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It’s estimated that the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world’s population by the end of this year. That is a tremendous amount of connections and as more devices enter the market, the way people, processes, data, and things – the Internet of Everything – connect will change everything about how we do business and live our lives.

Mobility is the power-player when it comes to the future of the Internet of Everything, revolutionizing everything from our shopping habits to healthcare innovations. In this blog, Mala Anand, Senior Vice President, Cisco Services Platforms Group, outlines the importance of mobility as an Internet of Things driver and how these “things” are essential to the success of the Internet of Everything.

Be sure to read the first blog in this series by Rachael McBrearty, Chief Creative of the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, about the Nexus of the Internet of Everything.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is on course to exponentially grow in the coming years, with more than 30 billion devices installed by 2020. And this count doesn’t include the “standard” items such as PCs, tablets, and smartphones!

We have already seen how IoT innovations can connect homes, linking light bulbs, locks, thermostats, and more. We have even seen networks make their way under water to the ocean floor. And during this year’s Cisco Live, mobile phone notifications, sensors on streetlights and recycling bins and other smart technology gave attendees insight into the fluidity of a connected city, as these “things” spoke to each another.  These innovations are fascinating, but the question still remains – what’s next?

Continue reading “Mobility’s Place in the Internet of Things”



Authors

Mala Anand

No Longer with Cisco

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MMH In the July issue of Modern Materials Handling (MMH), a very informative article appeared on “4 Ways the Internet of Things is Changing Manufacturing”. Editor-at-Large Roberto Michel presents an interesting perspective on the emergence of IoT and its impact on manufacturing today. Specifically, Mr. Michel presents four immediate business use case scenarios that can be implemented today:

  1. Equipment monitoring and optimization;
  2. Process, Machine and Occupational Safety;
  3. Materials tracking for WIP visibility, agility; and
  4. Lifecycle product traceability.

My colleague Douglas Bellin is quoted in the article that “IoT necessitates a break from siloed thinking”.  He explains:

“The biggest benefit we are going to start to see is the correlation of information from systems that typically did not work together or were not thought of needing to reference each other.  Historically, the information was stored in silos and was very difficult to get to. Now we are adding the connectivity to these machines and are able to extract the data, move the data, store it, and analyze it to see if abnormalities are occurring.”

Read more on Doug’s thoughts regarding IoT benefits in one of his recent blogs “Imagine the Possibilities with IoT and IoE”. The benefits that result from converging your production environment and IACS with Enterprise IT infrastructure into a fully Connected Factory can be quite significant, and have been for many global manufacturers like GM. The MMH article quotes Bill Ferrell of Clemson University (my undergraduate alma mater), “If the Internet of Things is this concept that inanimate objects can communicate over the Internet and be controlled, that strikes me as having the potential to revolutionize the way manufacturing is done.”

For a glimpse into what you can expect, some of my colleagues in Cisco Consulting Services created an animated infographic that presents some of the business outcomes and results of implementing IoT and IoE into manufacturing operations. Take a look:

Let me know what you think. Do you agree these are the four most applicable business use case scenarios for IoT adoption today?  What other manufacturing imperatives and business outcomes are you looking to achieve with IoT / IoE?  Send me a comment.  Thanks for reading.



Authors

Chet Namboodri

Senior Director

Global Private Sector Industries Marketing

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bioShot-sWritten By Wayne Cullen, Senior Manager, Service Provider Architectures

Agility. Scalability. Automation. Orchestration. Programmability. Service providers are exploring such an array of new and exciting capabilities these days! You hear a lot about lowering costs by increasing efficiency and decreasing complexity.

But what about monetization? More specifically, do programmable networks help make you money while also saving it? What are the competitive benefits that lead to higher revenues from service agility and faster time-to-market? According to a 2013 Heavy Reading study, that’s a top expectation of service providers when asked about the potential benefits of software-defined networking (SDN). The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has also promoted monetization opportunities based on SDN through new service creation and the enhancement of existing ones due to faster service creation, easier scalability, and mass customization.

