The United Nation’s (UN) Broadband Commission for Digital Development has clearly demonstrated the link between broadband and achieving the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The UN set out these important goals for global development in 2000 with a target for 2015. With one thousand days left, it is time to focus on what is next.

Today the UN Broadband Commission outlined the importance of broadband and urged the UN’s High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons in an open letter to include broadband as they develop the UN’s post-2015 development agenda.

The Broadband Commission is led by chairs and co-chairs, Hamadoun Toure (Secretary-General of the ITU), Irina Bokova (Director-General of UNESCO), Paul Kagame (President of Rwanda) and Carlos Slim (CEO of Grupo Carso).

This is a major step in the right direction to increase the awareness and importance of broadband to global development, especially for the billions of people in the developing world.

 Broadband and the MDGs (from the “State of Broadband 2012” report)

In my role as a Social Collaboration Architect, I see a lot of opinions about what it will take for social collaboration applications to take off within the enterprise. Analysts and sales people alike are constantly speculating on the business value — via increased revenue or decreased cost — that social applications will uncover and make adoption a simple sell. The expectation is that a more connected and conversational employee base will become more productive. It’s a start, but not the end of the value proposition.

Becoming more connected and conversational is only as good as the richness of the interaction. Are you solving a business need? Making a process more efficient? Adding value to a transaction? At the heart of these questions is how you factor your social collaboration solution into your business processes.

In the past, companies used business process re-engineering to cut out waste and make operations leaner. Today, companies Read More »

Tags: business process, collaboration, Collaboration Enabled Business Transformation (CEBT), social collaboration

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks: there are already enough articles out there that can explain what a CSRF attack is and provide potential examples. There are also plenty of security alerts that have been released by various vendors whose products are affected by CSRF-related vulnerabilities.

CSRF attacks usually target web applications and attempt to make unwanted changes on server data or extract sensitive information from a web application. Attackers do this by luring an authenticated user into making a specially crafted web request. It’s important, regardless of role, for everyone to have a basic understanding of CSRF attacks and the available options to protect against them.

For more information about basic CSRF concepts and potential mitigations, see our new Applied Mitigation Bulletin Understanding Cross-Site Request Forgery Threat Vectors. Although this document does not attempt to provide all the technical details associated with CSRF, it does aim to summarize the CSRF technique and provide methods that can be potentially used by developers, network administrators and users to protect against CSRF attacks.

For all things related to Security don’t forget to visit the Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) Portal—the primary outlet for Cisco’s security intelligence and the public home to all of our security-related content. Just go to cisco.com/security.

Tags: Applied Mitigation Bulletins, Cisco Security, cisco sio, cross-site request forgery, CSRF, CSRF attacks, mitigations

On March 27 2013 I had the opportunity to participate at Cisco’s Women in Technology Forum with the theme, “Think Big, Play Big!”

The event was particularly poignant as it was held under the publicity from Sheryl Sandberg’s provocative book and movement   “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead”

Our CEO John Chambers kicked the Forum off with a welcome video.  There were 41 Cisco execs at this venue and what can I say, an excellent start! Moving forward, I am excited that Cisco will be active globally in the celebration of Girls in ICT Day on April 25 2013. Further, I will have an opportunity to represent Cisco at the afternoon session, European Parliamentary hearing on Women in ICT.

The topic that I will address is most relevant today , “Women in ICT Careers, How to Explore Female Talent?” Read More »

Tags: women in ICT

By Akshay Thakur, Cisco UKI

The National Virtual Incubator (NVI) is one of the four pillars of Cisco’s British Innovation Gateway (BIG) programme. As you may have noticed, the hard work on BIG has begun and our three key partnerships are already producing results. These programmes are a continuation of our London 2012 Olympics legacy.

The NVI aims to create a community and a platform for collaboration between clusters of innovation throughout the UK. Such clusters of innovation are in various stages of their lifecycle and most are renown as a centre of excellence of a given sector, industry, or vertical.

Read More »

Tags: British Innovation Gateway, digital business ecosystem, National Virtual Incubator, start ups, UK