Are you thinking about the evolving threat landscape? You should be. Each day, new vulnerabilities are found and new exploits are crafted. Attackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, while industry trends such as cloud computing and mobility are rapidly expanding the attack surfaces. Your mobile device could act like a Trojan horse, passing right through your network perimeter. Or your compromised server could spread an infection to your most sensitive assets.

This is the first in a series of blog posts that focuses on how Cisco stays ahead of the latest security threats. Of course, to stay on top of something as fast changing and widespread as security threats, you need to understand them in great detail.

And that’s what the Cisco 2013 Annual Security Report (ASR) and Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) offer. Read More »

Tags: analytics, cisco annual security report, Cisco Security Intelligence Operations, evolving threat landscape, infographic, intelligence graph

I recently kicked off a series about security and the Internet of Everything, a pivotal topic that starts with the roots of IoE, IoT and M2M, which I explore in more depth in the first post.

Machine-to-Machine connections make up a huge portion of the Internet of Things, both general concepts for the network infrastructures that link physical and virtual objects. These abstractions come together on IoE, making it possible for devices to orchestrate and manage the world we live in, as they become connected entities themselves.

But to fully discuss security on the Internet of Everything, we must first go back to the roots of IoE itself. The technology innovations that employ M2M and IoT were actually spun off from military and industrial supply chain applications. As IP became a more common communication protocol, IoT gained more traction, helped even more by the creation of IPv6 and other advancements in wireless technology. As ever-increasing data is captured and distributed on these networks, more intelligence is generated.

Read my full “Securing the Internet of Everything: An Introduction” blog post to learn more about this embedded intelligence that is a core architectural component of IoT, and how it informs the security for the Internet of Everything itself. And stay tuned! I have more for you to come in this series, including a look into IoE security framework.

Tags: analytics, architecture, internet, Internet of Everything, internet of things, IoE, IoT, ip, IPv6, M2M, Service Provider, sms

Can you remember life without Wi-Fi? Mobility is an integrated part of our daily lives – from how we operate as a mobile user or consumer to how we conduct business. And as Cisco continues to focus on architectures and solutions that transform our customers’ businesses, our Wi-Fi business soars: in last week’s Q3 earnings, we reported a 27 percent increase in year-over-year revenue and a 200% increase in sales of Service Provider Wi-Fi. We’ve now seen 6 out of 7 quarters of Wi-Fi growth, and we continue to be the clear industry leader.

We’ve made exciting new announcements in wireless – the industry’s first edition of the 802.11ac module; extending our portfolio for a cloud-managed offering with the acquisition of Meraki; and unveiling several marquees customer deployments.

One of the truly differentiated ways Cisco is delivering business-relevant solutions is extending the Unified Access architecture through the Connected Mobile Experiences solution. This solution embodies Cisco’s commitment to deliver relevance to line of businesses by shifting the network to a revenue enabler that creates meaningful Wi-Fi user experiences and increases business efficiency.

The Connected Mobile Experiences solution uses Cisco Wi-Fi infrastructure– access points, controllers, Mobility Services Engine (MSE), and management – to detect, connect, and engage end users and to provide unique insight to venue owners through location analytics.

Read More »

Tags: analytics, aruba, business, Cisco, connected mobile experiences, End User, location, location-based, Meridian, mobile, mobility, network, operations, unified access, wireless

The mobile market will be vastly different 10 years from today. We will see two and a half billion more people connected to the internet, but also 50 billion more devices. Those devices are going to have a totally different consumption profile compared with the smartphone or dongle user that we have today. We will have a mobile market with mobile internet which has got to have flexibility in terms of how it supports the massive number of devices, signaling events, and bandwidth that will occur in the future.

To manage this exponential growth in mobile data, effective small cell networks need to take advantage of both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Small cells help operators increase coverage, capacity, and services, effectively and have already proven to be vital element in mobile networks.  To better integrate licensed and unlicensed small cells, we have identified 5 fundamentals that are important to remember: Read More »

Tags: analytics, architecture, big thinkers in small cells, device, Enterprise, HetNet, mobile data, mobility, Service Provider, small cells, SON

Towards developing a Secure Architecture for the Internet of Everything, I plan to kick off a series of blogs around this pivotal topic.

In discussing security and the Internet of Everything, the first question that comes to mind is, “Which segment of “everything” is one referring to?”. A reasonable approach has been to understand the common attributes that crosses vertical segments such as Intelligent Transportation, Smart Utilities, Industrial Automation and so on. The Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) are general abstractions for the network infrastructure that links physical and virtual objects. In Cisco, we now refer to these abstractions as the Internet of Everything, IoE. The IoE describes a world where billions of objects have sensors to detect, measure and assess their status; all connected over public or private networks using standard and proprietary protocols.

Until a point in time around 2008/2009, there were more human beings in the world than devices connected to the Internet. That is no longer the case.  Read More »

Tags: analytics, architecture, internet, Internet of Everything, internet of things, IoE, IoT, ip, IPv6, M2M, Service Provider, sms