Tag: Network

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Cisco Live: Every business in the world will become a tech company

…and that’s what the innovations and announcements at Cisco Live this week were all centered around. in networking, security, data centers, and more that we unveiled at Cisco Live EMEA are all about.

Reliving the past to innovate the future

The Cisco Live keynote began with Oliver Tuszik [President, Cisco EMEA] walking us through the 40-year history of Cisco’s innovations that powered big data, IoT, and cloud computing – reminding us that Cisco has been here since the beginning of the internet days and how their technology is what powered the internet and cloud generation we are all now firmly in.

In his opening, he said that “every business in this world will become a technology company,” stating that every organisation is or will soon face three main challenges in this journey:

  • Unlocking the power of AI, especially as we move out of the ‘hype cycle’ of AI, with companies now seeing tangible, real-world efficiency and productivity gains using the technology, but with only 7% of European companies being “AI ready”.
  • Killing complexity. “Everything is growing fast” as companies scale and grow their technologies in the face of the skills shortage. To do this they need to re-invent, simplify, and consolidate complex technology and multi-vendor products into solutions.
  • Strengthening digital resilience.“Digital resilience is business resilience,” especially if every company is to become a tech company.

New Products and Services for the AI Generation

Following the keynote, Jeetu Patel (EVP and Chief Product Officer) talked about what Cisco stand for and the product strategy and vision saying that Cisco’s mantra is to build products people love; quality is priority zero; and think ‘10x’.”

Echoing the opening messages, he enforced that every business is working frantically to understand, play out and refine the opportunities and challenges of realising and adapting to how they work and serve customers in the era of AI.

Jeetu said that “every organisation needs to lay the groundwork for AI,”. He went on to say that the last two years have been “experimental” and that Cisco believe that over the next 2 to 5 years, the world’s workforce will be “supplemented” by AI agents and apps and eventually robots and even humanoids. Cisco said that whilst they believe this shift will create more jobs than it removes, the working world will change, and that change will happen rapidly. He said the IT and Digitial industry needs innovative technologies, new operating processes, and new outlook to business, one that we haven’t seen in this capacity since the dot com boom.

There was loads of technology and updates to existing products announced and a reminder from Cisco just how much of a Software company they now are…

Networking

The first new product announced was the Cisco UCS C845A M8 Rack Server – a modular rack with flexible GPU scaling designed to run AI workloads faster and more efficiently.

Cisco said that this will be the new Cisco blueprint for service providers as they look to capitalise on the opportunities of AI. These new Servers will helpo service providers and large enterprise organisions building their own AI services to meet the demand for high-bandwidth along with secure, and energy-efficient connectivity.

Cisco say that this architecture will result in simplified networks, AI-powered operations and resilient networks with end-to-end network security and observability. Cisco also said that this will better help service providers and telcos monetise easier, by allowing them to deploy services closer to their customers to provide intelligent service delivery.


Cisco also annouced two new N9300 Series Smart Switches, with Cisco’s Silicon One E100 chips, AMD Pensando DPUs, and Cisco Hypershield built in…. Cisco say that Hypershield will be embedded on the new switches, meaning that multi-layer protection can be scaled for zone segmentation, micro segmentation, and distributed exploit protection, along with with a centrally managed firewall distributed throughout the datacenter at the service level.

Cisco Hypershield will be embedded on the new switches, meaning that protection can be scaled for zone segmentation, micro segmentation, and distributed exploit protection – with a centrally managed firewall distributed throughout the datacenter at the service level, allowing service providers and enterprise customers to enforce security policies directly on the network fabric, enabling a “fully distributed security model”.

Cisco AI Defense

DJ Sampath, VP of Product, AI Software and Platform, showcased on stage on how Cisco’s newly announced AI Defense application allows businesses to validate and test new AI models in a matter of minutes which will represent a huge time saving reducing the typical weeks of testing down to hours.

Webex Contact Centre

Cisco Webex also got some new AI attention, with Caitlin Lacey (Director of Global Product Marketing, Collaboration Devices) showing off the newly updated Webex AI Agent that can be used to build autonomous AI chatbots to elevate the customer support experience. Cisco showed how these new AI models are not just limited to text either as they showcased voice based agents with ‘lifelike’ voices and super-low-latency responses which can be built to reduce the number of telephone agents needed and also reduce the time customers need to spend waiting on hold only to be transfered to another department and put back on hold. They even showed how customers can interrupt the agent mid flow. Impressive demo.

