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I often joke with our customers and ask, “How many of you woke up this morning saying, ‘If I could only buy software defined networking (SDN) today, then my day would be complete.’”  My point in asking this is to underscore that it’s not about the technology itself, but it’s about the benefits – or the outcomes – that this solution achieves which is what our customers want.

There’s no question that there’s a massive amount of market disruption occurring. Whether it’s economic shifts around the world, technology transitions we see with mobile, cloud, big data, analytics, security, SDN and the Internet of Everything (IoE), or the disruption of business models across every industry, our customers are facing a great deal of complexity coming at them fast – and all at the same time.

Whereas IT was once thought of as a necessary evil, customers I speak with today understand that technology will differentiate and transform their businesses amidst all of this complexity. CEOs understand that technology, at a minimum, must be a strategic enabler for their business, and ideally a strategic differentiator.  They realize if they do not stay ahead, a competitor can – and will – disrupt them.

This leads to an incredible amount of pressure on CIOs, who are being asked to make IT decisions faster than ever. More than 70 percent of IT budget is spent keeping existing systems running, with 50 percent of IT budgets spent on labor alone. So how can they create more time to be both strategic partners and simultaneously play Chief Innovation Officer for their CEO and organization?

Continue reading “Fast IT: Unleashing Value at Stake”



Authors

Chuck Robbins

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Cisco Systems, Inc.

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Billions of devices are changing how organizations compete and disrupting traditional data management and analytics.

This Internet of Everything world presents an exciting new opportunity to discover and take advantage of market, customer, and operational insights. And by making sense of captured data quickly, organizations can take action at that point, in that moment, in ways that differentiate versus competitors and drive significant new business value.   TimeWarnerCable’s intelligent home initiative is one example.

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But all this data is massive, messy, and everywhere, spanning many sources – cloud, data warehouses, devices – and formats – video, voice, text, and images.  To address this challenge, new solutions beyond traditional data warehousing and even big data are required.

Cisco Enters the Data and Analytics Market

When Cisco acquired data virtualization market leader Composite Software in mid 2013, Cisco signaled a clear intent to begin connecting this data via intelligent networking the same way it connected LANs; the Internet; voice and video over IP; and more in it’s 30 year history.

And with our December 11, 2014, Connected Analytics Portfolio announcement, Cisco adds a rich suite of analytics solutions that help organizations capture insights that create new opportunities, simplify business operations, enhance the customer experience, and resolve potential threats.

New Methods for the New Challenges

Today’s analytic solutions need to advance beyond traditional methods that move data to a warehouse or data lake before commencing analysis.  Cisco’s Connected Analytics Portfolio provides analytics with immediate access to data, as well as brings analytics to the data – no matter where the data resides on the network.

Further, Cisco is uniquely qualified to implement analytics at the point of data, because so much of the data worldwide resides on our networks, providing the ideal platform for embedded analytics.  Along with 30 years of networking experience, Cisco now has the data and analytics tools, software, and services to help our customers instantly capture, analyze, and interpret critical data out to the network edge.

 

Learn More

Visit our Data and Analytics website to learn more.

Join the Conversation

Follow us @CiscoDataVirt and @CiscoAnalytics.



Authors

Bob Eve

No Longer with Cisco

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At Automation Fair last month, I participated in several sessions and industry forums as part of Cisco’s participation in this event, which is Rockwell Automation’s largest user conference. What struck me were some of the urgency for many manufacturers in investing in key technologies in their plant environment. It was quite serendipitous, since we announced enhancements to our Connected Factory offering in terms of wireless features. Many of the customers I spoke to had specific wireless use cases in mind for their particular factory floor.

Specifically, we spoke to several well-known Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Aerospace companies, and the drive to improve efficiencies through machine monitoring and new analytics to reduce costs or downtime is spurring new investments in IoT initiatives and projects.   According to my colleague Randall Kenworthy, Practice Director for CPG and Life Sciences, CPG companies are pursuing 3 strategies: “Connect,” “Secure,” and “Virtualize.” Most of the assets being used to make products are still dark, securing food safety and intellectual property in an escalating threat environment, and virtualizing plant floors to increase uptime and lower costs. Randall presented to a packed room of nearly 400 attendees in the CPG forum at Automation Fair.

What is interesting today is that a full ‘Plant of the Future’ concept is no longer a ‘pie-in-the sky’ vision but rather a real-life, tested solution that can be deployable today. Take a look at this overview video describing the prime use cases and components of a Connected Factory:

The infographic below encapsulates many of the business outcomes manufacturers are seeking to achieve and how the Connected Factory can make your ‘Plant of the Future’ a reality today: productivity, output increase, innovation acceleration, and energy efficiency. What are your plans to make the Plant of the Future a reality for your factory? Tell us more in the comments below. Thanks for reading.



