In the past few years a number of paradigm shifts have made policy-based networking essential to effective enterprise IT management. Some of these shifts include an increased reliance on virtualization and the cloud; the “consumerization” of business networks that has occurred with the popularity of devices such as tablets and smartphones; and the rapid adoption of video in business communications. By applying appropriate policies within the network, IT managers can do a better job of meeting users’ expectations and become business enablers.

We believe our message of One Policy, One Management and One Network has been recognized in the recent Gartner 2012 Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure Magic Quadrant, where Cisco has been positioned as a leader.

Foundational to Cisco’s One Policy strategy is the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), which enables organizations to create and deploy unified policy to address the need for BYOD compliance. ISE enables one consistent policy across the entire enterprise, as well as enforcement by correlating a unique combination of contextual information including user, device, location and time.

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Tags: bring your own device, byod, Gartner, gartner MQ, one policy, policy, security, unified access, wired and wireless

Gartner has released their 2012 Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure Magic Quadrant.  Cisco is recognized as a leader in this highly anticipated publication.

Our industry is going through dramatic changes. The rapid growth of cloud, mobility and business collaborations has put more and more pressure on the network. Disparate wired and wireless networks architected and managed separately are no longer sufficient to meet the new demand. This is the first time that Gartner covers wired and wireless LAN infrastructure together in one Magic Quadrant. It is a clear sign that the time has come to evolve the network infrastructure to address the rapid growth of cloud, mobility and business collaborations with a unified approach.
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Tags: Gartner, infrastructure, LAN, Magic Quadrant, management, mobility, Netowrking, policy, security, switching, unified access, wired, wireless

Ready or not, governments, healthcare providers, and schools are going mobile. If your workforce isn’t mobile yet, it soon will be: by 2013, 80 percent of businesses will support a mobile workforce (one that specifically relies on tablet technology), according to Gartner.

As I mentioned before, mobile employees will depend on telepresence and video collaboration tools to optimize their work experiences: these technologies do a wonderful job of filling the gap in personal interaction that can occur when an entire office works outside of the actual office.

But telepresence and video are only as good as the networks that support them.

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Tags: Gartner, medianet, mobile, mobile employees, Tablets, TelePresence

You can’t turn around without seeing new stats on the growth of cloud adoption. (One of our favorites stats states that by the year 2015, 50% of all CIOs expect to operate the majority of their applications and infrastructures via the cloud.)

While growth is imminent, many customers are still wary and concerned about risk. To both help partners better prepare for growth and help address customer concerns, we launched the Cloud Partner Program with three tracks: Cloud Builder, Cloud Provider, and Cloud Services Reseller.

On the heels of that news, Gartner released a report titled “Cloud Adoption at Risk without Big Channel Investment.” We’ve summarized a few of the key findings and recommendations for partners:

• Through 2015, cloud service brokerage will represent the single largest revenue growth opportunity in cloud computing.
• The channel has an opportunity to play a significant role in aggregation and brokerage services. The challenges facing enterprises building private cloud services or leveraging public clouds are significantly more complicated than just technology.

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Tags: channel, CIO, Cisco, cloud, Cloud Builder, cloud provider, cloud services reseller, Gartner, global, partner

Our industry certainly loves its buzzwords.  For a while, everything was about “virtualized this” and “virtualized that” in the data center.  Then there is a current love affair with “cloud”.  It seems the next hot buzzword might turn out to be fabric.

For Cisco, “fabric” in the data center has defined our data center strategy and vision for the last three years.  With the introduction of the Cisco Nexus family in January 2008, we also announced the concept of Unified Fabric as a fundamental building block for the data center.  We offered the simple vision of a single fabric to link all the network, compute and storage resources in a data center as a mechanism to not only reduce TCO but also improve agility and flexibility.  Since then, we have released a steady flow of products and technologies to deliver on the promise of Cisco Unified Fabric by simplifying the infrastructure with convergence, improving its ability to handle virtual and physical scale and increasing the intelligence of the fabric to increase agility and lower operating costs.

While initially hesitant, customers and industry experts are beginning to see the merits of Cisco’s vision, especially in the age of virtualization and cloud.  Meanwhile, other vendors in the marketplace are left to play catch-up.  In a November 4, 2010 independent report titled “Q&A: Networking Landscape, Q4 2010” Forrester Research, Inc. commented that:

“To Cisco’s credit, it saw the data center evolution way before any other networking vendor and started to build a set of products and solutions directed at a converged and virtual world.”- Forrester Research, Inc.

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Tags: cloud, data center, forrester, Gartner, nexus, Unified Fabric, virtualization