could be Cisco Spark or any other notification mechanism.

show logging

*Jul 12 11:44:11.174: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty4(user id: ): "Looking up cisco.com"

*Jul 12 11:44:11.253: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty4(user id: ): "Looking up amazon.com"

*Jul 12 11:44:11.341: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty4(user id: ): "adding IP: 72.163.4.161 to ACL: status: Success"

*Jul 12 11:44:11.351: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty4(user id: ): "adding IP: 54.239.25.208 to ACL: status: Success"

*Jul 12 11:44:11.360: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty4(user id: ): "adding IP: 54.239.17.6 to ACL: status: Success"

*Jul 12 11:44:11.370: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty4(user id: ): "adding IP: 54.239.26.128 to ACL: status: Success"

*Jul 12 11:44:11.379: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty4(user id: ): "adding IP: 54.239.17.7 to ACL: status: Success"

*Jul 12 11:44:11.389: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty4(user id: ): "adding IP: 54.239.25.200 to ACL: status: Success"

*Jul 12 11:44:11.398: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty4(user id: ): "adding IP: 54.239.25.192 to ACL: status: Success"

*Jul 12 11:44:17.605: %SYS-5-USERLOG_NOTICE: Message from tty5(user id: ): "reschedule in : 557 seconds: status: Success"

Here is the resulting ACL. Notice how the remarks are used to indicate the time the ACL changed. The last two entries were added at a later date.

9300#show run | sec canary

ip access-list extended canary_ip_in

remark Added 72.163.4.161 @Wed Jul 12 11:44:11 2017

permit ip any host 72.163.4.161

remark Added 54.239.25.208 @Wed Jul 12 11:44:11 2017

permit ip any host 54.239.25.208

remark Added 54.239.17.6 @Wed Jul 12 11:44:11 2017

permit ip any host 54.239.17.6

remark Added 54.239.26.128 @Wed Jul 12 11:44:11 2017

permit ip any host 54.239.26.128

remark Added 54.239.17.7 @Wed Jul 12 11:44:11 2017

permit ip any host 54.239.17.7

remark Added 54.239.25.200 @Thu Jul 13 16:34:37 2017

permit ip any host 54.239.25.200

remark Added 54.239.25.192 @Thu Jul 13 16:34:37 2017

permit ip any host 54.239.25.192

deny ip any any

This script uses a different type of EEM trigger, a countdown timer. The script self-updates the trigger based on the TTL of the DNS response. In the case below, it will fire in the next 557 seconds.

9300#show run | sec even

event manager applet DNS_update

 event timer countdown time 557

 action 1.0 cli command "enable"

 action 1.1 cli command "guestshell run python bootflash:gs_script/src/dns-update/DNS_update.py cisco.com amazon.com"

This is an example of security using on-box Python. No external access to the device is required.

Example 3 – Configuration change

This example uses an EEM event to look for a syslog message and execute a Python script. In this case, it looks for a configuration event, and fires the script.

This script will do two things:

◈ A sanity check. This example is a simple test to see if an IP address is reachable, but it could be more sophisticated. If the sanity check fails, then the configuration is rolled back.

◈ Log the changes to the configuration in a spark room.

This screenshow shows the configuration diff posted to a spark room.

Here’s an example of the sanity check:  I have a very simple sanitiy check that is looking for connectivity to 1.1.1.1.   While this example is trivial, the sanity check could be much more sophisticated (checking for OSPF neighours, number of connected hosts, etc.).

I shut down the loopback address 1.1.1.1, which is being checked by the sanity function.  The sanity function fails, triggering configuration rollback, and the current (working) configuration is restored.

9300(config)#int loopback 2

9300(config-if)#shut

9300(config-if)#exit

9300(config)#end

9300#

Jul 14 12:01:04.859: %SYS-5-CONFIG_I: Configured from console by vty0 (10.61.215.206)

Jul 14 12:01:15.648: %MLANG-3-LOG: config_check.py: Sanity 

Type escape sequence to abort.

Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 1.1.1.1, timeout is 2 seconds:

.....

Success rate is 0 percent (0/5)

Jul 14 12:01:15.690: Rollback:Acquired Configuration lock.

Jul 14 12:01:15.690: %SYS-5-CONFIG_R: Config Replace is Done 

Jul 14 12:01:16.579: %MLANG-3-LOG: config_check.py: 

Total number of passes: 1

Rollback Done

Jul 14 12:01:18.127: %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface Loopback2, changed state to up

Jul 14 12:01:18.127: %LINK-3-UPDOWN: Interface Loopback2, changed state to up

There are lots of other options for this script, including checking into a git repository and more enhanced sanity checks.

This Python script uses EEM in a different way. The first line of the script embeds an EEM registration. If there is a syslog message with pattern “CONFIG_I” in it, the script will be executed. (NOTE: This is actually a Python script, and the normal Python code is after this.)

::cisco::eem::event_register_syslog pattern "CONFIG_I" maxrun 60

# this is an example of an EEM policy trigger

# based of Joe Clarke version

#https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/python_code_samples_network/blob/master/eem_configdiff_to_spark/sl_config_diff_to_spark.py

I then tell EEM to look for the registration in the config_check.py script.

event manager directory user policy flash:

event manager policy config_check.py

This is an example of autonomy; if the configuration is changed, a sanity check is run to make sure the device is still functioning (and connected) to the network. If the sanity check fails, the configuration is rolled back.

Upgrade sanity check

It’s pretty simple to extend the use case above to check the status of the device before downloading and installing new software. Once the new code is installed, it will re-run the sanity check and either remove the old version of code or roll back depending on the status of the sanity check.

This is another example of autonomy using on-box Python.

How does this really work?

Python runs in a guestshell on the device.  The guestshell is CentOS or Montevista shell running as an application on the device. In order to enable application hosting you need to use the application hosting framework IOX.  To enable IOX is quite easy:

9300# conf t

9300(config)#iox

You then need to enable guestshell. This will take a few seconds.

9300# guestshell enable

Management Interface will be selected if configured

Please wait for completion

On switches running 16.8.1 and later, you need to configure a management interface, as shown below. This was added to allow access to guest shell from ports other than the mangement interface (GigabitEthernet0/0).

9300# conf t

app-hosting appid guestshell

 app-vnic management guest-interface 0

end

9300# guestshell enable

Management Interface will be selected if configured

Please wait for completion

Once it has started, you can either run a command or get an interactive shell session.

9300#guestshell run echo "hello world"

hello world

9300#guestshell

[guestshell@guestshell ~]$ 

The very first thing you will do is update the DNS settings. You can use vi, or just a simple echo statement.

echo -e "nameserver 8.8.8.8\ndomain cisco.com" > /etc/resolv.conf

Now to install some Python modules. This is pretty simple. Just use pip install. I am using the “-E” option as my switch needs a proxy to get to the internet.

[guestshell@guestshell ~]$ sudo -E  pip install netaddr

Collecting netaddr

  Downloading netaddr-0.7.19-py2.py3-none-any.whl (1.6MB)

    100% |################################| 1.6MB 257kB/s 

Installing collected packages: netaddr

Successfully installed netaddr-0.7.19

DevOps

The next question you’re asking is how do I keep the scripts on the device updated? It would be a pain to have to copy/install new scripts all the time.

The solution is pretty simple. Store the scripts in a git repository (so you have full version control), then use an EEM script to “git pull” regularly to keep them updated.

Here’s a simple git update script:

[guestshell@guestshell ~]$ cat /flash/gs_script/utils/update_git.sh 

#!/bin/bash

(cd /flash/gs_script; git pull)

All that’s required is another EEM cron job to keep the device updated with the latest git repository.

event manager applet GIT-sync

 event timer cron cron-entry "0,30 * * * *"

 action 1.0 cli command "enable"

 action 1.1 cli command "guestshell run bootflash/gs_script/src/util/update_git/sh"

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Five Proven Innovation Principles that Drive Business Success and Positive Social Impact

The innovation toolbox is broad and deep, with a growing array of methods, technologies, and tools for bringing a diverse group of innovators to the table. Though the fields of business and social change can seem very different, the things that make business innovation successful can also drive positive social impact. Think of design strategy, systems thinking, community engagement, and advanced technologies. By integrating these elements into regular operations, companies can reframe social responsibility as an integral part of their business model, rather than something that happens alongside.

