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S. Joe Bhatia  President and CEO American National Standards Institute
S. Joe Bhatia, President and CEO
American National Standards Institute

Guest Blog by the President and CEO of the American National Standards Institute, S. Joe Bhatia: learn directly from the American National Standards Institute about the importance of standards, how their adoption and promotion can help organizations innovate in a global market, while lowering costs and gaining competitive advantage

Author Bio: S. Joe Bhatia, president and CEO of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), has more than 30 years of leadership experience in global business operations covering engineering, governmental and congressional liaisons, external affairs, and standardization and conformance, and is a frequent lecturer in the U.S. and around the world on topics such as international trade, technical developments, commercial market access, and health, safety and environmental concerns.

As U.S. business and government leaders seek concrete solutions for job growth and global competitiveness, there is an incredibly powerful tool at hand that is sometimes overlooked. This tool can help U.S. industry tap into new and expanding technologies. It can help businesses out-innovate competitors in the global market. And it can help you cut costs and boost your bottom line.

I’m talking about standardization – and there has never been a more crucial time for American businesses to leverage standards and conformance to gain a powerful advantage.

Standardization not only informs the direction of innovation, it impacts the strength of the American workforce. Standards have the potential to accelerate the idea-to-market cycle, increase the number of U.S. products and services in markets worldwide, and save companies millions of dollars.

In short, standards have the power to turbo-charge innovation and fuel business growth.

But to gain the greatest advantage, you have to get informed, and – better yet – get involved. That’s why the U.S. standardization community has worked together to develop the Standards Boost Business outreach initiative. The goal is to help business leaders understand the strategic and economic value of standards – both to your company, and to our overall national competitiveness. Continue reading “Standards Boost Business: Competing in a Global Economy”



Authors

Joe Bhatia

President and CEO

American National Standards Institute (ANSI)

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What happens when libraries transform from traditional, quiet places to engaging spaces that inspire learning? The old perceptions of libraries are swept away and energized by interactive, connected learning for the entire community.

That’s exactly what the strategy is at the Midland County Library in Texas. When the county decided to upgrade one of its public libraries, it was determined to create an innovative facility to change people’s perceptions of a traditional library.  The library partnered with Cisco to develop its IT infrastructure, incorporating interactive technology to entice new populations to visit the library, creating “the library of the future.” As a result, the Midland County Library now has a state-of-the-art, interactive facility, featuring digital walls, e-book rentals and training programs on how to use new technology.

As I’ve written today on the education blog, the technology transformation is proving successful; since its opening, the new library has had more than 1,000 visitors daily.

This weekend, if you are attending the National Association of Counties (NACo) Annual conference in Fort Worth, join me for Midland County’s 8am workshop on Sunday – Using Interactive Technology to Drive Citizen Engagement in room 202 D.



Authors

Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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Technology is a wonderful thing, at least in my opinion; especially when it’s used to inspire creativity, knowledge and to make learning fun and interactive. New and interactive technologies inspired the Midland County Library in Texas to change people’s perceptions of what a library can and should be. Coined as the “library of the future”, community members now engage in a wide-variety of activities inspired by not only the books on the shelves, but the entire world around them.

Take a look at the video and see how Midland County is changing the definition of “library”:

Changing longstanding perceptions of public libraries is necessary to attract children and adults to visit, read, check out books and ultimately, learn.  When a library positively changes the way people interact and gain information, education goals become limitless. The technology transformation is proving successful too; since its opening, the new library has had more than 1,000 visitors daily.

Midland County Library partnered with Cisco to develop its IT infrastructure, helping incorporate new technologies, such as interactive digital signage, to entice new visitors to the library. The a state-of-the-art, interactive facility features digital walls, e-book rentals and training programs on how to use new technology.

This weekend, if you are attending the National Association of Counties (NACo) Annual conference in Fort Worth, join me for Midland County’s 8am workshop on Sunday – Using Interactive Technology to Drive Citizen Engagement in room 202 D.