Cisco said that the new Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center is natively integrated with Webex Contact Center today and will be available for integration with third-party contact centers later this year. It includes context transfer summaries, dropped call summaries, Human Agent Wellbeing and automatic customer satisfaction scores (Auto CSAT). They are also introducing new features later this year including suggested responses, real-time transcription for agents, wrap-up summaries and mid-call summaries.

The agents will be available in English only at launch, however, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish will come later in 2025.

Webex Meeting rooms

Recognising the volume of BYOD meeting room solutions (where customers are not tied to any meeting platform like Webex, Zoom or Teams), Cisco are continuing their investment by supporting “Flexible Conferencing” with their Cisco Room Bar BYOD. This are designed for small to medium rooms, allowing seamless laptop connectivity along with the quality of Cisco audio and video experiences for BYOD / plug n play spaces.

Thousand eyes

Cisco announced updates to Thousand Eyes with a new traffic insight functionality which will give IT support and network administrators greater observability along with the ability to pinpoint disruptions within connected networks, WAN and Internet more easily and visually. This helps identify and pin point potential network disruptions on their own and public/third party infrastructure more easily.

Meraki and Cisco XDR

Cisco Meraki suite is now getting integration with Cisco XDR to power “the SOC of the future.”. For any organisation looking to build their own or build and sell their own SOC, this integration of Meraki dashboard data into Cisco XDR will allow SecOps to see incidents and threats as they emerge across their network infrastructure adding to the visibility scope over what they had before.

Firewalling

Cisco announced their “Hybrid Mesh Firewall“. This is a brand new AI optimised firewall that combines Cisco Firewall Threat Defense, new AI Defense capabilities, and their Security Cloud Control into a single management system.

From what I have read so far (so correct me if I am wrong), each firewall in the mesh will have two versions – an active and shadow version. As such new updates to rules and threat protection for example will be first introduced on the ‘shadow’ device which will then become ‘active’. They will then swap roles, with monitoring taking place over a period of time at a highly granular level to ensure the update works as intended. This will reduce downtime and provide consistent operations. .

Skilling for the Future AI Generation

Cisco has also launched a new AI Skills Journey program to help partners and companies build this much needed AI Infrastructure skillset. This new training will be available at https://u.cisco.com

Cisco are are also updating their current certifications, including traditional certs like the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) and Internetwork Expert (CCIE). These updated certifications reflect the AI and cybersecurity skills needed to achieve impactful business outcomes. Select programs

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Cisco Live 2023 – Cisco’s Key Announcements

Yesterday (6th June 2023) was the first day of Cisco Live which was hosted in Las Vegas.

CEO Chuck Robbins hosted the keynote, along with a host of product leads and Cisco executives who ran through their huge list of updates. The core focus for Cisco and the announcements made, were focussed on security, networking, cloud, AI, and sustainability. Some of the key announcements were:

  • Updates to their Full Stack Observability Platform (FSO), a cloud-based service that provides comprehensive visibility and insights into applications and networks.
  • Cisco Cloud Application Security, a new feature of their FSO ⬆️ that monitors and protects cloud applications from threats.
  • Cisco Networking Cloud, a unified cloud network management platform that simplifies connectivity and security across devices and networks.
  • Cisco Secure Access, a single sign-on solution that enables users to access any application from any device or network.
  • Cisco Multicloud Defense, a platform that unifies security controls across clouds and applications, with support for multiple firewalls.
  • Cisco Secure Firewall 4200, a new, faster, and more reliable firewall that works with their Multicloud Defense service
  • Cisco SOC Assistant, an AI-powered tool that helps security teams detect and respond to incidents, with optimized remediation tactics.

Cisco Key Themes

Chuck Robbins highlighted, Cisco’s five key themes going forward as:

  • Reimagine your applications.
  • Power your hybrid work.
  • Transform your infrastructure.
  • Secure your enterprise.
  • Your journey to sustainability.

Reimagine your applications

The first main product announcement was that of the general availability of Cisco’s Full Stack Observability (FSO) Platform which has been in preview for a few months.

The focus and need for FSO was positioned as the fact that “Every business is a digital business“. She discussed how that while having the right applications is critical to getting work done, they also need to work efficiently for people to be productive, wherever they work. Liz Centoni pointed out that the magnitude of apps used by businesses can “lead to an avalanche of data and insights that can be overwhelming, meaning delays in functions such as threat detection“.