Enhanced Revenue Generation with SDN-enabled Applications and Services Continue reading “Fresh Perspectives on Monetization in Programmable Service Provider Networks”



Authors

Sanjeev Mervana

Vice President of Product Management

Emerging Technologies & Incubation

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Multiple changes are on the horizon for public sector information technology managers. Over the next two years, IT organizations could be heavily impacted by these transformations, via a very distinct series of events.  Government and education CIOs, program managers, and business process planners will need to keep an eye on these looming changes as they embark on long-range IT plans.

IDC Government Insights recently worked with Cisco to develop a detailed InfoBrief –  as a way of highlighting these crucial issues. It’s titled Public Sector Reacts Positively to the Changes in IT Consumption.

Continue reading “New Edge Devices are Having a Cascade Effect on Public Sector IT Consumption”



Authors

Shawn P. McCathy

IDC Government Insights Research Director

U.S. Government IT Infrastructure Strategies

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As a business or technical leader, you know you need to protect your company in a rapidly evolving mobile ecosystem. However, threats are not always obvious. As malware and attacks become more sophisticated over time, business decision makers must work with technical decision makers to navigate security threats in a mobile world.

This blog series, authored by Kathy Trahan, will explore the topic of enterprise mobility security from a situational level and provide insight into what leaders can do now to mitigate risk. To read the first post focused on securing device freedom, click here. – Bret Hartman, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Cisco’s Security Technology Group

Imagine two of your executives are using a SaaS platform while working off an unsecure hotel Wi-Fi network nearby. Did you know that SaaS and B2B applications are 15 times more likely than pornography to deliver malicious content across a network?

The threats against a remote connection are unfortunately very real and using an unprotected network to access company assets (whether on-premise or in the cloud) can have serious consequences.

As the growth of mobility and cloud blur the lines of our personal and business lives, the “mobile cloud” has drawn users (consumer or employee) to its convenience. According to a recent Gallup poll, nearly 80% of workers had positive feelings for using their own computers and mobile devices to stay connected to work outside of normal business hours.

For IT, the mobile cloud offers huge management efficiencies. Recent Cisco mobility research confirms that mobility strategies are converging with cloud strategies. However, it also forces IT and business leaders to find a happy medium between encouraging corporate productivity and addressing a new wave of security concerns. From the same research, nearly half of the organizational leaders surveyed say security risks can prevent them from moving forward with mobility initiatives.

Despite these risks, It is hard to dispute that off premise access provides significant productivity gains especially as organizations see mobility as a competitive edge to embrace.

As more mobile users enter the market, (over half a billion devices were added just last year) and the number of remote workers becomes more ubiquitous, the expectation is that networks and access should be the same, regardless of location.

Continue reading “The Risk of Remote Connection: What’s Your Plan?”



Authors

Kathy Trahan

Senior Security Solutions Marketing Manager

Global Marketing Corporate Communications

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If you’re a network engineer or have been following some of the recent trends in network security space, you may have come across terms such as “erosion of trust”, “zero trust ecosystem”, “the increased attack surface” and “new attack vectors”. What this means for a network engineer is that as application migrate from on-prem to cloud, and trends like mobility and IoT vastly expand the scale of assets and forms of access to be secured, traditional network security, which historically was centered around securing the perimeter of your network, is no longer sufficient.

Anatomy of Data Breach

I was recently reading the Symantec Internet Security Report. This report has been quite appropriately themed as “2013: Year of the Mega-Breach”. In particular, the Point-of-Sale type of attack, mostly prevalent in the retail segment of the market, is a great indicator of the anatomy of a typical breach. So I’ll use that as an illustrative example for the purposes of this post.

Continue reading “Securing Your Network Before BYOD or IoT”



Authors

Vaibhav Katkade

Product Manager

Cisco's Enterprise Networking Group

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The month of June was very exciting for FlexPod.  On June 16th, Gartner released their 2014 Magic Quadrant for integrated infrastructure with FlexPod positioned in the leaders quadrant. On June 25th, Cisco and NetApp FlexPodannounced FlexPod has generated $3 billion in joint sales since its launch in 2010 with more than 4100 customers. The very next day, IDC released its Worldwide Integrated Infrastructure & Platforms Tracker for Q1 2014 with FlexPod ranked number one in factory revenue.

