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We are all seeing colleges and universities across the nation experiencing a massive disruption in how they deliver quality learning experiences to their students.  Those that continue down the path of status quo will miss this shift and become obsolete at best and out of business at best.  In his New York Times article, “Innovation Imperative: Change Everything,” Clayton Christensen says, “Like steam, online education is a disruptive innovation — one that introduces more convenient and affordable products or services that over time transform sectors.”

Changing delivery and business models have become part of the competitive landscape, but they also offer new sources of revenue and expense control for colleges and universities. Education delivery is changing in multiple ways, with increased cross registration in online courses, a growing focus on competency based models, new hybrid and online models, flipped learning, and moves to unbundling educational services, potentially increasing mobility across institutions. The rapid rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has also accelerated the pace of change in online delivery models over the last two years. Over the next several years, navigating this landscape will have economic impacts, both positive and negative. It will also force institutions to become more nimble in their strategic positioning. (Moody’s: 2014 Outlook US Higher Education). Continue reading “#HigherEdThursdays: Current Trends and Challenges in Higher Education”



Authors

Renee Patton

Former Global Director of Education and Healthcare

Global Industry Solutions Group

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The 2014 IEEE PES Transmission & Distribution Conference & Exposition is in the Windy City, bringing a half-century of industry innovation to the biggest and most exciting conference yet!

Check out Cisco’s presence at the IEEE show: McCormick Place; West Hall; Level 3, 2301 S. Lake Shore Drive; Chicago, IL 60616, and learn more about what Cisco is showing!

IEEE Event Apr2014Here’s a run down of the demos you can see:

Field Area Network showcases how you can address multiple use cases such as Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Distribution Automation (DA), and Remote Workforce Management all over a single, multi-service IP network platform. The latest additions to the Connected Grid product portfolio, include the IR 500 Series Distribution Automation Gateway, PLC NAN modules and WiMAX WAN modules for the Cisco 1000 Series Connected Grid Routers, and the Connected Grid Network Management System. The Connected Grid Network Management solution allows you to securely manage multi-vendor, multi-technology, multi-service utility communication networks that can scale to millions of endpoints.

IOx showcases the best in networking operating systems, Cisco Internetworking Operating System (IOS), and the best in open source Linux working together to enable Fog computing.  IOx allows data collection to move closer to the source, sensors and systems of origin. It reduces the cost of data collection by eliminating a separate server to run the interface or application and supports demanding utility and industry environments requiring hardened devices.

Substation Automation showcases how you can address mission critical grid operational as well as infrastructure support use cases over a converged network infrastructure.

You will see  IEC-61850 GOOSE transport over the Ethernet station bus, partner products integration for Visualization/Control (HMI), serial DNP3/Modbus SCADA and ANSI 87L Line Current Differential Teleprotection transport over an MPLS WAN, along with video surveillance and access control for substation physical security. The latest additions to the Connected Grid product portfolio, include the IE-2000U small form factor Industrial Ethernet Series Switches for the Process bus with PRP red-box and high precision 1588 Power Profile functionality, the ASR-903 MPLS substation router with Async/Sync Serial Interface Modules, and the Prime Carrier MPLS wide areas network management system.

IEEE Photo web-croppedCyber Security Cisco’s Agile Security Process can significantly reduce the risk of Cyber Threats. Having visibility into your network by seeing all the network traffic, learning what should and should not be there and which attacks are relevant, the Cisco Security Suite can adapt to your environment and remediate based on real threats.  This can not only save you time and money, but allow you to focus on the real world security issues by reducing the amount of false positives and false negatives.

Cisco Developer Network (CDN) program facilitates partners to work with Cisco to develop products and solutions for the utility industry. The CDN program enables development, integration with Cisco solutions and certification of IP enabled grid endpoints using Radio-frequency (RF) and Power-line communications (PLC) technologies, distributed intelligence applications and third party communication modules for IOX based field area routers, transmission and distribution technologies as well as grid security and management software.