Origibally announced last year, but now available to all, FSO is designed to let organisations gain insights and analytics almost any data source, helping reduce the number of monitoring tools needed, speed up support efforts and keep users online and productive. One of the key use cases for FSO is that in customer digital experience monitoring, whereby Cisco are able to measure predict and monitor the end-to-end user experience across various parts of a customer journey (for example, during an online e-commerce experience).

Joining FSO to Security, Cisco also announced that a new product – Cisco Cloud Application Security, is also coming FSO, which will bring a new layer of security insights into FSO to help understand, see, and act on threats affecting the organisation.

Power your Hybrid Work

The focus on this topic was really blended into Security and FSO which I cover later. There was not much talk about collaboration tools like Webex, though they did say that Webex was remains as a key part of Cisco’s collaboration strategy, which is now able to work seamlessly with Microsoft Teams with their support for Cisco Powered Teams Rooms. Cisco revealed how global organisations like Audi, Carhartt, and MGM Resorts International are using the end-to-end Cisco stack to enable hybrid work and improve productivity.

Journey to Sustainability

Sustainability was a key focus for Cisco, and they publicised a few key initiatives and some major pledges and initiatives to help both Cisco and their customers get greener, recycle more, and ensure sustainability manufacturer, supply chain and lifecycle management. “If you take our technology and put our ecosystem along it, it can help the transition to a modern and low-carbon economy” was a statement given by Cisco Chief Strategy Officer Liz Centoni.

Transform your Infrastructure

Jonathan Davidson, EVP and General Manager of Cisco Networking, announced the launch of Cisco Networking Cloud, a simplified, single cloud network management platform that aims to make cloud networking easier and more secure for organisations. During the announcement he said that Cisco Networking Cloud will provide

  • Unified experiences across technologies, applications, and networks
  • Radical simplification through platform consolidation
  • Cloud-first management with enhanced security and visibility
  • A simpler design experience with consistent interfaces

Cisco’s claim and message around Cisco Networking Cloud was “If it’s connected – it’s now protected“, and the key focus was about simplicity, with their vision being to bring unified visibility and management covering all an organisations’ technologies, applications, and networks. Cisco said that today, in the most, such unified experiences are being inhibited by operational complexity, but that Cisco is leading the fightback with what he called, “radical simplification“.

Secure your Enterprise

Liz Centoni said, in her presentation that “When it comes to security, we want to frustrate attackers, not users…..giving users safe and easy access to their apps and data“.

Security was the biggest talking point for at the keynote this year and was the topic for the last part of the presentation. The session was led Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s EVP and General Manager of Security & Collaboration. During this part of the keynote, he talked about Cisco’s vision and solutions for network, cloud, and application security. Some of the key points he shared were around how security services needs proper coordination and management to avoid discord and inefficiency – comparing them to an orchestra where everything needs to work in harmony to avoid just being lots of different noises.

Cisco also spoke about the issues and complexities that the traditional patchwork approach of the security has in most organisations and that these point products and solutions typically creates silos and complexity for customers as well increased cost and often areas of little or no protection.

This was used as a hook into announcing Cisco Security Cloud, which is an open, integrated security platform for multi-cloud environments that leverages generative AI capabilities to optimise performance and security of every connection.

Cisco shared how they now observe over four hundred billion security events every day, which provides them intelligence and trends and insights into the threats facing businesses. Cisco talked about the importance of AI within their products sets, which cuts around one hundred billion hours of work in threat detection and mitigation across their customer base.

Cisco emphasised the need for organisations to adopt zero trust and zero friction security, whereby users can connect to any application, from any device, or any network, without compromising on security or having a clunky and difficult user experience. Cisco talked about their Cisco Secure Access, solution – a single sign-on offering that is claimed to “enable seamless connectivity”. Linked to this was Apple iCloud Private Relay an integration with Apple devices and iOS that provides secure access to an organisation’s apps and services with the need to download anything extra on their iOS device. The words “Cisco makes security simple and magical for users” was one of my favourite quotes of the day!

