2013 - Page 7 of 232 - Cisco Blogs

December 16, 2013 4 Comments

Mobility and BYOD That’s Right for Your Midsize IT

Employee are now unchained from their desks; mobility frees the ability to work anyplace, anytime, and from any device. This is revolutionizing the type of productivity and efficiency businesses see from their workforce- large, medium, or small. While realizing business efficiency and growth, midmarket IT is struggling to balance objectives (make the network for you) and challenges (limited resources).

Midmarket IT Objectives

Leverage the network as a strategic asset

To increase employee productivity and gain competitive advantage;

Better serving customers,

Thus realizing overall growth

Midmarket IT Challenges with Mobility and BYOD

The advent of mobility and BYOD, while unleashing unprecedented levels of communication and collaboration, brings challenges to IT. Mobility enables BYOD. BYOD enables multiple types of employees, logging in from multiple types of devices, from multiple locations. Users are demanding access to the Internet and applications wherever and whenever they want. Chaos? Anyone reading this won’t need the laundry list of concerns. It’s there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kOtYC-a0rM Continue reading “Mobility and BYOD That’s Right for Your Midsize IT”

Sangita Patel

Cisco SD-WAN, Routing, Cloud Networking Marketing Lead

December 13, 2013 Leave a Comment

Courts Excellence in a Changing World: Highlights from Day 2

Kacey Carpenter

The second day of the Courts Excellence in a Changing World conference was even better than the first with a number of best practices demonstrating court excellence. Many of these best practices involve technology innovations that provide the foundation for transformation.

The best practices shared provided the courts capabilities for 24×7 citizen services, reduced costs, increased transparency, access from anywhere at anytime, increased citizen satisfaction, and more.

Continue reading “Courts Excellence in a Changing World: Highlights from Day 2”

Kacey Carpenter

Senior Manager

Global Government and Public Sector Marketing

1 Comment

Pick the Low-Hanging Omnichannel Fruit

Rose Depoe

This blog is the third of a series on how retailers are addressing the challenges of becoming an omnichannel business. We’ve talked about how omnichannel selling is not really about rushing to invest in some whiz-bang technology – in fact, I think stores often try to do too much at one time.

Instead, a smart approach to your implementation is to find the low-hanging fruit – projects that have the highest probability of effectiveness and can be measured against business targets as a whole. Remember that every store has its niche, and one size does not fit all. By achieving rapid successes up front, you gain funding for the next piece of your strategy, building from success to success to achieve omnichannel entry.

For example, some retailers look at how to make it easier for shoppers to buy and return where they want. Stores don’t carry the same selections from region to region, and they need processes and systems to make such an approach successful. The key is inventory management: figuring out how to sell, reorder, and exchange products in stores that also serve as fulfillment centers.

Other retailers focus on building a strong relationship with shoppers through excellent customer service. For example, instead of picking up the red bat phone or having “Customer assistance on Aisle 3” called over the loudspeaker, consumers can contact remote experts on their own mobile device or through a kiosk. Still other stores may put resources into user interfaces, branding, and site useability. These personalized approaches also pay off in better information about the customer, allowing retailers to use video analytics and sensors to get help to the shopper faster.

To help stores define their best path forward, they often make use of “innovation platforms,” systems designed to allow you to quickly set up and try out new merchandising, practices, or seasonal locations. Innovation platforms let you experiment with capabilities that leverage organizational strengths, hitting on the cylinders you want to address. Each success helps build the business justification for the next stage, supported by your cost/benefit analyses, baselines, and measurements.

Let’s talk more about this at the NRF Big Idea Sessions, where I’ll be speaking on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2:00-3:00 ET, in Room 4. My topic is “Detect, Connect, Engage: Enhance your Customer Experience with Mobility,” and I’ll discuss how to personalize the mobility journey and new strategies for delivering a meaningful customer experience. Visit Cisco’s NRF website to learn more about these very popular seminars. As well, please take time to attend some of the demos in Cisco booth #1954. These include several technologies that fulfill the requirements discussed above.

I’ll see you at NRF!

