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With over 25 years’ experience in content protection and over 250M VideoGuard secured devices, we at Cisco know a thing or two about security. We are harnessing this knowledge to further develop VideoGuard DRM, an open, comprehensive solution built to meet the Pay TV provider’s unique needs.

For that reason, we’ve compiled our Top Six List of Things To Ask a Prospective DRM Provider.

  1. Is it capable of multi-platform protection? Some solutions may protect video on IP-based screens, like tablets, laptops and smart phones. Others may protect video running on traditional digital set-tops, built for QAM/MPEG-2 transport. The ideal solution bridges legacy and new, offering integrated security and seamless cross-device experience.
  2. How widely is it deployed? If so, ask for details. To how many client devices and on Continue reading “The Top Six Things to Ask a Prospective DRM Provider”


Authors

David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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In the three months that passed between this year’s Cable Show, in Washington, D.C., and this week’s IBC conference, in Amsterdam, one thing is certain: Cloud DVR. It’s on.

Comcast started the buzz, with its X2 platform. Ever since, we’ve seen a surge of interest in cloud DVR from service providers around the globe.  Directionally, it’s gone from “that sounds interesting, let’s keep an eye on it,” to “we need to do this — let’s get a proof of concept going.”

That’s all good news for us, of course, and seems a good reason to share a few observations we’ve made along the way, as cloud DVR services go to market.

One: Linear parity matters, especially for advertising. If ever you want to create an instant imbroglio, tell the people in the ad sales department that the new service – cloud DVR, in this case – doesn’t provide linear parity. Put another way: Support for basic ad zones is a table stake, when it comes to cloud DVR.

So: Putting DVR services in Continue reading “Behind the Scenes of Cloud DVR”



Authors

David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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In this week’s Engineers Unplugged,  we are back to eavesdropping. This episode features Christopher Leigh-Currill (@ospero_chrisl) and Jonas Rosland (@virtualswede) talking Software Defined Storage at EMC World, including ViPR. Let’s listen in:

Welcome to Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:

  1. Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
  2. Subscribe to the podcast here: engineersunplugged.com
  3. Follow the #engineersunplugged conversation on Twitter
  4. Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
  5. Practice drawing unicorns

Thanks for joining us! We are closing out Season 3 next week, stay tuned for exciting changes in Season 4!



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Following my previous blog post about identity and device aware IT platforms making IT operations easier and more effective, I wanted to delve a little deeper into a specific element of the IT infrastructure: Security Event & Information Management (SIEM) and Threat Defense (TD) systems.

Continue reading “More Effective Threat Visibility Using Identity and Device-Type Context”



Authors

Scott Pope

Director, Product Management & Business Development

Security Technical Alliances Ecosystem

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I’d like to welcome you to my new Global Partner Marketing (GPM) blog series. As vice president of Cisco’s GPM organization, I’m excited about our broad partner ecosystem and the goals we can accomplish together. This new blog will feature all the latest perspectives on Revenue Marketing; upcoming partner program launches including how to market the Internet of Everything (IoE); partner tools and resources; partner events; how to evolve and profit as Cisco continues the journey to being the number one IT company and much more!  Continue reading “Global Partner Marketing Blog Series Kicks Off”



Authors

Sherri Liebo

Vice President

Global Partner Marketing

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We all have things we love and hate about our job. Sometimes it’s silly process stuff like TPS reports…but many times the good far out weight the bad. Just like picking out who to go out fishing with. Folks are gonna get on your nervous and make you want to hit them with the boat paddle, you just pick the folks that make you wanna do that less than others. I think that was my wife’s strategy for picking out a husband too. Not to say that I haven’t been clocked with a boat paddle, skillet, metal detector, etc…

<Long pause of reflection> Anyway…

Cisco has many cool technologies for sure. And by technologies, I mean features. When I was competing against Cisco way back in the dark ages when we pushed packets up baluns…both ways!  if a customer said they are going with Cisco for one of these features I cut our losses and headed for the next customer.  This is a blog of my three favorite Cisco features that only Cisco has and is a great reason to buy Cisco besides the neat-o blue console cables.

