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It isn’t everyday that you get to send a shout-out to your colleague for being recognized as one of the most influential women in tech by Elle Magazine.

Congratulations to Padmasree Warrior! Congratulations also to Elle magazine, for showcasing the growing number of female leaders and influencers who are developing new technology and running technology companies—and are just all-around impressive women.

At Cisco, we believe that we need to be a company whose environment, culture and mix resemble the diversity of the world we live in and the communities where we do business.

The truth is that there is a tangible business value from inclusion and diversity. Even more so, there are proven links between inclusion, collaboration, and innovation that drive bottom line results.  According to a study by McKinsey, the management consultancy, companies with a higher proportion of women in senior management are on average 48 percent more profitable than rivals.

However, there is much more work to do!  I believe as leaders we not only have the responsibility to lead by example but also to understand the strategic advantage gained from a team made up of a diverse set of individuals.

But for today, I hope there are females of all ages reading Elle Magazine, who get inspired to chart their own path to leadership.

Follow me: @BlairChristie

 



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Blair Christie

Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

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This post has been coauthored by Joel EslerCraig WilliamsRichard HarmanJaeson Schultz, and Douglas Goddard 

In part one of our two part blog series on the “String of Paerls” threat, we showed an attack involving a spearphish message containing an attached malicious Word doc. We also described our methodology in grouping similar samples based on Indicators of Compromise: static and dynamic analysis indicators. In this second part of the blog series we will cover the malicious documents and malicious executables. For the technical deep dive see the write up on the VRT blog here.

 



Authors

Craig Williams

Director

Talos Outreach

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It may sound strange to hear me say it, but when I wrote the previous blog post about Dynamic FCoE I thought that it may get a little blip of attention and then filed away as a “oh, that is cool” little factoid about Cisco’s storage portfolio. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so nonchalant, but I confess I was not expecting the number of questions that I (and other speakers at CiscoLive back in May) have been getting about the technology.

Many questions – including some in the comments of the previous blog – have indicated a strong desire to know more, and they have been excellent and well-thought out. I’m going to try to address some of them in a deeper dive blog whenever I can, in the hopes of being able to address some of the concerns and clarify some points.

switch goes downWe’ll start with one of the biggest concerns – sharing the spine layer for logical separation of SAN A/B, and what happens if one of the spine switches (nodes) go offline. Continue reading “Load Balancing with Dynamic FCoE”



Authors

J Metz

Sr. Product Manager

Data Center Group

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[ed. Note: This post was updated 7/9/2014 to include new information not available to the author at the time of original publishing]

I just returned from the Gartner Security Summit at the Gaylord Resort in National Harbor Maryland. Each morning I took my run along the Potomac River and passed this sculpture of a man buried in the sand.

KT_sandman

In speaking with many IT executives they expressed specific concerns around their IT security, and this sculpture of the “man in the sand” took on new meaning for me. I could see how they might similarly feel overwhelmed and buried given their limited resources and the abundance of threats to their environments. Yes, I’ve been in this industry too long! Anyway, throughout all of my conversations it was abundantly clear that people were looking for a new way to approach securing their networks and applications. Customers are recognizing that unsecured access to the network is a critical threat vector; however, when leveraged properly, the network itself also provides a significant platform that offers comprehensive protection to close those gaps. So, what do I mean by that?

The network uniformly sees and participates in everything across the threat continuum, whether before, during or after an attack. If we can leverage the insights and inherent control the network provides, IT organizations can truly augment their overall end-to-end security across this continuum. If done correctly, this augmentation can happen without investing a large amount of time, energy, and resources in filling all the gaps to secure their environments – regardless of legacy network, endpoint, mobile, virtual, or cloud usage models

Cisco strongly believes that the network must work intimately with various security technologies in a continuous fashion to offer protection for networks, endpoints, virtual, data centers and mobile.

The New Security Model

Given Cisco’s breadth and depth of security, we did not have room to exhibit our networking devices. However, within much of our networking (and even security) offerings, we have embedded security capabilities that provide more comprehensive protection across the entire threat continuum.

An example of this is Cisco TrustSec embedded network access enforcement, which provides network segmentation based on highly differentiated access policies. Cisco TrustSec works with Cisco ISE to provide consistent secure access that is mapped to IT business goals. Cisco ISE and TrustSec are part of the Cisco Unified Access solution and leverage a superior level of context and simplified policy management across the entire infrastructure in order to ensure that the right users and devices gain the right access to the right resources at any given time.

Cisco’s integrated approach to security reduces complexity, while providing unmatched visibility, continuous control and advanced threat protection, which, in turn, allows customers to prioritize more efficiently and act more quickly – before, during, and after an attack. Through Cisco’s New Security Model, we help you achieve a more pleasant experience and get you dug out of the sand. To learn more and go beyond just a shovel and pail, go to Cisco’s Security Page.



Authors

Kathy Trahan

Senior Security Solutions Marketing Manager

Global Marketing Corporate Communications

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Dimension Data recently came out with their 2014 Network Barometer Report. The report has business and technology insights based on data gathered from 74,000 network devices in 32 countries. Some of the findings are counter-intuitive, like failure rates and mean-time-repair (MTTR) are lower for obsolete equipment. See press release here, and download the full report here (requires registration). Also, check out their Google+ hangout on Wednesday July 9th.

DiData NBR Facebook-Timeline-v2

Based on this exhaustive report, Dimension Data’s top recommendation is:

“Have an accurate inventory of your network estate.”