As an innovation catalyst for Cisco and our customers, Cisco CHILL has identified several key principles that are essential for innovating across industries. We can use these same principles to take on some of the world’s thorniest social problems:

Collaboration

Multi-party innovation is key to solving big, global problems. As James Moore pointed out more than 25 years ago, business innovation requires ecosystems to attract capital, partners, and suppliers. Ecosystems built for social innovation create the same network effect. The more complex and global the challenges we tackle, the more we must grow a network across company, industry, and sector lines. The more intractable the problem, the more difficult it is it create a process to collaborate, but it is the only way to ensure a sustainable, inclusive future.

Technology

“We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate),” wrote Ray Kurzweil in 2001. Large, global data networks and the onslaught of new technologies are providing new tools to power social impact innovation. Imagine AI-enabled chatbots to coordinate aid distribution. Or an IoT-powered urban infrastructure that saves energy and lives. By applying new technologies to challenging problems, we can discover new ways to address complex challenges.

Stakeholder Engagement

In the Cisco CHILL innovation practice, we live by the principle of “massive inclusion”: everyone who might influence the success of a project is at the table. These are a project’s stakeholders. There are a lot of them and they don’t always agree! Leaders at the top of the organization must champion the company’s innovation agenda and involve stakeholders at every level from the very beginning of the design process (more on that below). This will help reduce friction internally and develop a culture of learning and trust. In the same way, a company’s agenda for community accountability and social responsibility must also be led from the highest levels so all employees and business functions can see how their work can affect real change.

Metrics

Founder of modern management Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” As with all business functions, determining the metrics for innovation success is important to achieving results. However, in both innovation and corporate social responsibility, the horizon can be long—it may be decades before we see impact. Innovators must carefully choose which indicators to track so we measure progress toward the end goal, not just activity for the sake of doing things.

Listening and Learning

Every step of the way, we must involve the people our initiatives will touch (often called “users” in the tech world). They too are stakeholders. It is crucial that the innovation process includes everyone and everything that a new technology or service will affect, positively or negatively.

At a CHILL Lab focused on healthcare, cancer patients and caregivers gave immediate feedback on prototypes and were the ultimate arbiters of success for all innovation concepts.

This expansive view must extend from people whose jobs or lives might be impacted, all the way to the global natural systems of air, water, climate, and environmental health. We can’t do this sitting behind a screen in an office: we must get out of the building to listen and learn, and leave ourselves open to wherever the conversation takes us. Co-innovation through prototypes is a great way to develop empathy and understand the needs of people affected by our solutions. At CHILL, we try out our ideas by building a quick prototype designed to test a specific assumption in a real and tangible way. Then we listen to feedback, adjust our approach, and try it again.

After spending the first ten years of my career in nonprofit organizations, I transitioned to enterprise innovation because I believe that to achieve a better world we need to embrace business transformation. The timing couldn’t be better. More and more, companies see the integrated connection between good business and being an accountable champion for a more just world. They see that having a profitable business doesn’t have to come at the cost of over-extracted resources, exploited populations, and pushing the long-term effects onto future generations. As Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said recently during a Fortune Global Forum panel, “I think we’re going to move to a place where you’re not going to talk about CSR (corporate social responsibility) anymore; you’re just going to talk about what you do as a company.”

Today, more organizations like Cisco partner with innovative startups to take on broad social challenges. They champion the work of human service agencies in our communities and design products and regenerative processes to improve the quality of life for those with the least access. Together, we are taking steps toward a more sustainable, healthy, and equitable future for everyone.