So be there or be square! Meet up withy Cisco specialists, hear about the latest trends, and see how Cisco is even more relevant to the Utilities sector than ever before!

For those of you looking for a handy map of ‘Where-to-go’, here it is below: Continue reading “Cisco at IEEE Event in Chicago this week!”



Authors

Peter Granger

Senior Sales Transformation Manager

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A recent Bloor Research Market Update on Advanced Threat Protection reminds us of something that many security vendors have long been loath to acknowledge: traditional, point-in-time technologies, like anti-virus or sandboxes, are not entirely effective when defending against complex, sophisticated attacks.

This is due to something we have said before and we will say again: malware is “the weapon of choice” for malicious actors. We know blended threats introduce malware. Our 2014 Annual Security Report notes that every Fortune 500 company that was spoken to for the report had traffic going to websites that host malware. Bloor tells us all, once again, that attack methods are becoming more complex.

To put it plainly, when it comes to networks being breached, it is not a case of if, but when.

Continue reading “Not If, but When: The case for Advanced Malware Protection Everywhere”



Authors

CP Morey

Senior Director, Product Marketing

Security Product and Solutions Marketing

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Data has always been important for many (if not all) companies. Today however it is becoming increasingly easier to collect data about customers, business transactions, devices etc…, . This data enables companies to (more dynamically) optimize their business models and processes and differentiate themelves from their competitors. Before embarking on a (Big) data strategy it is important to understand what is driving this evolution and what are basic Screen Shot 2014-04-07 at 10.45.42architecture building blocks to take into account when transforming into a more data driven enterprise.

Several trends are fueling the evolution towards a more data-driven enterprise: Price/performance improvements in network, storage and computing and the rise of Cloud computing , make it more cost effective to deploy large IT infrastructures and capture data. New data management technologies and products such as Hadoop (MapReduce) and NoSQL/NewSQL provide scalable and more cost effective solutions than traditional SQL databases for various classes of problems.  The IT consumerization trend results in departments more actively pursuing analytics capabilities. Another important trend is the Internet of Things (IoT): The advent of cheaper sensors and improved connectivity are bridging the gap between the physical and digital world, enabling collecting data from more devices and environments. This sensorization is unlocking the potential to gather enormous amounts of data and details about almost everything.

These trends are creating new challenges and opportunities to harness and understand the data tsunamis, and leverage the analytics for decision making purposes, to better monitor, control, and understand complex systems from business dashboards to IoT eco-systems. Continue reading “Evolution towards the Data-Driven Enterprise”



Authors

Frank van Lingen

Manager Business Development

Corporate Strategic Innovation Group

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One thing is clear to me. Managing IT is similar to playing a game of Jenga, which challenges players to build a stack of blocks then remove those blocks without being the one to knock the whole stack over.  Whenever an IT manager wants to make a move or a change to any of the technology stacks in the IT infrastructure, it’s literally like pulling out a block without knocking the entire stack over.  For this reason, many companies are taking advantage of cloud computing to automate and simplify their IT management.

However, channel partners with nascent cloud or hybrid IT practices are often unclear about when to use a private cloud, a public cloud, or a combination of the two. For customers, the fundamental questions are when is it best to buy public cloud services? When it is prudent to build your own private cloud? Or does a hybrid cloud make more sense?

The key decision criteria for partners in helping customers to adopt a build (private cloud) vs. a buy (public cloud) approach includes looking at value add, cost, time to deployment, risk profile and experience.  After a thorough analysis of these criteria, then partners can engage customers around a conversation of business outcomes and key use cases. Here are some things to consider before having that conversation with your customer.  Continue reading “When and How to Use Cloud”



Authors

Bob Gault

Vice President

Cloud and Managed Services Partner Organization Cisco

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Security concerns around cloud adoption can keep many IT and business leaders up at night. This blog series examines how organizations can take control of their cloud strategies. The first blog of this series discussing the role of data security in the cloud can be found here. The second blog of this series highlighting drivers for managed security and what to look for in a cloud provider can be found here.