The very fact that this is a top recommendation shows that creating accurate network inventory is hard. Otherwise, customers would already be doing this, and Dimension Data wouldn’t need to make it their top recommendation.

CAA

We are doing our part to make it easy for customers to create an accurate inventory of their network devices. Cisco Active Advisor is a free cloud-based service that can scan your network for Cisco enterprise and small business products such as Catalyst switches, routers, wireless access points, wireless controllers, and more. It provides valuable information on these products such as security vulnerabilities (PSIRTs), product lifecycle (End of Sale, End of Support), service contract status, warranty status, and more. You can view the report in an elegant web-based interface, and setup alerts. Cisco Active Advisor is ideal for small and mid-size networks. Continue reading “Introducing Cisco Active Advisor – A Free Cisco Tool For Your Network”



Authors

Pradeep Parmar

Senior Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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New applications and cloud computing are placing new demands on IT infrastructure. The infrastructure needs to be capable of quickly responding to dynamic business priorities and changing market conditions.  Customers require an IT infrastructure that brings the scale, agility, and mission-critical availability the business demands, both today and tomorrow. Hence, the industry is witnessing a movement to integrated infrastructure.  What is integrated infrastructure? Integrated infrastructure combines compute, network, management, and storage technologies to simplify and accelerate application deployment.

Blog Image 7_8The integrated infrastructure segment continues to be one of the fastest growing IT markets. I recently  highlighted that Cisco was the leader in the integrated infrastructure market with leading integrated systems built on top of UCS integrated infrastructure (Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus, and UCS Director). In fact, in Gartner’s inaugural Magic Quadrant report for integrated systems, integrated systems based on UCS integrated infrastructure have been rated in the Leaders Quadrant.  In addition, IDC just released their Q1 2014 Worldwide Quarterly Integrated Infrastructure and Platforms Tracker with UCS integrated infrastructure participating in the top three integrated infrastructure solutions. These results show that innovation and solving customer pain points is still a solid formula for success.

At Cisco, we see the need for application centric and hybrid cloud enabled infrastructure to quickly deploy and dynamically locate workloads. With UCS Integrated Infrastructure and Cisco ACI, customers will be able to automate the provisioning of network, compute, and storage resources. With Cisco Intercloud Fabric, customers can build secure hybrid clouds and extend their existing data center to public clouds as needed and on demand. Both Cisco ACI and Cisco Intercloud fabric help lower costs, simplify infrastructure management, and accelerate the delivery of IT resources.

Today, EMC announced a series of new products and solutions under their “Megalaunch” umbrella. The launch includes major updates to EMC’s industry-leading storage platforms. The new VMAX3 enterprise data service platform is designed for hybrid clouds by delivering enhanced scalability and agility with data center performance and availability.

I am very excited about the capabilities of UCS integrated infrastructure with ACI, Cisco Intercloud Fabric, and the EMC VMAX3 being the foundation for high performance, automated, and trusted hybrid clouds.



Authors

Jim McHugh

Vice President, Product and Solutions Marketing

Unified Computing Systems

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Cisco Nexus 9516 SwitchAll right I confess I’m not that kind of geek. I admire and work with many IT engineers, but if you need me to configure a Nexus switch you’ll be out of luck. I am a geek though, and I know about building successful B2B and B2C Ambassador Programs.

Before I start sharing my 2 cents, let’s take a look at what I mean by Ambassador Programs. Below are three major types. This is a simplified scenario but these large buckets help clarify.

Ambassador Program Types

1. Cast of Thousands: this type of program focuses on amplifying large volumes of content externally. Membership is open to anyone who registers, and includes automated content delivery, gamification, and tracking, where participants are rewarded for their actions in real time. Actions include low-hurdle social media tasks like sharing existing content to social media networks, rating a product, or entering a contest, but can also offer more challenging projects like writing a review, helping users solve problems, and communicating with potential customers. Ideally, ambassadors’ actions are integrated with a CRM platform in order to track ROI. Top participants are identified and nurtured, and in some cases transitioned into the second type of program (below). Continue reading “The Art of Ambassador Programs: 5 tips from a geek”



Authors

Rachel Bakker

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

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CIOs face a scary reality. They only know about 5-10% of the cloud applications that are being used within their organization. This shadow IT is ripping holes in their security strategies. In fact, a recent Forrester study cited that 43% of respondents said they believed shadow IT practices were major threats to their respective organizations. And, as the fallout from recent high-profile attacks have shown, both IT and business leaders will face the consequences if a security breach occurs.

To help leaders uncover shadow IT, we launched Cloud Consumption Assessment Service in January. But discovering shadow IT is only the first step that organizations need to take to manage cost and risks.

[Read the full post by Robert Dimicco on the Cisco Data Center blog…]



Authors

Robert Dimicco

Senior Director

Advanced Services

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The Internet of Everything (IoE) describes machine-to-machine (M2M) compute entities that track and measure real-time data that can be used to build out a data history for analytics that could be used to optimize the quality of life. The opportunity is represented by devices used in a person’s everyday life that are connected to the Internet, have the ability to learn a person’s consumption behavior, and embody the goal to improve the efficacy of services and goods delivery and consumption. Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers says that the Internet of Everything could be a $19 trillion opportunity. 1 Continue reading “The Internet of Everything: An Opportunistic View from the Clouds”



Authors

Kong Yang

Cloud Practice Leader