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Just like bad weather conditions found in nature, such as typhoons, hurricanes, or snowstorms, technology system defects and vulnerabilities are inherent characteristics found in a cyber system environment.

Regardless of whether it’s a fair comparison, weather changes are part of the natural environment that we have little direct control over, whereas the cyber environment is fundamentally a human creation. Despite these differences, the choices we make do have a direct implication even if they are not obvious. Take for example the use of lead-based or diesel fuel in vehicles, or controlled burns in the forest to clear land for agricultural use. Both have negative effects on air quality. The same is true for information technology developers, whose actions in designing software programs may unknowingly create software bugs or potential security risks because of their interactions with other non-tested, non-secure network systems and cyber environments.

Continue reading “Understanding and Addressing the Challenges of Managing Information Security – A More Responsive Approach”



Authors

Meng-Chow Kang, PhD, CISSP, CISA

Director and CISO

APJC region, Cisco Systems, Inc

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It is but just a year since Cisco announced its acquisition of Insieme Networks and the Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) approach for Data Center SDN deployments. The promise was to bring a simpler, highly automated and secure data center taking a policy-driven approach.

Now, with more than double the number of APIC customers, over 900 Nexus 9000 Customers, and nearly 35 Ecosystem Partners, this promise is fast becoming a reality. Nothing can be more real than customers willing to speak of their deployments and of the benefits they are beginning to derive in a tangible manner, or of ecosystem partners willing to integrate into an open architecture and indulge in joint go-to-market activities.

Today we’d like to invite you to a set of special webcasts where you can hear the perspectives of different organizations on how Application Centric Infrastructure transforms IT

1. December 9th at 8:00 AM PT, listen to the session titled “Deutsche Bank and Cisco to Host a Conference Call on Application Centric Infrastructure” with Soni Jiandani, SVP, Marketing, Insieme Business Unit at Cisco. Cisco will be joined by three customers representing E-Trade, QBranch and the University of Qatar during this conference call.

2. December 10, 2014, 1:30 – 2:30 p.m. PST: Click here to register to attend the live webcast: “Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Live Broadcast” with early adopter ACI customers. An online chat with ACI experts will be available for viewers.

3. January 13th2015, register for the interactive webcast “Is Your Data Center Ready for the Application Economy? Discover the Power of Application Centric Infrastructure”. Join Cisco customers from all over the world sharing the benefits they’re deriving from embracing the Cisco Nexus portfolio as well as the ACI architecture. CIOs, CTOs, Top IT practictioners and Networking Architects all get together to talk about ACI in their IT environment.

You’ll also hear from ACI Ecosystem Partners and how their solutions integrate to help customize and extend ACI deployments leveraging the open architecture, and how joint customers are benefiting from multi-vendor innovation.

Register now!

 



Authors

Shashi Kiran

Senior Director, Market Management

Data Center, Cloud and Open Networking

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Global Participation. A few weeks ago, the OpenStack community gathered came in Paris for the Juno release of the OpenStack platform.  The Foundation reported record attendance of 4600, many attending a Summit for the first time.  Of those visiting Cisco’s booth: 68% came from Europe/Middle East/Africa/Russia; 18% from the Americas, 12% from Asia Pacific/Japan and 1% from Greater China.

Cisco Presenters. In his premiere breakout, “A World of Many OpenStack Clouds,” Lew Tucker, VP and CTO for Cisco Cloud Computing and Vice-Chair of the OpenStack Foundation, spoke about the future of cloud and how past experience building the Internet might be applied to building the Intercloud—the universe of clouds. Additional comments can be viewed in eWeek’s interview with Lew Tucker, where he discusses Cisco’s expanding support for OpenStack.

Cisco was a Gold Sponsor of the Summit and delivered eight technical presentations. If you missed the Summit, check out these links to video recordings of the Cisco sessions:

Hot Topics. Four years in, OpenStack has growing global support, a strong ecosystem of vendors, end-users running in production, and leading-edge companies willing to talk about their experience scaling OpenStack in their organizations. The number of new OpenStack core projects being initiated has tapered off and the Foundation reports that ten times as many bug fixes were contributed as new features in this most recent cycle, producing a stronger focus on stability.

Other topics trending up at the Paris Summit were:

  • Software defined ‘X’ (with X equaling a wide variety of technologies and services)
  • Federated clouds
  • Docker/ Linux containers

Juno Release Highlights

  • Formation of the new Sahara data processing project, which allows users to run Hadoop big data clusters in an OpenStack cloud
  • Full integration of Swift cloud storage project, which allows users to define and apply different cloud storage policies
  • Key improvements to the Neutron networking project to support Distributed Virtual Routing and IPv6 protocols, increasingly important in large scale deployments
  • Enhancement to the Nova compute project to simplify recovery after a server failure
  • Extension of the Keystone access and identity project to accommodate federated multi-cloud environments.