Authors

Bryan Tantzen

Senior Director

Manufacturing Solutions

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In this episode, Emad Younis (@Emad_Younis) and Melissa Palmer (@vmiss33) give us the highlights of the FlexPod solution, from the parts to the implementation, with plenty of real world examples.

This is Engineers Unplugged, where technologists talk to each other the way they know best, with a whiteboard. The rules are simple:

  1. Episodes will publish weekly (or as close to it as we can manage)
  2. Subscribe to the podcast here: engineersunplugged.com
  3. Follow the #engineersunplugged conversation on Twitter
  4. Submit ideas for episodes or volunteer to appear by Tweeting to @CommsNinja
  5. Practice drawing unicorns

Join the behind the scenes by liking Engineers Unplugged on Facebook.

Quick programming note: This is the last episode I’ll be blogging about, but never fear! There are many great episodes to come, brought to you by my friend, co-host, and colleague Lauren Friedman (@Lauren). Be sure to enjoy a marathon of episodes over the holiday break, and prepare your unicorns!



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CiscoChampion2015200PX#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we’re talking with Cisco VP and CTO of Collaboration,  Jonathan Rosenberg, about Project Squared. Kim Austin (@ciscokima) moderates and John Welsh, Joshua Warcop and Rick Vanover are this week’s Cisco Champion guest hosts.

Listen to the Podcast.

Learn about the Cisco Champions Program HERE.
See a list of all #CiscoChampion Radio podcasts HERE.

Cisco SME
Jonathan Rosenberg, Cisco VP and CTO, Collaboration (@jdrosen2)

Cisco Champions
John Welsh, (@samplefive), Unified Communications Engineer
Joshua Warcop, (@Warcop), Senior Consultant
Rick Vanover, (@RickVanover), Product Strategy Specialist and Community Manager Continue reading “#CiscoChampion Radio S1|Ep 45. Project Squared”



Authors

Rachel Bakker

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

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This post was authored by Christopher Marczewski with contributions from Craig WIlliams

*This blog post has been updated to include Command and Control IP addresses used by the malware.

A new piece of wiper malware has received quite a bit of media attention. Despite all the recent press, Cisco’s Talos team has historic examples of this type of malware going back to the 1990s. Data is the new target, this should not surprise anyone. Recent examples of malware effectively “destroying” data – putting it out of victims’ reach – also include Cryptowall, and Cryptolocker, common ransomware variants delivered by exploit kits and other means.

Wiping systems is also an effective way to cover up malicious activity and make incident response more difficult, such as in the case of the DarkSeoul malware in 2013.

Any company that introduced proper back-up plans in response to recent ransomware like Cryptolocker or Cryptowall should already be protected to a degree against these threats. Mitigation strategies like defense in depth will also help minimize the chance of this malware reaching end systems.

The Deep Dive

Initially we started investigating a sample reported to be associated with the incident to improve detection efficacy. Based off our analysis of e2ecec43da974db02f624ecadc94baf1d21fd1a5c4990c15863bb9929f781a0a we were able to link 0753f8a7ae38fdb830484d0d737f975884499b9335e70b7d22b7d4ab149c01b5 as a nearly identical sample. By the time we reached the network-related functions during our analysis, the relevant IP addresses belonging to the C2 servers were no longer responding back as expected. In order to capture the necessary traffic we had to modify both of the aforementioned disk wiper components. One modification replaced one of the hard-coded C2 server IP addresses with a local address belonging to a decoy VM while changing references to the other hard-coded addresses to point to this local address instead. The other modification simply changed the parameter being passed to an instance of the Sleep() function so debugging efforts wouldn’t be put on hold for 45 minutes (the original sample used a 10 minutes sleep).

When we initially examined a rule that was being distributed in the public we were looking for areas where we could improve coverage to better protect our customers. The new Wiper variant is poorly written code and luckily includes very little obfuscation.The author(s) made the mistake of allocating a buffer for the send() function that surpasses the data they wished to include in the payload: a null-terminated opening parentheses byte, the infected host’s local IP address, and the first 15 bytes of the host name. This incorrect buffer allocation results in the desired data, in addition to some miscellaneous data already present on the stack (including the 0xFFFFFFFF bytes we alerted on in the first revision of our rule).

Simply running the disk wiper component on different versions of Windows proves the miscellaneous data from the stack that we onced alerted on only applies to beacons being sent from Win XP hosts:

Continue reading “Wiper Malware – A Detection Deep Dive”



Authors

Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

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Wealth Management firms are spending billions on IT to differentiate in the market place. Yet the question remains, can “Big Data” have a material impact on the business? Can it deliver business outcomes by reducing risk, increasing assets under management, driving profitability, client satisfaction, products per client, client and financial advisor retention, all while improving the cost/income ratio and return on equity?

These are questions that are being discussed in board rooms across the financial industry and topics that I will cover in this blog series.