“The world needs security defenses that are completely synchronised, this is what we set out to do – provide a platform for security”

Jeetus Patel | EVP of Security & Collaboration | Cisco

Finally, Cisco talked about the integration of Cisco Secure Access and Thousand Eyes (which is their cloud-based network intelligence platform that provides visibility and insights SaaS applications network performance and user experience. Jeetus Patel, talked about the challenge of securing private and public clouds, which often have different admin consoles, firewalls, and security controls. Cisco said that that their new Cisco Multicloud Defense platform is a new solution that will provide a translation layer to enable seamless communication and unified security across an organisation’s multi-cloud environments.

Cisco also introduced the new Cisco Secure Firewall 4200, a faster (and more energy efficient) offering that improves redundancy and was built alongside their new Multicloud defense platform as well as Cisco SOC Assistant, an AI-powered tool that helps security teams detect and respond to incidents, with optimized remediation tactics.

Did you attend or tune into Cisco Live? What were you most excited about?

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Cisco becomes first SD-WAN vendor to leverage Microsoft Informed Networking Routing to optimise performance of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint

Cisco Cloud On-Ramp

Cisco has released an updated version of their SD-WAN software which now supports the optimal routing of Microsoft SaaS apps including Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams on their SD-WAN. Cisco’s Vipella SD-WAN solution is the first SD-WAN solution to be certified for this.

Note: At time of writing, this feature applies to Cisco’s Viptela SD-WAN solution and is not currently supported in the Cisco Meraki SD-WAN portfolio. This may change.

With this update to the Cloud OnRamp feature, Cisco SD-WAN “further integrates Cisco’s support for Microsoft’s Informed Network Routing technology that lets organisations share Microsoft 365 app feedback telemetry with networking vendors and to receive network link telemetry from them”, according to Jeevan Sharma, Manager, Product Management, Enterprise Cloud & SD-WAN group at Cisco in a blog about the enhancements.

Known as Cloud OnRamp for Microsoft 365, it uses “proactive and continuous link probing to assess the best performing path at any point in time. It also allows network admin to utilize Microsoft URL categories granularity for categorizing the Microsoft 365 apps into Optimize, Allow and Default categories, while active link probing makes sure that the best performing path is always selected”.

How it works

This latest update to Cisco’s SD-WAN software, which continually monitors and controls the connectivity, management, and services between data users (remote or office based) and cloud and data centre services, now includes support for more Microsoft SaaS applications specifically SharePoint (and OneDrive) and Microsoft Teams.

Cisco SD-WAN customers can leverage Cisco’s Cloud OnRamp to intelligently route Microsoft 365 traffic, to provide the fastest, most secure, and most reliable end-user experience. This is done by ensuring that all connectivity paths to Microsoft 365 from each WAN / Internet connection at the branch, office, regional hub and/or data center is monitored continuously for performance, and application traffic is then dynamically routed to the best-performing path without requiring human intervention. Cisco Cloud OnRamp also provides real-time and historical visibility into SaaS application performance.

“I am excited to announce that the integration between Cisco SD-WAN and Microsoft Informed Network Routing now includes support for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint app telemetry. This update will help us deliver an improved end-user experience through enhanced cloud connectivity. The partnership between Microsoft 365 and Cisco SD-WAN further enhances your Microsoft Teams and SharePoint experience by optimizing routing and path selection beyond traditional network telemetry probes”

Jeff Mealiffe | Principal Architect | Microsoft 365 Core Networking | Cisco

Microsoft and Cisco Partnership

Cisco SD-WAN is Microsoft Network Partner Program (NPP) certified and is also a Microsoft 365 networking partner. As part of this program, Cisco SD-WAN aligns with the Microsoft’s Connectivity Principles aimed at helping Microsoft 365 customers achieve optimal end-user experience.

What is SD-WAN?

SD-WAN technology is available from leading network and vendors such as Cisco, Palo Alto etc, and typically include routers and switches or virtualised customer-premises equipment (vCPE). They run together using a connected software stack that handles things like policy, security, networking functions, and other management and security functions.

Cisco SD-WAN technology enables enterprises to build a scalable and carrier-neutral WAN infrastructure, allowing them to reduce WAN transport costs and network operational expenses. Cisco SD-WAN enables IT to apply business-centric, application-aware, and differentiated routing policies – providing end users at the remote offices, branch direct connectivity to performance-intensive trusted app, such as Microsoft 365, while routing generic Internet traffic via SWGs, CASBs, or the customer’s VPN connected data center.

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