Keynote Speakers. Matt Haines, VP Cloud Engineering and Operations for Time Warner Cable (TWC), reviewed the work he oversaw in 2014 to deploy OpenStack infrastructure at scale to support the company’s strategy of delivering “any content, on any device, anywhere.” At TWC, an OpenStack cloud provides self-service IT infrastructure for devops activity. Haines consulted with Cisco in the planning phase when he was determining which IT services would be offered, the number of data centers that would be involved, how to design the provider networks, and how to stabilize the environment. His infrastructure is currently operating with what Matt called “enterprise stability at service provider scale.”

Other keynotes included Dr. Stefan Lenz, Manager of Data Center IT Infrastructure for BMW, who spoke about how BMW’s internally built private cloud had failed to provide the stability required across all of the projects that OpenStack covers, and Jose Maria San Jose Juarez, Chief of Innovation in Technology for BBVA Bank, who shared how a programmatic (software driven) approach to delivering IT infrastructure was critical for achieving the agility, speed, and reliability required to deliver industry-leading customer applications.

In addition to the customer keynotes, technical leaders from CERN, Comcast, Ericsson, Expedia, Intel, and Tapjoy delivered presentations on their OpenStack deployments.

Cisco Contributions. Cisco continues to lead contributions to the OpenStack Neutron networking project, summarized in the blog Cisco and OpenStack Juno Release, Part 1. Enhancements included improvements to Neutron plugin and driver integration and metering of key network services through OpenStack Ceilometer in order to support service level agreements and monitor performance. Cisco also contributed to other core OpenStack projects, summarized in the blog Cisco and OpenStack Juno Release, Part 2, which includes enabling configuration of IPv6 through OpenStack Horizon and increasing flexibility and security of SAN access through OpenStack Cinder. In addition to core work, Cisco also contributes code to incubation projects via GitHub/Stackforge. A high visibility project this cycle has been the effort to enable programmability of network infrastructure and services through group based policy. This approach is the basis of Cisco’s implementation of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), which delivers new levels of agility, speed and control for IT.

In addition to direct code contributions, Cisco provides plugins that ensure OpenStack distributions run smoothly on Cisco UCS servers and Cisco Nexus physical and virtual switches. The recent acquisition of Metacloud also allows Cisco to deliver OpenStack clouds-as-a-service, onsite at the customer, providing customers an alternative to building and managing private clouds themselves. In another step forward, Cisco is also building a global Intercloud ecosystem, in which clouds built on diverse hardware platforms can be easily connected to form highly-secure and efficient hybrid clouds.

For more information on OpenStack at Cisco, visit www.cisco.com/go/openstack and mark your calendars for the next OpenStack Summit May 18-20 in Vancouver, British Columbia.



Authors

Lora O'Haver

Solutions Marketing Manager

Data Center and Virtualization

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Have a bit of free time this Wednesday morning? If so please feel free to sit in on a Cisco keynote delivered by Mark Balch, Director of Cisco UCS Product Management, as he outlines the challenges faced and the discoveries made with the UCS family and how it has driven revolutionary change and business benefits for today’s modern datacenter.

The Cisco keynote starts WindowsITPro’s “virtual trade show” on Optimizing Your Virtual Infrastructure.  The event brings top industry Microsoft experts together in an online forum affording attendees the opportunity to learn about key datacenter optimization topics and trends.

Our UCS family has been a leader in Data Center optimization since it’s initial release to market five years ago.  Having been designed for virtualization from the beginning, UCS is an integrated system that is configured through unified, model-based management to simplify deployment of enterprise-class applications and services running in bare-metal, virtualized, and cloud-computing environments.

UCSPoster

Download the UCS Family poster

Continue reading “Cisco Keynote – End-to-End Optimization for Today’s Modern Datacenters”



Authors

Rex Backman

Senior Marketing Manager, Big Data Solutions

Data Center and Cloud

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Most parents share a common fear – that something might happen to their child, and they won’t be able to help or make them better. No parent wants to jump in the car with a sick child for a trip to the emergency room. But if that fever just won’t break or the cough is only getting worse, most parents know the hospital is often the best bet. But what happens if the local hospital isn’t local at all, and is instead hours away? Or, if the one specialist in the area isn’t due to visit until next week? For remote areas both in the U.S. and globally, this can be an everyday reality.

Thanks to technology advancements in the past few decades – of which the Internet of Everything has powered most – distance doesn’t have to play a factor anymore. Doctors and hospitals can be on call for all parents whenever needed, not just for parents in the local neighborhood. Continue reading “Children’s National Health System Improves Medical Services With the Internet of Everything”



Authors

Craig Sable

Director of echocardiography

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There is immense parental pride in seeing your child receive her University diploma. As I watched my daughter walk across the stage on the campus quad last year, bittersweet thoughts floated by – she’ll be leaving the family nest, striking out on her own, facing the challenges of finding a job, moving into her own apartment, paying bills. It was sad to think of innocence lost, and the real world barking at her door. With these thoughts I embraced her, and then she said “Dad, guess what, I’ve decided that I’m gonna do a gap year in New Zealand and Australia!”