The integrated infrastructure segment continues to be one of the fastest growing IT markets. IDC has this segment growing at a staggering 69 percent per year. Cisco is a core vendor in the integrated infrastructure market with leading integrated systems built on top of UCS integrated infrastructure (Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, and UCS Director). According to the latest IDC tracker, UCS integrated infrastructure participates in the top three integrated Infrastructures.

Cisco and NetApp plan to integrate innovative technologies into the FlexPod architecture, including Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Intercloud Fabric, along with NetApp’s clustered DATA ONTAP and Flash technologies. We are proud of our achievements and thankful for our customers in helping us achieve this success.



Authors

Tim Stack

Product Marketing Manager

Data Center and Virtualization

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As the Internet of Everything (IoE) continues to drive one of the most sweeping market transitions in history, organizations will need to be hyper-aware, predictive, and agile. And IT will demand an infrastructure that is flexible enough to keep pace with rapid change and fast innovation, as it responds dynamically to ever-rising threat levels. Above all, it must support business leaders looking to capture their share of the $19 trillion in IoE-related value at stake.

But a rethink on the traditional role of IT is critical. Today, IT cannot simply continue “keeping the lights on.” More than ever, IT must partner with the business as an orchestrator of services and a true leader in innovation. The new IT operating model for the IoE era is Fast IT. And it enables more efficient processes, better asset utilization, an increasingly productive employee base, and improved customer experiences.

Fast IT is the way forward for businesses looking to compete and thrive in the rapidly changing IoE economy. Is your organization ready for the transformation?

Here are a few questions to consider as you evaluate your organization’s readiness:

  • How confident are you in your current network’s ability to propel your business into the future?
  • What are your top three concerns about your network?
  • What are the criteria you see as crucial for your organization to adopt a Fast IT model?
  • How will next-gen networking affect your IT staff, role and influence?

7 14 Cisco_IDG_Twitter v2

Join me on Twitter this Friday, July 18 at 10 a.m. PST/1 p.m. EST for insights and feedback about the #FutureOfIT, the #InternetofEverything and your organization in the #InnovateThink Tweet Chat.

Follow @JosephMBradley to learn more about the Internet of Everything and how companies must embrace Fast IT to fully maximize the value of the Internet of Everything for both themselves and their customers. Join the discussion by simply using hashtags #InnovateThink and #FutureOfIT on Twitter to join the conversation.

Learn more about the role of Fast IT in an Internet of Everything world:



Authors

Joseph M. Bradley

Global Vice President

Digital & IoT Advanced Services

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(This is part 2 of a 7-part series sharing insights from Cisco partners about the Future of Cloud.)

Chris Kemmerer, Director, Mobility Solutions, Verizon, had a lot to share with me at CiscoLive! “What I’m seeing this year is very transformational,” said Kemmerer. “What we’re seeing is how to take some of these foundation services and layer applications and more value on top of them.

“For example, our Cisco Powered hosted collaboration service has been very successful as we see the market shifting from premises-based phone services to cloud-base phone systems. Our traditional focus in the cloud space has been infrastructure as a service (IaaS). We’ve taken the underlying infrastructure of our IaaS platform and started to layer applications to provide software as a service (SaaS) on top of that with some key partners.”

Organizations can benefit greatly from these value-added services. “Why put your communications in the cloud? I think customers learn very quickly about the speed with which they can execute in a reliable, responsible manner. When customers are looking to stand up new locations, in the old days, it would be a month or two just for planning. Now we’re doing it in weeks.”

However, not all clouds are created equal. “Being a carrier, there’s an expectation from our customers that we are five 9s reliable, however you want to calculate that,” said Kemmerer. “The way we look at it, when we say we’re providing an enterprise-class service, it’s going to be over an application-aware network. It’s going to be secure. It’s going to offer SLAs. These are the things that, in my mind, are going to differentiate our services from say a commodity or best effort service.”

You can also learn more about how providers are addressing the need for enterprise class services in the latest edition of Unleashing IT.



Authors

Xander Uyleman

Senior Manager

Global Partner Marketing