Avatar

Create community. Drive cross company collaboration. Raise the corporate security consciousness. Educate! These were the major themes present at the synergistic 5th annual Cisco SecCon held December 5-6, 2012, at Cisco’s corporate headquarters in San Jose, CA. The senior leadership team in the Security and Government Group had a clear and present message for the Cisco Engineering community: Security is the differentiator for Cisco! Building and developing our corporate security awareness and driving it into our DNA is part of what makes Cisco—a company dedicated to continuous improvement—unique as a top industry leader.

The message is clear: security must be pervasive in every aspect of every product we design, develop, and deploy. It’s what our customers expect, and SecCon is one of the major delivery vehicles for creating a unified front within the engineering community as part of Cisco’s evolution towards the Internet of Everything. The more the world becomes interconnected, the more important it is that product designers, developers, testers, and implementers are aware and educated about the importance of the security mindset. How we think about security dictates how we act. This is something the Cisco leadership team is keenly aware of, and their intent to mature security capabilities and features into our entire product line is evident as they work to bring together industry security advocates to drive change and continuous improvement at the annual SecCon conference. Continue reading “Commitment and Community: Cisco’s Security DNA”



Avatar

Continuing my tour of the Cisco Domain Ten (SM)  framework for simplifying data center transformation, with this blog, I’ll build upon my previous blogs and introduce Domain 3, which is concerned with “Automation and Orchestration“.

Domain 3 pic

 

 

I’ve asserted previously that having an automated, virtualized data center is a necessary – but insufficient – basis for cloud – and Cisco Domain Ten portrays this very well.  That said, automation and orchestration in my view is one of the 2 or 3 most important domains to focus on when transforming a data center, and when planning a cloud  architecture.  Automation is quite simply fundamental to delivering benefits such as cost reduction, elasticity, rapid service delivery and agility to your end users/ stakeholders/customers.    So what are the key problems we in Cisco Services can help you with in this domain?

Continue reading “Cisco Domain Ten: Domain 3: Automation and Orchestration”



Authors

Stephen Speirs

SP Product Management

Cisco Customer Experience (CX)

Avatar

EFF_LogoEdu­ca­tion Fast For­ward (EFF), an orga­ni­za­tion, spon­sored jointly by Promethean and Cisco, that brings together lead­ing global experts and change agents from the world of edu­ca­tion to dis­cuss ‘the top­ics that mat­ter most’, wants to begin to change that by bring­ing together some artic­u­late and intel­li­gent voices from the world’s youth to dis­cuss issues that are rel­e­vant to young peo­ple them­selves and to their edu­ca­tion.

In July 2012, in the most recent of the five debates orga­nized by EFF to date, a group of elo­quent and youth­ful voices debated the topic ‘From Learner Voice to Global Peace’. The young peo­ple were located all across the globe and came together pri­mar­ily through the won­der of Telep­res­ence (TP), a high-definition video con­fer­enc­ing tech­nol­ogy. The dis­cus­sion that day was not only intel­li­gent and thought­ful: it was truly inspir­ing for every­one involved.

Continue reading “Education Fast Forward Debate – “From Learner Voice to Emerging Leaders””



Authors

Avatar

Secure software is a hot topic these days and many people have ideas about what should be done to achieve it. For years, the focus of many software vendors was on security features. Add a firewall. Add SSL to secure data flows. Positive security features are great, but they don’t do much to address every potential security issue that result from insecure code.

At this year’s Cisco SecCon conference, Bryan Sullivan, Microsoft’s Security Program Manager, addressed the issue of writing secure code with a diagram like the following:

Security Features vs Securing Features

His point is that there is much more work to do in securing all the features of a product than simply writing the security features. Writing security features, although important, is only 10% of the workload of creating secure code. The other 90% of the coding work is meant to ensure that all non-security codebase is secure. This includes input validation, output encoding, and overflow defense.