 



Authors

Kerry Best

Marketing Manager

Public Sector Marketing

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Cisco Executive Chairman Emeritus John Morgridge
John Morgridge

The annual Cisco Networking Academy Conference opened with a fitting tribute to celebrate its rich 15-year history. Cisco Executive Chairman Emeritus John Morgridge took the stage just days before his 80th birthday and told the audience the story of how Networking Academy was founded. Hundreds of academy instructors and Cisco staff watched in person from Cisco headquarters in San Jose, California and virtually from around the world.

According to John, there are 3 reasons why NetAcad has been such a success. First of all, it capitalized on Cisco’s strengths and capabilities. Cisco also invested for the longer term: 15 years and hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars. Finally, he mentioned and thanked the great instructors who have taught more than 4.75 million students in 165 countries since 1997. Today, NetAcad is evolving to keep up with the ever-changing educational system. One key component, according to Morgridge, is that “we test to master not to measure.”

Continue reading “Connection, Collaboration, and Innovation at the Cisco Networking Academy Conference”



Authors

Jennifer Barr

Social Media Manager, Online Brand

Cisco Talent Acquisition

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 Guest Blog: Jacob Van Ewyk,  Jacob Van Ewyk Photo 2

Product Manager – Cisco UCS Manager and Cisco UCS Central

One of the great benefits of the Cisco UCS solution is that it includes the management layer – Cisco UCS Manager – as part of the Fabric Interconnects  This ensures that any UCS server connected to a Fabric Interconnect has embedded management of all software and hardware components in that domain. While this is a great solution for many customers, we recognize that some customers want multiple domains, whether for scale, redundancy, multiple locations, or a host of other reasons. While Cisco UCS Manager has an XML API that can help manage multiple domains, Cisco also offers UCS Central to help solve this challenge.

Cisco UCS Central runs as a virtual machine and centralizes many features across multiple domains – whether local or remote domains. The first release of UCS Central, version 1.0, was released in November 2012 and provided value to customers with central fault management, ID pool management, and global operational polices. However, I am proud to announce that Cisco has released UCS Central 1.1, the follow up release that brings key functionality such as service profiles and templates, policies, statistics, and more. This release is a major step forward in providing a complete, centralized offering that provides the full capabilities of UCS Manager, but across a multi-domain environment.

How does UCS Central 1.1 make your life easier? Here are several good use cases to illustrate the value of UCS Central.

Use Case Benefit
Bring up an additional domain Additional domains can pull access service profiles and templates, policies, and ID pools from UCS Central allowing customers to bring up an additional domain in minutes instead of hours or days.
Consistent Service Profiles across domains Global Service Profiles, templates, and policies are available across multiple domains. UCS Central automates the task of replicating the information and ensuring consistency, helping to ensure compliance, simplify HA and DR deployments, and reduce troubleshooting time.
Centralized, In-depth Inventory Simplified inventory reporting and analysis across multiple domains reduces administrative overhead from hours or days to minutes.
Centralized Fault Manager With all of the faults in one place, it helps eliminate oversights, enables quicker problem resolution, and helps provide higher levels of uptime, allowing the team to support more systems with the same people.
Capacity and Performance Planning Detailed bandwidth, power, and thermal statistics that are kept for two weeks or one year instead of 24 hours in UCS Manager enable better system optimization, higher utilization levels, and fewer performance issues. Proper sizing reduces direct costs.
Firmware Updates Automatically get scheduled updates of new firmware bundles pulled into UCS Central and automatically pushed to relevant UCS Manger instances as needed,  based on policies. This reduces the administrator time when managing firmware.

 

If UCS Central 1.1 is something that you would like to try, you can download it from Cisco.com. It will work for 120 days without a license, so Continue reading “Get it and save time: Multi-UCS Domain Management simplifies your administrative life”



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The explosion in business mobility is transforming our companies in profound—and sometimes challenging—ways. One of the most vexing issues is security.

Recently, I came across a Wharton article predicting that by 2015, more Americans will access the Internet through mobile devices than PCs. From open data to an increase in government-accessed information, this sweeping trend raises questions about the true security of mobile networks and devices. But how can an organization support the infusion of wireless devices into employees’ lives without opening the door to heightened security risks? Continue reading “Three Simple Ways to Boost Mobile Device Security”



Authors

Joseph M. Bradley

Global Vice President

Digital & IoT Advanced Services

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Network Solutions is a domain name registrar that manages over 6.6 million domains. As of July 16, 2013, the Network Solutions website is under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Recently, Network Solutions has been a target for attackers; in a previous outage, domain name servers were redirected away from their proper IP addresses. This was reported to be a result of a server misconfiguration while Network Solutions was attempting to mitigate a DDoS attack. It is possible that the DDoS attacks are related.

According to isitdownrightnow.com, the Network Solutions site has been having issues for at least the last 24 hours.

response_time
Response time in ms (GMT -8:00)

Continue reading “Network Solutions Customer Site Compromises and DDoS”



Authors

Craig Williams

Director

Talos Outreach

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So many students, so many devices, yet zero increase in number of IT staffers. The increasingly unbalanced ratio is enough to cause a few nightmares for any IT professional.  Luckily, supporting student IT requirements, while remaining secure, has become a bit simpler with Identity Service Engine (ISE)  Policy Deployment, part of Cisco BYOD Solutions for K12 Education.   With ISE, IT staffers can quickly add and support student’s devices like laptops, smart phones and tablets and at the same time ensure the protection of student information access, dynamically control who gets access to what and provide optimal network user experience.  You can be rest assured that we have your back while you balance it all.

K-12 TightRope1    

Protection of Minors – Let’s face it – K-12 means we’re talking about minors, so we need to tread quite carefully. Extending network access across wired and wireless opens education to a world of innovation; yet it also opens the network up to security threats. 64% of parents feel it is a schools responsibility to effectively teach students how to use their mobile devices safely [Info graphic].  Protection of access to and access by students is a high-priority.  It is critical to restrict access to confidential student records while making sure students get the right access to resources they need for learning. The ISE component of the  K12 BYOD Solution protects student information through secure,   role-based, application access – simply – over the wired and wireless infrastructure. Continue reading “[Cartoon Catalyst Blog Series] K-12 BYOD. Secure Students, Determine Internet Access, and Yet Provide Awesome Network Pe …”



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sailesh_krishanamruthyWritten by Sailesh Krishnamurthy, Principal Engineer

Service providers around the world are seeing an unprecedented explosion of data in their networks. This explosion is characterized by the “Three Vs” (volume, variety and velocity) that are the typical hallmarks of challenging data problems. The service providers that embrace these problems creatively stand to unlock enormous monetization opportunities. The good news is that service providers are uniquely positioned to correlate and analyze data from across the ecosystem (client, network and cloud).

This blog post will describe some of these analytics opportunities. In my next post, I’ll discuss Cisco’s strategic plans to help service providers in this process with Cisco Prime Analytics.

Data Explosion

The data explosion in service provider networks is extremely diverse (“Variety”) and comes from various sources including:

  1. Mobile Data. Location, presence, devices and customers.
  2. Video Growth. Projected to be 65% of mobile and 90% of fixed traffic by 2015.
  3. Machine-2-Machine (M2M): 225 M2M connections by 2014— from vending machines and ATMs to connected vehicles.
  4. Commerce. Mobile payment platforms and local offers.
  5. Smart Networks. Capable of bandwidth optimization, content placement, SDN, and more.
  6. Social Media. Consumer behavior, targeted advertisements.
  7. Cloud (XaaS). All data moving to the cloud leading to more app-cloud interactions.

Unlike other players (manufacturers, content/service/app providers), service providers are Continue reading “The Analytics Opportunity for Service Providers”



Authors

Jamie Lerner

Senior Vice President and General Manager

Cloud and Systems Management Technology Group