Cool Feature 00×01: ISSU (In Service Software Upgrade)

Engineer’s dilemma; How Do I upgrade my switch code when my network is 24x7x365 with minimal to ZERO downtime in a five nines world?  When I FIRST came over to Cisco as an employee after getting my badge (and having a burrito at the Cisco café in building 17), I had to talk to the folks that developed ISSU. At my former gig we tried all kinda of things to get this feature to work on our gear. We just ran into tons and tons of problems. At first we tried modifying VRRP with something called XRRP and it just sucked. Customers hated it. Then we tried other snapshotting technologies and just couldn’t get close. See the problem is how do you GRACEFULLY start two primary software threads to the same process then keep increasing the NICE value so the secondary in now primary without panic-ing the kernel AND losing packets.  Oh and remember I need a back out process if I abort or lose power, a roll back process if the new code starts causing problems, and a solid commit process to give me one more chance to back out so it’s not a permanent change until I agree.  It’s a huge development challenge that took Cisco many many thousands of engineering hours to figure out. As a coder, I really admire the team that designed this technology and overcame all the obstacles to make this work. ISSU is dependent on NSF (Non Stop Forwarding) and SSO (Stateful Switch Over) and is hands down my single favorite feature at Cisco among all of products. If there was a Noble prize for networking; this would win hands down.

Cool Feature 00×02: STP (Spanning Tree Protocol)

STP is in nearly every switch out there today. However….with STP in its IEEE state you can really get in trouble quick.  The Cisco difference is HUGE here. First off, STP is enabled by default. In an Auto-MDIX world, this is critical. I don’t know how many customers I walked into that have had ports cross connected by users. Sometimes, for fun and sometimes, well, I had one user tell me that they cross connected a port because the cable was a trip hazard…Yep… safety…ummm…first I reckon…. Now consider all the options Cisco gives ya to protect your network from easy hacks and misconfigs; Port Fast, Uplink Fast, Bridge Assurance, BPDU Guard, Port Guard, Root Guard, Loop Guard, Etherchannel Guard, all the filtering AND PVST simulation  to allow MST to interop with Rapid PVST+. Nobody does STP better the Cisco. This is a deal killer if you’re a competitor. And, if you wanted the best description and write up on Spanning Tree protocol outside of the book; “Interconnections” by Radia Perlmann it’s hard to beat Cisco LAN Switching Fundamentals.

Cool Feature 00×03: OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization)

When I was first induced to this feature, I was told it was “mac routing” ????WTF??? Mac….Routing?? Humph…Marketing people. I need to talk to the coders to see what this REALLY is. Well, their kinda right…it’s really more like a distributed control plane among all DC’s using the MAC address to advertise reachability. Designed for the data center interconnectivity it works by encapsulating MAC frames destined for remote DC’s in an IP packet, transports it across the network to the target DC where it unwraps it and forwards it on. OK, so how is that different from routing right? Here’s the thing, first, it doesn’t use the data plane for this. Honestly, (with respects to John Moy) to me, it’s more like L2 OSPF. Each Nexus head end switch keeps a MAC table for each remote destination and can recognize a MAC frame bound for another DC without having to climb the stack to do a routing look up. Heck it even handles multicast efficiently too. PLUS you can config and set this up in about 4 to 8 commands. Cisco likes to say four (marketing pays the bills baby) my experience is about 8. I also like that broadcast storm containment is built in so we don’t flood rogue frames out to all DC’s and it has loop prevention, multi-path, a rudimentary form of load balancing (layer two right?). My fav feature inside of a feature is the fact that we can add a new DC onto the OTV diameter and only config the new DC. The others will automagically update their tables to include the new DC to the OTV par-ty!! This is one excellent and well thought out feature. It’s everything TRiLL should have been.

If you could boil it down to three features, what would be your top three? List ‘um out and let’s see what ya think! It just goes to reason that there is a light and a dark side to the Force. Tune in next week to see my three Cisco features that I really dislike and why. Sure to piss some folks off without a doubt!!