In today’s workplace, employees are encouraged to find the most agile ways to accomplish business: this extends beyond using their own devices to work on from anywhere, anytime and at any place to now choosing which cloud services to use.

Why Bring Your Own Service Needs to be on Infosec's Radar
Why Bring Your Own Service Needs to be on Infosec’s Radar

In many instances, most of this happens with little IT engagement. In fact, according to a 2013 Fortinet Survey, Generation Y users are increasingly willing to skirt such policies to use their own devices and cloud services. Couple this user behavior with estimates from Cisco’s Global Cloud Index that by the year 2017, over two thirds of all data center traffic will be based in the cloud proves that cloud computing is undeniable and unstoppable.

With this information in mind, how should IT and InfoSec teams manage their company’s data when hundreds of instances of new cloud deployments happen each month without their knowledge?

Additionally, what provisions need to be in place to limit risks from data being stored, processed and managed by third parties?

Here are a few considerations for IT and InfoSec teams as they try to secure our world of many clouds:

Continue reading “Bring Your Own Service: Why It Needs to be on InfoSec’s Radar”



Authors

Evelyn de Souza

Cloud Data Governance Leader

Chief Technology and Architecture Office

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As advancements in mobility continue to accelerate across all industries, one area that appears poised for some of the deepest transformation is healthcare.

Already, we are seeing how mobility adoption in hospitals — along with new personal health-monitoring devices — is enabling better patient care and a healthier society. And all of these breakthroughs dovetail into the revolution that we call the Internet of Everything (IoE) — the explosion in connectivity among people, process, data, and things that is transforming our world.

A great example is Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Sergipe, which is utilizing telehealth technology to provide patients with specialty healthcare. In the United States, nearly 70 percent of surveyed healthcare leaders say that clinicians at their organizations use mobile technology to view patient data, according to a new survey from HIMSS Analytics.

It’s also estimated that more than 17 million wearable bands will ship this year, putting new health-monitoring tools directly in the hands — or on the wrists — of patients. And with the deployment of strong wireless networks, such as the one used by Miami Children’s Hospital, hospitals are supporting a holistic mobile-enabled patient-care experience that is providing strides in electronic health records. Another intriguing breakthough involves devices such as the Scanadu Scout, which makes the handheld medical “tricorder” of Star Trek fame a consumer reality. Such advances are helping doctors, nurses, and patients reduce errors in miscommunication, while cutting costs.

Cisco_HealthcareMobility_Joseph Bradley

It isn’t about just becoming more mobilized; it’s about improving patient care and individual well-being. As Addison McGuffin, vice president of business technology innovation at Health Care Service Corporation, said, “Some of the things we’re looking at is a trend toward technology that is helping patients toward health performance and improvement on a daily basis.”

These examples show how mobility is reshaping the healthcare industry. Yet, according to a recent Forbes article, many hospital administrators perceive a “double-edged sword” when balancing the need to invest in technology with regulatory constraints. This topic also drove conversation at the recent HIMSS conference. At Kaiser Permanente’s booth, they asked the question: “Is Health IT Really Worth It?” With advancements in mobility shaping IT strategy and investments, I’d take Kaiser’s question a step further by asking, “Is Mobility in Healthcare Really Worth It?” Continue reading “Connected Healthcare: How Mobility Drives Better Care and a Healthier Society”



Authors

Joseph M. Bradley

Global Vice President

Digital & IoT Advanced Services

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Fig 1 Overview

This week Microsoft launched SQL Server 2014, their data management and business intelligence platform. SQL Server at Microsoft has grown tremendously over the years; it is far from its origins as a simple relational database that Microsoft licensed from Sybase years ago. For the 2014 version of SQL Server, Microsoft has focused on continuing their drive to deliver mission critical performance, use that performance to provide for heterogeneous data access and insight, and finally delivering a data platform for customer’s private and hybrid cloud solutions.  At Cisco we believe that our Unified Data Center architecture provides an optimum compute, network, and management offering for your Microsoft SQL Server solutions:

Compute – Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS)

 Fig 2 Compute

Our Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) server family is an intelligent fabric-based computing infrastructure that simplifies operations and speeds application deployment in physical and cloud computing environments. UCS combines industry-standard x86 architecture blade and rack servers, networking, and enterprise-class management into a single cohesive system. UCS’s configuration is entirely programmable using unified, model-based management to simplify and accelerate deployment of Microsoft workloads, bare-metal or virtual, such as SQL Server 2014. Its unified I/O infrastructure uses a high-bandwidth, low-latency unified fabric to support networking, storage I/O, and management traffic. UCS unified fabric increases performance, security, and manageability by extending fabric directly to servers and virtual machines. UCS servers are 100% stateless, delivering a highly flexible server environment that allows for dynamic utilization of server hardware

Continue reading “Cisco and Microsoft SQL Server 2014”



Authors

Rex Backman

Senior Marketing Manager, Big Data Solutions

Data Center and Cloud

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Private Clouds are fundamentally challenging how modern data centers are acquiring and consuming IT.  Nearly half of large enterprises polled[1] have deployed a private cloud, its reasonable to say organizations are tackling head-on the key concerns of designing, building and deploying a private cloud today. The top challenges are security of data, control and efficient delivery of applications as cloud services; need to be compliant, need for in-house expertise and added upfront costs. Added to the challenges is the network that is becoming the remaining bottleneck to business agility after everything else gets virtualized and automated. SDN is the key component[2] of any cloud computing strategy in making IT more agile and, therefore, more responsive to the needs of the business.

At our April 2 webcast,  New Applications Are Knocking: Is your Data Center OPEN for Business?, we explored insights from ACI ecosystem vendors and customers that are addressing these challenges using the Nexus 9000, cloud orchestration, and the open capabilities of ACI.

Cisco Customer Insights Panel - April 2, 2014
Cisco Customer Insights Panel – April 2, 2014

At that event, Chuck Crane, Lead Networking and Security Architect at Acxiom, shared the accelerating pace that his team is expected to deploy infrastructure in – from weeks down to  hours with an astounding 20,000 network and security changes in their cloud infrastructure per year.

His DevOps teams are accelerating their deployment cycles from six months down to two week sprints so the IT organization must deliver new infrastructure services almost instantly.  Chuck and the other customer discussions can be found at the 40 minute mark in this video of the event.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)  solves not only the technical challenges but also delivers the operational, service-level, and financial business improvements that help organizations become world class service oriented IT organizations.  ACI gives IT leaders the ability to manage even the most complex private cloud environments more easily and transparently.

The architecture provides a common programmable automation and management framework for network, application, security, and virtualization teams.   This framework makes IT more agile while reducing application deployment time.  In short, Cisco ACI enables a world class service oriented IT organization by coordinating application, network and security teams to maximize the benefits of a policy-driven data center that support open, standard controller APIs to maximize flexibility and minimize lock-in. In other words, ACI enables the IT to be more strategic in streamlining the IT resources and to act like an internal service provider, essentially “running IT as a business”.

Related:

Introducing OpFlex – A new standards-based protocol for Application Centric Infrastructure

The Promise of an Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)

Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Includes Strong Partner Ecosystem for Security and Network Services

The Dynamic Security Model of Cisco ACI (video)

Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI): Application Network Profiles for Security and Network Services


[1] Gartner, Private Cloud Matures, Hybrid Cloud Is Next, Analyst: Thomas J. Bittman

[2] Top 10 Technology Trends, 2013: Cloud Computing and Hybrid IT Drive Future IT Models, 6 February 2013, David W. Cearley, Donna Scott, Joe Skorupa, Thomas J. Bittman



Authors

Harry Petty

Director

Data Center and Cloud Marketing