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Secure Access to Any Application With Duo Security

Over the past decade, several trends have broadly influenced the way businesses provide users access to applications and services. These trends include the wide adoption of:

◈ Mobile devices
◈ Cloud services (SaaS and IaaS)
◈ Accessing applications from anywhere

As businesses have transformed to a multi-cloud approach, users now have 24×7 access to business applications using any device, from any location. This approach has significantly increased productivity and business agility.

During this same time, business risk has increased as the volume of security incidents has skyrocketed. The result has been major impacts on brand reputation and increased costs in the management and remediation of security incidents. Meanwhile, attackers have developed more sophisticated methods of attack, although many older methods used today (like social engineering, phishing and stolen passwords) still prove effective.

Over the past five years, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report has shown credential theft as the most common factor of a breach. In the 2018 report, Verizon reported the number one action involved in a breach was the use of stolen credentials.

When we look back at the legacy solutions that were previously available to protect against credential theft, products such as RSA SecurID, Vasco and Safenet come to mind. These legacy solutions are known for introducing friction into the end user workflow. They’re seen as being overbearing for the end user, costly to manage, difficult to deploy and integrate with distributed multi-cloud environments. These are not attributes you want in a solution you’re trusting to secure access to critical applications and data.

When Duo Security started, our mission was – and still is – to democratize security by focusing on mitigating and reducing the risk of credential theft in a way that is easy and intuitive for the end user; easy for admins to deploy and manage – while easily protecting any application. We do this by verifying the trust of the user and the device at the time of access – the moment when a user attempts to access a business application. And we apply the same level of protection to all applications, whether they’re hosted in the cloud or on-premises.

It’s a three-prong, unified approach to secure access:

Verify User Trust

Duo verifies the trust of a user by sending a push notification to the user’s mobile device for one-tap approval and login, after the user completes primary authentication (username and password). For more sensitive applications, Duo can apply adaptive authentication controls and policies to establish a higher level of trust. This can include the user’s location, mobile biometrics such as TouchID and FaceID, as well as many other factors.

Verify Device Trust

Duo also verifies the trust of a user’s device by ensuring the device is up to date and adheres to an organization’s security policies before granting access. When a device is up to date, the risk of a device being compromised is significantly reduced. For higher risk applications, Duo allows for stronger controls, such as only allowing company-managed devices to gain access.

Secure Any Application

Duo extends the ability to verify the trust of the user and device to protect any application – in the cloud or on-premises – and supports the ability to apply these security controls to multi-cloud environments including SaaS, IaaS, VPN, Remote Access, Privileged Access, and other core business applications.

Duo’s ability to focus on the user experience while aligning with industry trends such as the broad adoption of mobile devices and cloud services puts Duo in a unique position to enable business agility by providing secure, frictionless access to any application, from anywhere, while significantly reducing the risk of a breach.

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Layers of Security

Do you remember the movie “Die Hard”? Arguably the best Christmas movie ever. All kidding aside, this movie has a great correlation into Security best practices. Before we go into that, let’s recap. The bad guys in the movie were going to steal $640M in bearer bonds. In order to do so, they needed to break through several layers of security:

◈ Infiltrate Nakatomi Plaza and get rid of the guards
◈ Get the vault password from Mr. Takagi
◈ Have your computer guy hack through the vault locks
◈ Have the FBI cut power to the building, which in turn disables the last lock

So, how does this relate to Security? Layers. Lots and lots of layers. Utilizing a layered approach to security means that there are several hurdles that the bad guys need to overcome in order to get to your “bearer bonds” (your data, user information, etc.). The more challenging it is for someone to gain access to your resources, the less likely they are to spend their resources in getting them. While that is not always the case, if your security methodology is such that you can stop a large percentage of malicious activity early, you can focus on the more sophisticated attempts. Former Cisco CEO John Chambers said “There are two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those who don’t know they have been hacked. “. If you take this to heart, it will help in laying out the strategy you need to best protect your people, applications, and data.

There is not one way to accomplish setting up these layers and they are certainly not linear as attacks can come from both inside and outside of your network. Let’s take a look at some of these layers that could be considered foundational to any security plan.

Starting at the Front Door

From a technology point of view, this makes me think of the firewall. Granted, in many ways this is obvious. Limit access to/from the Internet. This is a great place to start as this is like a lock on the front door of your home. With today’s Next-Gen Firewalls, one can look at applications, provide deeper packet inspection, and ultimately more granular control. As the infrastructures change, we are now deploying firewall technology within segments of the network and now even into the Cloud.

Who? What? Where? When?

Nakatomi Plaza had locks on their doors, guards, and security cameras. Managing Whether it’s physical or network security, managing access is critical. When we understand who is accessing the network (employee, contractor, guest, CEO), how they are accessing it (corporate laptop, phone, personal tablet), where they are accessing (HQ, Branch Office, VPN), and even the time of day, decisions can be made to allow or deny access. Taking it a step further, access control today with a solution like Identity Service Engine (ISE) can take all of this into consideration to allow/deny access to specific resources on the network. For example, if a user in the Engineering group is at HQ and trying to update a critical server using their corporate issued laptop, the engineer may be able to do so. That same engineer still at HQ but on a personal laptop or tablet may be denied access. Managing access to resources is one of the most important and challenging areas of security.

You’ve Got Mail

Email is still the number one threat vector when it comes to malware and breaches. The criminals are getting smarter and when they send out a phishing attack, SPAM, or malicious email, they look completely legitimate and it’s challenging to know what is real and what is not. Email security solutions can pour through all incoming and outgoing mail. These tools can verify the sender and receiver. They can look at the content and attachments. Based on policies and information from resources such as Talos, compromised emails may never even make it to the recipient. As long as email continues to be a primary source of communication, it will continue to be a primary way to be breached.

We’re Not in Kansas (or the office) Anymore

Almost 50% of the workforce is mobile today. People are working from homes, hotels, coffee shops, and planes now. There is also the need to access data from anywhere at any time. Keeping that data secure is not the job of the cloud provider but the owner of the data. Additionally, the users accessing the data from so many not-so-secure locations are of course always using their VPNs every time, right? Wrong! In a recent survey over 80% polled admitted to not using their VPN when connecting to public networks. So, now the bad guys are through another layer of security. We need to protect the cloud users, applications, and data. CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) is a technology that does just that. Cloudlock can detect compromised accounts, monitor and flag anomalies, and provide visibility into those cloud applications, users, and data.

As work becomes a thing we do and less of a place we go, the risk of attack gets higher. I said earlier that the number one threat vector is email. Within those emails, many of the malware is launched from clicking on a link. That means DNS is yet another method that can be used by the bad guys. In fact, around 90% of malware is DNS based. Umbrella provides not only a better Internet access, but a secure Internet access. Regardless of where you go, Umbrella can protect you.

Having all of these layers to protect your “bearer bonds” doesn’t guarantee that nothing bad will happen. The bad guys have a lot of resources and time to get what they want. This methodology will hopefully help make it so difficult for them, that they don’t want to even try. People, applications, and data. It’s a lot to protect and a lost to lose. If you do it correctly though, you get to be the hero at the end.

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Cloud Covered – Are You Insured?

Security is a topic that is a top-of-mind for every CIO out there. It is interesting to know that according to a study performed by Research 451, 64% of enterprises report information security is not a separate line in terms of budget, instead, it is part of their IT infrastructure one.

In other words, most of us take security for granted until something bad happens. Pete Johnson (“Cloud Unfiltered”) even referred to it as “insurance” and I believe that it is the appropriate term for it.

We all know we need insurance, but what is the right-coverage for me? Well, it really depends on what are the type of assets you are trying to protect and how your business would be impacted if something happened.

If we think about our daily lives, imagine having 20 doors/windows wide open and then just locking or adding video-surveillance to the one in the backyard (because your neighbor just told you he had been robbed the night before and that the thief broke into his house through the backyard door). Well, that’s a good start, however there are still more than 19 doors & windows still wide open and vulnerable for anybody to access right?

Well, that’s pretty much what happens in IT and only securing a few “doors” is called “black-listing”. Let me explain: every server has 65535 ports open (for TCP and the same amount for UDP). If we consider the black-listing approach, we may just close a few ports based on common vulnerabilities knowledge. Most of the times, we don’t know which ports our apps need to work on, therefore we need to follow this approach and just block a few ports while permitting the rest of them.

In today’s Multicloud world, constant and more sophisticated threats are a fact and black-listing security is definitely not enough.

All we must do is install a Tetration software sensor on top of Operating Systems like Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX among others, it does not matter if they are running bare-metal, virtualized, container-based or even on any Public Cloud or non-Cisco hardware. Once installed, the sensors will continuously feed every flow going in and out of that host to the Tetration Engine, which will show us the Application Dependency Mappings.

Think of the sensors as continuous-feed cameras while the Tetration Engine performs as that person in the SoC watching 24×7, reporting any process-level/network anomalies and having all the recordings from the past available for you to analyze when needed. Before, we would only rely on “video-samples” from specific places and at specific times (using things like Netflow or SPAN sessions).

This provides us with great value, since now we know what specific ports our apps really need and we can close the rest, which is called “white-listing” or “zero-trust policies”. We can now use that information and execute our Zero-Trust Policies either manually or even automatically as shown in the video below.

Tetration supports enforcing those policies at the sensor level, turning the software sensor into an enforcement agent and executing segmentation at the OS level. We could also automate the configuration of those policies on ACI or on your own firewall using tools like Tuffin.

Tetration software sensors log every flow at the process level, therefore, they may help us to identify any anomalies or deviation from the standard (like privilege escalation, change in binary files, failed logons and many more).

There are many other types of coverage we may need for IT and our apps and a comprehensive solution may be needed. This is where Stealthwatch & Stealthwatch Cloud (which effectively report potential attacks), ACI (that can execute and complement our security strategy at the multicloud network level while encrypting VXLAN communications) and an effective Next-Generation Firewall like the Firepower Family among others, can further reduce blind-spots and help us react faster to potential threats.

Having multiple homes (in this case Clouds) where our applications may live, would normally force us into having multiple insurance policies. With solutions like these, we can have a single, continuous and consistent one, which should help us getting some extra hours of quality sleep at night!

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Machine Learning is NOT Rocket Science: Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog, I point out that using machine learning algorithms is much easier today with packages such as scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and others. In fact, using machine learning has been relegated down to largely a data management problem and software development issue rather than the mythical complexity of a rocket science.

Yet, it has never been more important to take advantage of machine learning.  According to the McKinsey report, being one of the first to adopt artificial intelligence has huge implications on future cash flow.

Relative Change in Cash Flow by AI Adoption

If indeed machine learning boils down to data management and using the machine learning packages, what challenges are enterprise facing today to make use of that data?  For many Cisco customers, we find that

◈ Data scientists are tasked with mining value out of the data.  As they explore the value of data source A and B, there may be petabytes of additional data, which represents huge changes in infrastructure requirement.  While data scientists can have a small set of data using curated version of machine learning software on their laptop, scaling to petabytes clearly requires working closely with IT teams.

◈ There are numerous machine learning software stacks.  Not only are there numerous options, many, like TensorFlow, even have nightly builds with new capabilities.  Hence, the machine learning software ecosystem is relatively immature compared to say relational databases.

◈ IT teams are trying to help the data scientists.  Yet, constantly changing data sources leads to drastic infrastructure requirement changes.  With immature software ecosystem, it is very difficult for IT to create a stable environment with the needed infrastructure to scale.

At Cisco, we understand these challenges.  Often times, we find that the IT team and the data scientists may be at odds with one another.  To help our customers, Cisco has developed Cisco Validated Designs (CVD), in partnership with the machine learning software ecosystem, to create a complete solution based on unified architecture that can quickly scale, enabling the IT teams to better support the data scientists.

Let’s highlight some examples of Cisco Validated Design supporting machine learning. One of the prerequisites of machine learning is data itself.  For many Cisco big data customers, they already have a data lake in Hadoop that requires further analysis to extract more value from the data.  Hence, Cisco has partnered with Cloudera to create a CVD using Cloudera Data Science Workbench enabling customers to tap into the Hadoop data lake and use the latest machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.  In a similar way, Hortonworks 3.0 also has the latest YARN scheduler that is able to schedule workloads on CPU and GPUs to support workloads like Apache Spark and TensorFlow as Docker containers.  This solution enables IT teams to scale the CPU, GPU, and storage.

Cisco’s proven approach helps simplify deployments, accelerate time to insight, and enables the data scientists to curate their own machine learning software stack. For some data scientists that may want to do some machine learning experiments in the cloud, Cisco is actively contributing code to the Kubeflow open source project ensuring that there are consistent tools for machine learning both on-premise and in the cloud enabling a hybrid cloud architecture for AI and ML.  In fact, Gartner points out that 57% of machine learning models are developed using resources on-prem.

UCS AI ML Solutions

By expanding our UCS portfolio with the new C480 ML, we continue to diversify for any workload. All UCS Servers are based on a unified architecture and can be managed by Cisco Intersight, making it simple to integrate into existing UCS environments.

UCS Unified Architecture

In short, Cisco has expanded the UCS portfolio to now include a system that is purpose built for deep learning. We are working with machine learning software ecosystem to demystify AI/ML with proven, full-stack solutions developed with industry leaders. Our goal is to help IT better support AI projects and their data scientists.  May your machine learning journey be fast and smooth.

Activate Power of Data with UCS

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Machine Learning is NOT Rocket Science: Part 1

Movies have always created powerful mystique about artificial intelligence. For example, 2001: A Space Odyssey had the computer, Hal 9000, that recognized astronauts, spoke to them, and even locked the door to prevent an astronaut from entering the spacecraft. In the Terminator movies, Skynet was a self-aware computer set on destroying humans. The awesome computer capabilities depicted in these and other movies are very entertaining to be sure but also create a mysticism about computers being omniscient, omnipresent, and even omnipotent. Parts of these fictional computer superpowers are actually reality in our pockets. For many of us, the smart phone is able to recognize our voices, our faces, talk to us in different languages, and even lock doors. Despite how artificial intelligence and machine learning are embedded into our lives, the mystical powers of fictional computers still give many the impression that using artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities in business requires the wizardry of Merlin, the intellect of Einstein, and the national effort of a moon landing.

The reality is that machine learning has advanced to a point where it is no longer in the realm of rocket science. To take advantage of machine learning today, one does NOT need know all the internal details of a machine learning algorithm such as

◈ Auto-differentiation
◈ Stochastic Gradient Descent
◈ Kernel tricks of a support vector machine

One only has to be able to use software packages such as scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and many others. Rather than the mysticism of rocket science, the true technical barrier for entry to machine learning has been lowered to that of a software problem. Does having a data scientist that understand the machine learning algorithmic details help? Absolutely. However, data scientists do not need to know all the details of the machine learning algorithm to mine value out of data. This situation is very similar to that of a C programmer who may not understand the details of assembly language but can still develop sophisticated programs.

Is machine learning different than traditional programming? Yes. Historically, humans had to create software to take input data and have the computer to generate output data. For example, a programmer can try to write code that recognize photos of cats and dogs by describing all the characteristics of of cats and dogs (e.g., nose, ears, tails). Unfortunately, this is an exceptionally daunting problem because of the myriad variations among cats, dogs and their respective breeds. Instead of writing such detailed instructions to recognize a pet, with supervised machine learning, you feed the machine learning algorithm with lots of labeled examples, such as photos that are properly identified as cats and dogs. Then, the machine learning algorithm can create a program, also known as a model, that can recognize cats and dogs with amazing accuracy. With this ability to recognize patterns in data, machine learning can be used in a variety of tasks, not just academic examples such as dog recognition. The once complex pattern recognition problem has become as simple as managing the labeled data and using the machine learning algorithms.

AI / ML Write Code Based on Examples

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