Jimmy Ray Purser

Trivia File Transfer Protocol

-40 degrees Fahrenheit and -40 degrees Celsius are the same temp. It’s the point when both temperature scales converge and everyone agrees that wholly friggen smokes it’s too cold to be measuring anything out here, let’s get our tail back inside.

 



Authors

Jimmy Ray Purser

Former Co-Host of TechWiseTV

No Longer at Cisco

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Someday soon, personal sensors, wearable gadgets, and embedded devices and services may make today’s PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones look quaint by comparison. But as the Internet of Everything­ (IoE) ─ with its diverse array of devices accessing a plethora of existing and new services ─ continues to rapidly evolve, user friendly interfaces mask growing complexity within networks. An article on today’s digital designers in the September 2013 issue of Wired captured how the focus is now “creating not products or interfaces but experiences, a million invisible transactions” and that “even as our devices have individually gotten simpler, the cumulative complexity of all of them is increasing.”

Which inevitably takes us behind the curtain to the exciting challenge of building hyper-efficient programmable networks using virtualization, the cloud, Software Defined Networking (SDN), and other technologies, architectures, and standards.

So far, this blog series on The Programmable Network has described various new and exciting capabilities leading to greater efficiencies and cost benefits. We’ve shared with you how you can now:

  • Visualize and control traffic using path computation via a network controller
  • Monitor and optimize traffic flows across network connections
  • Order services through an easy-to-use online portal which then launches automated service creation tasks

These capabilities are all Continue reading “The Programmable Network: IP and Optical Convergence”



Authors

Sanjeev Mervana

Vice President of Product Management

Emerging Technologies & Incubation

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This is the fifth post in a blog series featuring Vine-format videos focusing on the “Six Essential Steps for Unleashing the Power of Enterprise Mobility”. The first blog post discussing how to build a mobile structure can be found here. The second blog post highlighting the benefits going virtual can be found here. The third blog post focused on preparing enterprises for the division of devices can be found here. The fourth blog post focused on creating an app checkpoint can be found here

In a 2012 survey of IT executives and CEOs, nearly half of the companies that permit mobility and BYOD reported experiencing a data or security breach as a result of an employee-owned device accessing the corporate network. In addition, security concerns continue to remain a key issue for decision makers looking to deploy additional mobile solutions such as enterprise mobile apps, according to a recent article from IT Pro.

Careful planning can help enterprises manage security concerns and harness the power of mobility. Here’s a brief checklist to help organizations secure devices, data and the network:

Watch the video: http://youtu.be/k8ytncvjE7M
Watch the video: http://youtu.be/k8ytncvjE7M

1. IT Pushing of Capability Down to End Devices

 IT needs to be able to push capabilities down to end devices and access control for both on-premises and off-premises apps, while providing pull capabilities for users, so they can self-provision apps.

IT must have the ability to apply situational control policies (for example, for disabling cameras on mobile devices in order to protect on-premises company assets when employees and guests are on corporate premises or in restricted areas). Another must have? The ability to remotely locate, lock, and wipe devices should there be a theft or if an employee leaves the company. It is also essential to be able to automate geo-specific policies to control roaming costs when workers are out of country. Continue reading “The Fifth Step to Enterprise Mobility: Defending Your Data”



Authors

Prashanth Shenoy

Vice President of Marketing

Enterprise Networking and Mobility

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IoTWF for blog smallAs you may have heard, Cisco is hosting the inaugural Internet of Things World Forum, October 29-31 in Barcelona.  The goal of the IoT World Forum is to gather the best and brightest thinkers, doers, and innovators from business, government, and academia together to accelerate the Internet of Things.  At the end of the conference, participants will walk away with an enhanced understanding of what they can do to advance the Internet of Things, as well as strategies for maximizing its benefits—both for their organizations and the industry as a whole.

If you’re one of those thinkers, innovators, or doers and would like to attend, please check out the handy list of steps below to register. Registering for the IoT World Forum is actually a two-step process.  Nominations and Registration.  I detail both, below.  Continue reading “Trick Question: Have You Registered for the Internet of Things World Forum?”



Authors

Lauren Friedman

Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks