What’s New With Megaport’s Services

By Henry Wagner, Chief Marketing Officer

Here’s everything you need to know about Megaport’s latest service enhancements.

From improving security to adding new Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) functionality, Megaport has been hard at work enhancing our services and making them easier to use. Here are some recent changes that might affect you.

Important infosec updates

Change your passwords

We’re sure you’ve heard it before, but we’re going to say it anyway – you can never be too careful with your passwords.

As cybercrime increases, one of the easiest and most effective ways to mitigate cybersecurity risk is to regularly update your passwords. While we have always encouraged strong passwords, as part of our ongoing effort to make sure your data stays private and protected, we’ve updated our password policy.

We recently logged all users out of the Megaport Portal and required users who do not meet our minimum password complexity rules to update their passwords.

As a reminder, your new password must contain:

• At least 8 characters
• Uppercase characters (A-Z)
• Lowercase characters (a-z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• At least one symbol ^ $ * . [ ] { } ( ) ? ” ! @ # % & / \ , > < ‘ : ; | _ ~ ` = + –

After a successful login, your primary email address will become your Megaport Portal username.

To update your password now, follow the steps outlined here.

We also recommend you take this opportunity to audit your list of existing users and make sure your team’s email configurations are up to date. The following guides can help you with this:

• Adding and Modifying Users – Megaport Documentation
• Configuring Email Notifications – Megaport Documentation

Go to the Megaport Portal.

Multi-factor authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) improves security with additional controls over who can access your network via the Megaport Portal. To login, the user must know their password and also generate a token with an enrolled device, like a smartphone. Enforcement of MFA will help IT and network administrators meet regulatory and corporate compliance rules.

Megaport’s latest MFA update gives a company admin the option to enforce MFA across the entire account, so every user must enroll a second authentication device to login to the Megaport Portal. A complete guide can be found here.

In the coming months, Megaport will enable Single Sign-On, which will allow customers to choose whether authentication is done via their selected third-party identity provider or by the Megaport Portal itself.

We appreciate your support in keeping your accounts secure. If you have any questions, please email support@megaport.com or contact our support team here.

100G port diversity

The ability to easily add redundant connections is critical to any network architect’s job. You need to ensure mission-critical applications are highly available. In the event of failovers, having secure, reliable, and performant secondary connections is a necessity.

That’s why we’re happy to share that we’ve made it easier than ever to add high-bandwidth redundant connections. 100G port diversity now appears as the default option on the Megaport Portal when you’re spinning up a 100G connection.

Perfect for business- or mission-critical applications that require resilient networking, our new 100G port diversity feature can help every network engineer improve security, reliability, and performance at the push of a button.

Megaport Cloud Router AS-path prepend

For Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) users, AS-path prepend is now available. This optional feature enables you to prepend your ASN (Autonomous System Number) to the AS-Path of routes advertised from the MCR, providing additional control over the path your data takes. AS-path prepend can be used with any standard Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peer to flexibly steer traffic over a desired primary, secondary, or tertiary path.

This feature can be managed in MCR’s advanced BGP settings. To apply AS-path prepend to your MCR routes, you can follow the steps outlined in our Docs Portal here.

AWS Outposts Certification

In case you missed it, Megaport has now earned an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outposts Ready Partner designation as part of the AWS Service Ready Program.

This means that Megaport and Outposts customers can now get these benefits:

• Service Ready: The AWS Service Ready designation means the solution has been tested, validated, and proven by AWS.
• Network resilience: The Megaport solution for Outposts rack allows a redundant architecture for the critical AWS Region connectivity.
• More data center choices: The Megaport solution for Outposts rack allows the customer to choose the desired data center operator and location with fewer restrictions. Choose from over 100 data center operators and 800+ locations globally.

The benefits of this integration extend beyond Outposts – now, Megaport and AWS customers can also use AWS Direct Connect with Megaport and Outposts to apply a diverse range of reference architectures that answer for almost any way you could want to customize or improve your network.

We go into much more detail in our recent blog.

Virtual Standalone Routing Mode for Megaport Virtual Edge

Cisco-integrated MVEs can now be provisioned as a virtualized standalone router. This provisioning mode doesn’t require that you use Cisco SD-WAN, however customers need to bring their own valid Smart License from Cisco.

A Cisco Catalyst 8000V provisioned in standalone router mode supports Cisco IOS XE software features and technologies, providing Cisco IOS XE routing, security, and switching features on a virtualized platform.

Coming soon: Palo Alto Networks – VM Series

To fulfill growing customer demands, MVE is constantly evolving – and with more enterprises looking to adopt a SASE architecture in a market estimated to reach $15 billion by 2025, we’re expanding our capabilities to bring new elements of SASE into the Megaport ecosystem.

While MVE has strong SD-WAN capabilities across the market’s top providers, we’re now working hard to integrate firewall features and functions within MVE to keep your network secure against cyber threats. The next-generation firewalls from Palo Alto Networks, a leading cybersecurity provider, are among the most requested by our existing customers.

Palo Alto Networks with Megaport is expected to be released in early April, and the first iteration of this new capability will allow for standalone firewalls to be deployed at all our MVE-enabled locations.

Network testing, automation, and development has been completed, and we’re now working through the final stages of front- and back-end system evaluation and integration with Palo Alto Networks. For more information in the meantime, contact our team here.

Coming soon: Unbundling of IP Transit

Customers will shortly have the ability to adjust their IP transit speed from 20Mbps to 10Gbps on four new size options that will provide two (2), four (4), eight (8), or 12 virtual CPUs, plus double the amount of RAM of our current offer.

These simpler and more flexible MVE features are expected to be available in early April, alongside the release of Palo Alto Networks with Megaport. For more information, contact our team here.

Improved security, greater flexibility

These service enhancements are making Megaport’s network connectivity solutions more secure, performant, and flexible in 2023, and we’re always working on further improvements.

Want to learn more, or have a question? Our support team is here to help – reach out to us any time.