In order to answer these questions we need to put the wealth client at the center and understand changing client needs and expectations around how the client wants to be served by the firm. We need to examine external factors such as the impact of game changing consumer technology and unprecedented client access to information, as well as understand how new market entrants are challenging the traditional financial advisor value proposition and business model as a new round of Robo-Advisors hit the market.

Up until recent years, banks enjoyed an account centric transactional business model. What is changing is the onset of unstructured social interaction data as smart mobile devices and mobile broadband Internet usage reach high penetration levels. Device proliferation is leading to the availability of “data exhaust” from mobile phones, tablets, automobiles, video cameras, and from sensors in buildings, streets, consumer wearables and footfall traffic counters. Correlation of such data to better attract, retain, and serve clients can create market advantage.J pagano Wealth Mgt Blog part 1

The “Big” in Big Data comes from the fact that worldwide data volume is doubling every two years with unprecedented volume, variety, and velocity. Ninety percent of the all data in the history of the world was created in the last two years (SINTEF)! The concept of Big Data is about the correlation and analysis of transaction data, social interaction data, and machine/sensor data in a way that can turn data into knowledge, knowledge into insights, and insights into actions in real-time.

So what does this all mean for wealth managers?

As a wealth manager, what impact would it have on your business if you were able to increase the understanding of your client exponentially? Actions derived from data are informed by highly personalized needs predictions that can arm wealth managers with deep insights about their clients, increase their relevance in every interaction, and directly contribute to business outcomes. Big Data can help wealth managers transform the client value proposition and re-imagine the client experience.

The new vision for financial services is that a firm must be present in the financial lives of its clients, any time, any place, on any device, and across any channel.

The firm can no longer wait for the client to come to it. It must be proactive in delivering highly relevant value-added services in real-time and anticipate client needs. The firm needs to aspire to creating a “market of one” experience for each wealth client, understand the needs of and the hierarchy within the household, and move to a client centric versus account centric go-to-market approach.

When it comes to Big Data in Wealth Management start with the foundation, put the client at the center, and define business outcomes. Focus on building capabilities around what is possible while re-imagining the client experience.

Wealth management firms can take concrete steps in the form of measurable business outcome based projects to significantly enhance the client experience. These include:

  1. Define a roadmap for wealth client data analytics maturity. This will identify gaps that can be addressed resulting in more relevant advisor-client interactions.
  2. Establish a wealth client listening system across all channels. Early detection of client behaviors can lead to the identification of issues and sales opportunities.
  3. Create a real-time single view of wealth client data with data virtualization. Substantial savings can be had by leaving disparate data in place while providing managers with a single view.
  4. Establish an analytics driven financial advisor collaboration platform. This helps create market differentiation by maximizing advisor productivity, sharing best practices daily.
  5. Deploy mobile virtual advisor video capability and establish branch analytics. This improves client experience and gives advisors more minutes per day with clients increasing cross-selling opportunities.
  6. Empower advisors with real-time client insights to drive business outcomes. This helps the advisor manage to client life events with much greater granularity and speed.

The choices that wealth management firms make around data analytics in the next two years will determine their position in the marketplace. Can Big Data help wealth managers? With a client centric and business outcomes solutions approach, the answer is an astounding YES!

I will discuss each of the above steps in more detail in my next blog. As always I welcome your suggestions, stories, and feedback!

 

 



Authors

Joe Pagano

Practice Advisor, Sales

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blog image Patty Post 12_15_14As I am sitting in heavy traffic on the way home from work, my finger tips tapping impatiently on the steering wheel, my mind wandering… I suddenly think of the Chinese program that I am so glad to have recorded on TV. Without this convenience, I would have missed it.

I can’t help but reflect on how big the opportunity is for companies to deliver information via pre-recorded, on-demand, interactive video.

Just recently, I was talking to my colleagues about how different time zones often make it difficult to attend conferences live. Thankfully, we can access the recordings. These can save so much time and let us catch up with the topics that matter most to us.

One of my colleagues also pointed out how valuable the leadership briefings are to keep employees informed. Although we’re based in the UK and Cisco headquarters are in California, we do like to get regular updates and feel involved. She said that she watches the meetings on demand from her laptop or on her iPad while travelling.

If only more companies made more of their communications available in this way… Continue reading “Use Video to Make Internal Communications Count”



Authors

Patty Yan

No Longer with Cisco

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‘Tis the season to shop and to make resolutions  for the coming year. I’m doing a fair bit of both, inspired by the many Internet of Everything (IoE) products that are popping up everywhere. And while it’s the season of giving, I’m also finding plenty of things I wouldn’t mind getting myself. According to the National Retail Federation, I’m not alone. “Self gifting” makes up almost a third of all holiday shopping.

IoE is about things connecting to the Internet, millions of things. It’s about turning the data they collect into information we can act on or respond to. Cisco defines IoE as bringing together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before. Continue reading “My Internet of Everything Holiday Wish List”



Authors

Rachael McBrearty

Chief Creative and Group Leader

Cisco Consulting Services