Rose Depoe

Executive Director

Consumer Products & Services

Leave a Comment

New University Dedicated to STEM, Real-world Relevance

Patrick Finn

The success of our industry and even our nation’s well-being are dependent on engaging students and developing the experts of the future in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). I am personally committed to STEM education initiatives, and want to share an exciting university that’s breaking new ground to lead the way and ensure students have a clear path to STEM careers. As the newest member of the State University System of Florida, Florida Polytechnic University is dedicated exclusively to STEM.

Within their College of Engineering and the College of Innovation and Technology, Florida Poly will offer six undergraduate degree programs and two Master degree programs. These include some really unique areas of concentration including Big Data Analytics, Cloud Virtualization, Health Informatics, Cyber Gaming, Information Assurance and Cyber Security, and even more.

Another unique aspect of this high-tech university is that they work closely with industry partners to ensure strong relevance to real-world needs. This will ensure graduates are learning the critical skills needed to join some very competitive workforces. In fact, all you have to do is check out the campus to be impressed:

https://youtu.be/O8tgAC6WU4A

If you are in Florida, check out the PolyPremiere – a campaign where Florida Poly is rolling out the purple carpet at movie theaters across the state to give potential students an in-depth look at Florida Poly’s campus, curriculum, culture and scholarships.

Where are your tech students looking for STEM degree opportunities?

Patrick Finn

No Longer at Cisco

Leave a Comment

Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – December 13, 2013

David Durham

Each week, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way. Here’s what you might have missed this week:

Wow, winter seems to have taken hold early this year. Here in North Carolina, we are certainly seeing colder temperatures than normal this time of year. My dogs certainly seem to appreciate a warm spot on the couch more these past few days.

Even though temps are dropping outside, we are, of course, keeping the fires going here at Cisco. Even as we are heading toward the holiday season where we will all enjoy some time with friends and family, we still have a lot going on for partners. Here’s a little recap of the week!

Off the Top

As part of our Partner Voices series, we like to highlight the successes of our partners using Cisco products and services to solve customer issues. This week, we had the opportunity to speak with MCPc about a recent airport project they completed. Continue reading “Cisco Partner Weekly Rewind – December 13, 2013”

David Durham

Content Strategist

Channels

2 Comments

Big Data in Security – Part V: Anti-Phishing in the Cloud

Levi Gundert

In the last chapter of our five part Big Data in Security series, expert Data Scientists Brennan Evans and Mahdi Namazifar join me to discuss their work on a cloud anti-phishing solution.

Phishing is a well-known historical threat. Essentially, it’s social engineering via email and it continues to be effective and potent. What is TRAC currently doing in this space to protect Cisco customers?

Brennan: One of the ways that we have traditionally confronted this threat is through third-party intelligence in the form of data feeds. The problem is that these social engineering attacks have a high time dependency. If we solely rely on feeds, we risk delivering data to our customers that may be stale so that solution isn’t terribly attractive. This complicates another issue with common approaches with a lot of the data sources out there: many attempt to enumerate the solution by listing compromised hosts and in practice each vendor seems to see just a small slice of the problem space, and as I just said, oftentimes it’s too late.

We have invested a lot of time in looking at how to avoid the problem of essentially being an intelligence redistributor and instead look at the problem firsthand using our own rich data sources – both external and internal – and really develop a system that is more flexible, timely, and robust in the types of attacks it can address.

Mahdi: In principle, we have designed and built prototypes around Cisco’s next generation phishing detection solution. To address the requirements for both an effective and efficient phishing detection solution, our design is based on Big Data and machine learning. The Big Data technology allows us to dig into a tremendous amount of data that we have for this problem and extract predictive signals for the phishing problem. Machine learning algorithms, on the other hand, provide the means for using the predictive signals, captured from historical data, to build mathematical models for predicting the probability of a URL or other content being phishing.