A “gap year” is a way to defer all those serious milestones I was imagining for my daughter by taking a year off to travel and do fun things. Oh, and could I also take care of her cat, her car, and start making her college loan payments while she was gone? Oh well, I was actually very happy – and envious – about her quest for self-discovery.

So we shifted focus to new challenges, like getting travel medical insurance, selecting the right backpack, managing money needs, where to find jobs along the way, getting temporary work visas. And what about keeping in touch? I looked at my mobile operator’s roaming rates, and saw that Continue reading “Roaming Data Plans: Culture Shock, maybe, but Bill Shock no more!”



Authors

Brian Walsh

Senior Marketing Manager

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As enterprise cloud use extends to public, private, and hybrid clouds, CIOs and IT leaders are realizing the need to evolve their IT business model to become enterprise cloud service brokerage (CSBs).

Cisco’s Scott Clark recently discussed the value of this new business approach for IT and highlighted that by adopting this approach IT can “provide the right private, hybrid or public cloud service, at the right time, and at the right cost.”

Most organizations are lagging behind in overhaul their business model and evolve into a CSB. Ovum came out with a report citing that only 50% of organizations participating had a cloud strategy in place and “only one-third or less of respondents said they have [cloud] governance, integration, or compliance strategies.” Continue reading “The Journey to Becoming an Enterprise Cloud Service Brokerage: From Shadow IT to Hybrid IT”



Authors

Robert Dimicco

Senior Director

Advanced Services

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In today’s highly mobile society we try to stay as connected as we possibly can, whether that be for instant messaging, email, or keeping up with our favorite TV shows and movies. This obsession for connectivity has stressed the wireless infrastructures that are installed by many organizations. Because of this many organizations are looking to update their systems that support 802.11n technologies or even the older 802.11a/b/g standards. As a consultant it is one of my jobs to help a customer understand the new technology inside and out and make sure their networks are deployed accordingly. One of the major topics discussed when going over 802.11ac is throughput. 802.11ac brings with it a substantial jump in throughput, but there is a price to pay in order to achieve those higher data rates.

test-4Let’s go over a basic first, in wireless technology we use a frequency, or channel, to send our signal from the client to the station (access point). Think of this channel as a lane on a highway or freeway. A single lane carries so many cars per hour. Now if we add another lane in the same direction we can carry double the amount of traffic. This is repeated for each lane that you add. 802.11n and 802.11ac both allow us to combine multiple lanes to act as a single wide lane, allowing for larger traffic to pass. These channels are reflected as 20MHz, 40MHz (2 lanes – 802.11n and 802.11ac), and 80MHz (4 lanes – 802.11ac).

Ok, so we get the hole channel concept now right? So what’s the big deal then if we start combining these channels? Channels = capacity in the wireless world. A channel only has so much bandwidth to provide, you can’t create more, it’s a very finite resource. When our goal is to support hundreds of client devices in a large university auditorium for example, we want more channels as this gives us more overall capacity. If I were to deploy a true 802.11ac network for a university in an auditorium that requires say for example 6 access points I will end up with channel reuse when I avoid DFS channels in 5GHz. The channel reuse will degrade the performance of those access points using the same channel. Now if I deploy the same 6 access points with 40MHz channels I no longer have to worry about channel reuse in that auditorium. Continue reading “802.11ac: More Throughput For One or For All?”



Authors

Blake Krone

Senior Wireless Engineer

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According to Cisco’s 2014 Connected World Technology Report, the future of work will be more flexible and collaborative than ever before. In this two-part blog series, Rowan Trollope, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group, explores how the IT and business landscape is changing based on this new research and how organizations can prepare. Read the first blog in the series, The Future of Work & Collaboration, here.

We are facing a generation of knowledge workers who have essentially grown-up online. Most of the future workforce will have an online presence from the day they are born – being online is as natural as breathing and its fundamental to their social and work lives. These “digital natives” also don’t see a tradeoff between security and privacy: they want the access they want when they want it.

This changing tide in the workforce means that CIOs must empower the next generation of workers with the latest applications to enable them to work how they want to personally – whether that’s on a corporate-owned device or not. Workers need access to the right collaboration tools at the right time; and if they don’t have those tools, they’ll find them on their own – outside the structure and purview of the enterprise.

For organizations to succeed in this future work environment, Continue reading “Privacy v. Productivity: The CIOs Role in Shaping Future of Work Policies”



Authors

Rowan Trollope

Senior Vice President and General Manager

IoT and Collaboration Technology Group