These practices are part of software quality, and they don’t usually appear on a feature list and often fail to appear on customer requirements lists. Customers don’t often ask for things such as:

  • This product should be free of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities
  • This product shouldn’t have client-side security validation that can be bypassed by a determined attacker
  • This product shouldn’t store my passwords or key data in plain text files might be leaked

Continue reading “Security Features vs. Securing Features”



Authors

Andy Balinsky

Security Research Engineer

Security Research and Operations

Avatar

According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, China’s internet traffic will grow 600 percent in the next two years. At that point, China will also be home to nearly a quarter of the world’s broadband users and 21 percent of the world’s connected devices. This substantial growth, combined with the country’s rapid urbanization, opens the door to many new business opportunities.

With this in mind, Cisco today announced the latest in its strategy to capitalize on the growing China market, a US$ 200m joint venture with China Electronics Software Information Service Co., Ltd. Cisco will contribute 43% and China Electronics Software Information Service Co., Ltd 57% of the joint venture funding. The joint venture agreement is subject to the appropriate regulatory approvals.

The joint venture will provide valuable end to end solutions for public services and industry applications. For example, one solution may be an education cloud to help parents, teachers, and students in schools all across China access the latest education material through interactive whiteboards, laptops, tablets, and other devices.

Based in Shanghai, the joint venture will create new, open standards-based products not currently offered by Cisco, and integrate those new products with existing technologies and create cloud-based solutions including cloud storage, cloud management and network transportation, for public and private projects in China.

Continue reading “Cisco Signs Joint Venture Agreement”



Authors

Hilton Romanski

No Longer with Cisco

Avatar

Choir_Compressed_BetterThis holiday season, the Urban Entertainment Institute, Cisco and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) have joined forces to address the achievement gap in education, the dropout rate and the need to keep performing arts in schools by integrating academics, arts and technology to bridge the cultural gap in education throughout the world.

Unprecedented budget pressures are forcing K-12 schools across the nation to think differently about how to deliver learning to their students. As such, we’re seeing a growing acceptance of collaboration technologies in schools to increase quality learning and engage students, and to relieve some financial pressures.

One such school district implementing Cisco TelePresence video systems is the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Serving some 700,000 students, LAUSD has deployed TelePresence to avoid cutting its arts programs, instead scaling the program across the large geographical area of Los Angeles and beyond with video.

Continue reading “Celebrating the Gift – Cisco TelePresence connects, engages Los Angeles students”



Authors

Marc Musgrove

Former Director, Internet of Things and Digital Industries PR

No Longer with Cisco

Avatar

Welcome to a tour of Cisco’s Social Media Listening Center!

Welcome to the Social Media Listening Center (SMLC). We’ve developed this exhibit to show our commitment to the voice of the customer. By being present in the social web the minute we find a conversation about Cisco, or someone in need of customer support, our social media listening center allows Cisco to drive to action.

Contents

Cisco Live!
Global Conversations
Social Media Influencers
Industry Landscape
Social Media Scoreboard
Word Cloud

The Purpose of our Listening Center

There are several reasons for creating the listening center. They are:

  • To promote Cisco’s commitment to social media and gain valuable insights from the perspective of the customer
  • To demonstrate that we are leveraging Cisco’s industry leadership and innovation to drive a standard of social media listening and engagement across our organization
  • To show how Cisco is using our own technology to power the display
  • The Cisco Technology

Continue reading “Cisco Social Media Listening Center Tour Guide”



Authors

Michael Hopps

Specialist

Global Social Media Marketing

Avatar

Success in retail hinges on a deep understanding of consumers. Anticipating their wants and needs — then offering the right product, in the right place, at the right time, and for the right price — has always been paramount.

To truly understand today’s consumer, however, retailers need to address a new dimension that is challenging retailers in unprecedented ways: data. Not just traditional data – Big Data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpougeaMyZA

Continue reading “Big Data Could Spawn a Retail Revolution”



Authors

Ronald van Zanten

Director, Internet Business Solutions Group

EMEAR and Latin America, Retail and Consumer Goods Industries