Don’t be the Next Victim
Even as the latest breach headline fades away, we all know there is another waiting in the wings (read Part I of my blog). How can organizations protect themselves? There is no panacea for securing a payment environment, and implementing advanced technology alone will not make an organization compliant with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS). The PCI DSS provides a solid foundation for a security strategy that covers payment and other types of data, but overall security does not begin and end with PCI compliance. Therefore, an organization’s security strategy should employ best practices and an architecture that will not only facilitate PCI compliance, but also help secure the cardholder environment, prevent identity theft, reliably protect brand image and assets, mitigate financial risk, and provide a secure foundation for new business services.
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Tags: Cisco, data breach, data loss, data loss credit card, design, pci, PCI Compliance, pci-dss
For this week’s Data Center Deconstructed we’re setting the Wayback machine to 1998, when Cisco opened a new engineering Data Center at its headquarters in San Jose, California.
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Tags: Cisco, coc-data-center, data center, datacenterdeconstructed, design, legacy, WABAC, wayback machine
I realized a few years ago that all Data Center challenges can be solved with the sufficient application of money.
Need more computing capability? Buy new hardware. Struggling with hot spots? Purchase supplemental cooling infrastructure. Don’t have enough physical space? Pay to expand the Data Center or lease additional space.
More performance means greater cost, though. Some energy saving technologies buck that trend when compared to conventional facilities, but generally the more capability you want from a Data Center the more it will cost to build and operate.
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Tags: capital costs, Cisco, coc-data-center, cost per square foot, data center, datacenterdeconstructed, design, IT

Chillin'
Strong title perhaps…but thats the kind of over the top messaging I have been practicing now that I am technically on a marketing team. Today is the big day -- all the hard work of a great many people that spent the last several years dreaming, designing and then building what appears to me as the most advanced, eco-friendly data center as yet conceived…(there I go again). Lots to promote here so bear with me -- first and foremost -- be sure and tune in today as they stream the grand opening event featuring our own Rebecca Jacoby and John Manville -- you can catch it live on the uStream channel: http://www.ustream.tv/ciscotv from 2:30 to 3:15 Central Time. (cause its in Texas!). Jimmy Ray recently penned a nice run down of our own recent visit to this high impact low profile data center in his blog -- I thought I would share a couple of my favorite things.
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Tags: data center, design, virtualization
You’ve probably noticed the new product category pages on Cisco.com, which we updated last week. That’s pages like the ones for Switches, Routers, Voice and Unified Communication, Security, Wireless and about a dozen others.
We’ve made a number of new enhancements (see below), and one of the ones I like the best is how we’ve begun to link directly to specific relevant areas that support the product.
Support: If you click on the Support button, it expands out to reveal links that do directly to relevant downloads, troubleshooting and other information that support the products in this category (and of course, we also link from specific product pages — which is an extremely handy way to jump to the correct place).

Follow Us: Relevant community links, twitter feeds, podcasts, blogs, etc are grouped together under the Follow Us button. This is the first time we’ve consistently grouped this information together by category, and you may be surprised at the rich information available via social feeds by product category.

Here’s a recap of additional enhancements, which I mentioned on the blog last week:
1. Faster performance load time. The pages are faster to load, thanks to sleeker pages.
2. Clearer linking to the “All products” listing. It’s easier to get to the full list of all products in a category, thanks to more obvious links that go directly.

3. Consistent treatment for Contact Us and related information.
4. Consistent navigation to related Communities, Support, How to Buy functions, as shown above.
5. Clearer linkages to reference designs and other important functions.
6. Elevated technology and business benefits areas – so you don’t have to go hunting for them.
7. More ROI information, and in more obvious places.
8. Better information about services and solutions related to product areas.
9. Consistent routes to segments/size-specific views of products where it applies (e.g. small business).
10. Removing the left nav at this top level, which confused new customers (you can more easily move using the flydown megamenus at the top)
11. Improved writing – We rewrote some things that… well to be honest, were confusing.
12. Ongoing improvements–We’ll be making additional improvements based on your feedback, and what we see in site metrics.
Let us know what you think.
Tags: cisco.com, design, webexperience