Towards developing a Secure Architecture for the Internet of Everything, I plan to kick off a series of blogs around this pivotal topic.

In discussing security and the Internet of Everything, the first question that comes to mind is, “Which segment of “everything” is one referring to?”. A reasonable approach has been to understand the common attributes that crosses vertical segments such as Intelligent Transportation, Smart Utilities, Industrial Automation and so on. The Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) are general abstractions for the network infrastructure that links physical and virtual objects. In Cisco, we now refer to these abstractions as the Internet of Everything, IoE. The IoE describes a world where billions of objects have sensors to detect, measure and assess their status; all connected over public or private networks using standard and proprietary protocols.

Until a point in time around 2008/2009, there were more human beings in the world than devices connected to the Internet. That is no longer the case.  Read More »

Tags: analytics, architecture, internet, Internet of Everything, internet of things, IoE, IoT, ip, IPv6, M2M, Service Provider, sms

By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist

Is broadband deployment progressing or regressing? Does it seem like broadband policy may be taking two steps forward and one step back? Most of the time we’re inundated in encouraging news, both forecasts about its economic potential and grounded-in-reality reports about new deployments, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Research firm Gartner has devised an unintentionally humorous curve that it applies to technology like broadband: its hype cycle. It has five data points, starting out like a waveform and then flattening out.

Read More »

Tags: broadband, economic development, Gartner Hype Cycle, infrastructure, investment, public policy

This is the first post in a new series from Dimension Data and Cisco Channels looking at user adoption and integration of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions. Findings stem from Dimension Data’s 2013 Global UC&C Survey, developed with ICT researcher Ovum and featuring responses from more than 2,700 participants in 18 countries across 20 vertical industries.

We’ve all heard that selling UC&C solutions has to be less about flashy technology, and more about a comfortable, productive user experience. In other words, are video sessions, presence and other UC&C functions as easy and convenient to use as a traditional voice call? But user adoption of UC&C isn’t by any means the last step in a UC&C implementation. It’s actually a lot closer to the first step, as Neill Hart puts it.

“We don’t have to worry about user adoption with most other areas of IT,” says Hart, converged communications director for Dimension Data Europe. “If you put in a firewall on a Sunday night, for example, it’s at work the next morning and the user probably isn’t even aware it’s there. With most technologies, the user doesn’t even worry about it. But with UC&C, it’s everything. If I’m not entirely comfortably with technology, then I can find a way of not using it.” Read More »

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, dimension data, integration, partner, unified communications, user adoption

Coming off a busy week at Interop Las Vegas, we have recorded another info-packed podcast with the popular wireless networking podcast group “No Strings Attached Show”. The topic for this podcast covers the gigabit wireless technology, 802.11ac which if you attended Interop, you know this is a very hot topic (“I’ll take enormous understatements for $600, Alex”).

However, it is not just a discussion on what is included in the standard. Blake Krone and Sam Clements from No Strings Attached interview our Mark Denny and Brian Hart as they discuss a number of topics related to 802.11ac technology including the following:

-          The 802.11ac Wave 1 Radio Module for the 3600 Access Point, the availability and best practices for upgrading the 3600 AP with the 802.11ac Module

-          Segments of the enterprise market where 802.11ac technology is generating the most interest Read More »

Tags: #80211ac, 3600 access point, 802.11, 802.11ac, CCIE, CCNA, Cisco, discussion, information, interop, Interop Las Vegas, learn, network, networking, no strings attached, podcast, popular, radio module, technology, WAN, wi-fi, wifi, wireless, wlan

In my previous Blogs I have talked about Megatrends including BYOD, the Next-Generation Workspace, Video and the Internet of Things. One unfortunate reality all of these trends have in common is that they are going to put additional stress on your current Network and Security Infrastructure and Operational Process.

TrustSec uniquely offers the welcome opportunity to improve and extend Security Policy Control and the same time make it easier to Operate and Maintain. This post concludes the mini-series on TrustSec. Previous Blogs have looked at TrustSec in the DC and applied to VDI.  Here I have asked Dave Berry Cisco TSA to take a step back and look at the bigger picture from Network Access to the DC. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, Megatrends, network access, policy control, routers, SGT, TrustSec, vpn