It’s that time of year again. The annual RSA security show brings together all the major security vendors under one roof for a week of training, announcements, and vendors hawking their latest wares. This year we can expect the usual cadre of legacy security vendors with their stand-alone, siloed products pretending that they now support clouds and mobile workers and BYOD. Booth babes, jugglers, magicians, and flashy giveaways will fill the exhibit halls while vendors play shell games with the security of customers, all adding a cacophony of noise to an already confusing situation.

Amidst all the hoopla and fanfare, however, Cisco Systems, the largest security vendor in the world, will be there with perhaps the only reasonable strategy for securing the networks organizations are creating today.

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Tags: Cisco, data, data center, framework, network, RSA, SecureX, security

Recently, I participated in a conversation with our LinkedIn community on GETideas.org. The crux of the discussion was labels--should there be a universal taxonomy for terms such as Global Education, and would trying to foster global adoption of such terms speed up the transformation of the societal challenges we face today? It got me thinking about all sorts of terms that pop into our language stream. One day you’re talking about the “inequalities of the distribution of wealth and the effects of taxation on global markets;” the next day you’re texting an associate and summing up your thought stream with the word “Occupy”.

In my preparation for a panel discussion called Why enterprise Social Media Loves Social Good?, I poked around online to see if there was any consistency in the meaning for the term “social good”. Almost all the discussions and posts I found connected “social good” directly to its use within the business community. While businesses vary in their approaches to social good, this definition seems to be a common one: “A good or service that benefits the largest number of people in the largest possible way. Some classic examples of social goods are clean air, clean water and literacy; in addition, many economic proponents include access to services such as healthcare in their definition of the social or “common good”. (Source: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social_good.asp) Read More »

Tags: ATC21S, Cisco, Cisco CSR, corporate-socia-lresponsibility, CSR, education, employees, environment, global ed, good, Governance, impact multiplied, Social Good, social media, society, Value Chain

Despite the “buzz” around IPv6 right now for many customers it’s not easy to actually test drive an IPv6 connection. When we got the opportunity to sponsor the Wi-Fi customer access at the 2012 v6 World Congress, we jumped at it. …

The actual hardware used at the event is all available right now: a Cisco ASR 1000 router, the Aironet 1142 Access Point, and the Cisco 5508 Wireless LAN Controller. The ASR 1000 is one of Cisco’s most popular routers and in use by over 8000 customers, including both enterprise and service providers. The ASR 1000 is a proven platform for IPv6 applications and has been deployed by two of the industry’s earlier adopters of v6 technology: Iliad Group’s Free and SFR France.

Read more and watch video demonstration.

By Jason Kohn, Contributing Columnist

In my last post, I talked about how companion screens are changing the TV landscape. It’s easy to see how our ever-present smartphones and iPads can alter the TV viewing experience. (“I’m sorry dear, could you repeat that? I was checking my Twitter feed and responding to this IM, and I couldn’t hear you over the intro to Mad Men.”)

But what are people really doing on those companion devices? According to a white paper published last year by Yahoo! and the The Nielsen Company, nearly a quarter of them are looking up something related to what they’re watching on TV.

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Tags: mobile, Pay TV, Service Provider, smartphone, tablet, user experience, videoscape

This post was authored by my colleague Jessica Kelly (@JessGoddesse)

If you’re wondering why social media should be an key  part of your communications strategy, just note these current statistics demonstrating the ubiquity of the medium:

• Facebook now boasts more than 800 million active users worldwide, and more than half of these log on to the network on any given day.

• Twitter too is no slouch (and growing), with 200 million registered users, one quarter of whom tweet daily.

Want more justifying numbers? A recent infographic on MediaBistro lists more compelling stats―like, say, the fact that 56% of consumers are likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming a fan on Facebook, and 20% of marketers have closed sales using Twitter.

Given that social media networks are timely (if not immediate) communications platforms that are interactive, and therefore― if used correctly (that is, authentically)―engaging, their success in marketing should come as no surprise. Read More »

Tags: corporate social responsibility, CSR, education, facebook, getideas, good, impact, impact multiplied, networking, Networks, philanthropy, red, social media, starbucks, twitter