Continue reading “Big Data in Security – Part V: Anti-Phishing in the Cloud”

Levi Gundert

Technical Lead

Cisco Threat Research, Analysis, and Communications (TRAC)

Leave a Comment

Guest Blog: Migrating High Density University Networks to 802.11ac

Vivian Chan

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Joe Rogers, Associate Director of Network Engineering for the University of South Florida (USF). Hear Joe speak about his experiences with next-generation wireless in high density environments on next Tuesday’s webinar: “Migrating Enterprise Networks to 802.11ac” at 10am PST (Dec 17) (Register here)

Joe Rogers is the Associate Director of Network Engineering for the University of South Florida. He is a graduate of USF’s Computer Science and Engineering program and has worked as a network engineer at USF for the past 20 years. He is currently responsible for all aspects of USF’s network which provides connectivity to over 100k devices across three campuses. He’s held a CCIE routing and switching certification since 1999. When not working, he’s an avid mountain biker (if you can call it “mountain” biking when you live in Florida).

—–

Universities face some of the most complex design challenges in wireless networking. Our user population is highly mobile, bandwidth-hungry, and often simultaneously using at least two wireless devices in rooms with hundreds of their classmates. The wireless network isn’t simply a convenience to them. It’s critical to their educational success as many of the students are taking tests or working on assignments across the network.

At the University of South Florida, we support over 20,000 concurrent wireless users on our network of over 4,000 access points. We have more than 90,000 unique devices registered this semester. Our biggest challenge is designing the wireless network for the device densities in our large classrooms and popular study areas. In these locations, we often have a thousand devices in a few hundred square feet of space.

We heavily rely on band select to place as many devices as possible on 5Ghz where more channels are available. Unfortunately many devices such as older tablets and smart phones simply don’t have an 802.11a/n radio. So we must carefully RF engineer the environment with smaller cells to provide the necessary coverage density. Continue reading “Guest Blog: Migrating High Density University Networks to 802.11ac”

Vivian Chan

Leave a Comment

Using the Internet for Your Enterprise WAN

Matt Bolick

You want to do what?

Enterprise networks are special. They require bomb-proof design, micro-second convergence and service-level agreements so good that the WAN will only be down for half a second every year scheduled six weeks ahead of time for midnight over a holiday weekend. That’s what we’re taught from the time we’re young Network Engineers sitting on our parents’ knees. An Enterprise network is something special they taught us. We should never consider running our mission-critical traffic over the dirty, unreliable Internet! Such talk would be blasphemy akin to looking for a date at a funeral. It might work for some, but our network is special and must be treated that way.

So what is all of this talk then, coming from Cisco no less, of using Internet links to run an Enterprise-class network? Cisco recently introduced the Intelligent WAN (IWAN) solution that promotes exactly this sort of “illicit” behavior. So what’s changed?

Continue reading “Using the Internet for Your Enterprise WAN”

Matt Bolick

ENGINEER.TECHNICAL MARKETING

SRTG Marketing - US

December 12, 2013 Leave a Comment

Congratulations to 2013 IEEE-SA International Award Recipient Andrew Myles

Bill Rubino

Earlier this week, the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) announced the winners of the 2013 IEEE-SA Awards to honor standards development contributions. We are pleased to announce that Andrew Myles, Engineering Technical Lead at Cisco has been awarded the IEEE 802 SA International award for his extraordinary contribution to establishing IEEE-SA as a world-class leader in standardization. Andrew has long been involved in IEEE-SA and led a long term initiative (2005-2013) in IEEE 802 to defend and promote IEEE 802 standards globally.

We want to congratulate Andrew on this tremendous recognition. The work of Andrew and others contributors develop and promote high quality, efficient and effective IEEE standards. This enables the Internet and the supporting network components to be the premiere platforms for innovation and borderless commerce they are today. These standards in turn are reflected in our products and solutions for our customers. As we develop technological innovation for our customers, in parallel, we continue to drive global standards deployment. The results are the best innovative solutions that can solve and better our customers’ network environments. Continue reading “Congratulations to 2013 IEEE-SA International Award Recipient Andrew Myles”

Year: 2013

Sangita Patel

Cisco SD-WAN, Routing, Cloud Networking Marketing Lead

Courts Excellence in a Changing World: Highlights from Day 2

Authors