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From a high level, managing your IT infrastructure can be boiled down to 5 basic steps:

Cloud networking deployments are meant to be simple, scalable, and effective. In this Fireside Chat LookingPoint CEO, Sean Barr, sits down with Network Engineer, Trevor Butler, to discuss cloud networking deployments, specifically our experience deploying Cisco Meraki into the network.

Hello, my loyal blog post readers, in this my third installment of our SD-WAN series I am going to walk you through how our vEdge router locates, communicates and authenticates itself onto our SD-WAN fabric. Along the way we will take a look at a few packets captures and command line output to see what is going on under the hood.

What if you could see into the future and knew when an attack on your network was coming and were able to stop it, or at least mitigate its impact?

There are many video solutions in the industry.  When deciding on a solution it’s important to understand the primary needs for a Collaboration Conference Room.  This includes whether the room will be used purely for video and content sharing or if it’s more of a multi-purpose room with movable tables.  Conference rooms where everyone sits around a table are quite different than a classroom style room where there is a speaker at the front of the room.  It’s also important to review the user experience with any video / collaboration solution.  Many technologies look good on paper, however successful video room deployments are directly tied to the user experience.  This includes how easy is it to schedule a meeting, start the meeting, and join the meeting.  I’ve seen this be a complicated process that involves IT for the entire process and I’ve seen it as easy as placing a FaceTime call from an iPhone. When video rooms have been designed with usability at the top of the list, you will see an increase of collaboration.

No matter how seasoned an engineer you are, it’s a magic feeling to reach the end of a Cisco UC upgrade. The systems are up, devices are registered, you've dodged all the bugs in the code that threatened to throw your little upgrade train off the rails of your cut plan and burning into the canyon of despair. Things are working and its time to start testing. Its at this point, that you or more specifically I in this case, noticed an interesting all circuits busy message when I attempted to dial inbound from the outside. After some quick investigation, my curiosity turned to surprise when I discovered that the customer's voicemail system had not only been compromised but, was being used to place hundreds of outbound calls to international numbers per minute. This is toll fraud. A well-known attack among voice engineers who have spent some time in the field but, largely a mystery to victims who only learn about it when they receive massive phone bills for seemingly no reason. In a nut shell, the attack leverages compromised voicemail boxes on your system to allow attackers to make unlimited international calls at your expense. While simple in theory, I thought I would try to share the details and origins of this hack below. Enjoy!

In my last post in the series I introduced you to the four architectural components that control and enable our SD-WAN fabric. In that post I had promised that in our next installment we would take a closer look at our fabric bring up sequence, but if you will indulge me I would like to hold off on that topic for the next post. In its place I would like to use this post to introduce you to the lab environment that I have built for this series and take you through the process of deploying and registering a virtual vEdge router into our lab.