Welcome to the Cisco Sizzle! Each month, we’re rounding up the best of the best from across our social media channels for your reading pleasure. From the most read blog posts to the top engaging content on Facebook or LinkedIn, catch up on things you might have missed, or on the articles you just want to see again, all in one place.

Let’s take a look back at the top content from March…

Tomorrow Starts Here
Explore how the Internet of Everything will change the way we work, live, play and learn.

Connected World Technology Report
Calling all IT professionals! Over two thirds of the IT managers agree that Big Data will be a strategic priority for their companies in 2013 and over the next five years as well. Do you agree? Is Big Data a strategic priority for your company?

Cisco on Fortune’s Most Admired
Once again, Cisco is honored to be on Fortune Magazine’s “World’s Most Admired Companies” List. Fortune tells us that the Most Admired list is the “definitive report card on corporate reputations.” Congratulations to our employees, and thanks to Fortune for the honor!

Understanding the Different Types of Wireless Routers
If your small business has grown and your workforce has become more mobile, you may be considering adding wireless to your network. Cisco explains the basics so you can identify which wireless router best fits your needs.

TeleWork Week
If you telecommuted for a week, how much time do you think you would save?

Network Madness
Don’t worry network managers; we’ve got you covered. Find out about Cisco’s solutions to Network Madness.

Check out the Cisco Storify feed for even more great content!

Tags: Big Data, CCWTR, Cisco Connected World Technology Report, collaboration, connected solutions, data in motion, Fortune, government, innovation, Internet of Everything, IoE, IT, mobility, Most Admired, networking, reputation, security, small business, telework week, Tomorrow Starts Here, wireless network, wireless router

Protecting Your Business in an “Any to Any” World

Innovation never stops in the mobile world, and that rule applies to security threats as well. Network attacks are becoming more sophisticated and even high-tech businesses with the most advanced security may find themselves in the crosshairs as we shift to more devices and anywhere access.

Just a few weeks ago, multiple leading social networking and large enterprises were hit with an attack when their employees visited a known and trusted website focused on mobile application development. Read More »

Tags: byod, Internet of Everything, IoE, mobility, security, unified access, wired, wireless

A doctor in California diagnosing a patient in Africa. An Ohio woman on vacation accessing her medical records from an emergency room in London. A patient’s vital signs being monitored remotely from a hospital on the other side of town. These are all scenarios that just years ago seemed impossible… but could be made possible by Cisco.

In life, I’m consistently amazed by the astonishing change and progress that can occur in the short span of just one year. In technology, it moves even more quickly. Walking into the 2013 HIMSS conference in New Orleans, it was obvious to me that pace of change in healthcare is accelerating dramatically. The sheer size of the event and the number of companies that attended this year’s conference, each demonstrating innovative products, technologies, or methodologies to connect healthcare providers and patients was astonishing. Read More »

Tags: healthcare, healthpresence, himss, Internet of Everything, internet of things, IoE, IoT

We’re 13 years into the new millennium and we still don’t have flying cars, house cleaning robot maids or refrigerators that talk back to us.  Not everything predicted for our Jetson-like future came true — or maybe not as quickly as expected.  Yet, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.   Our industry talked about triple play voice, video and data services for more than a decade.  Today we watch videos or TV on smart phones, tablets, PCs and television sets while texting friends, playing games or surfing simultaneously on any number of devices from anywhere.   Technology has a way of catching up to our vision of the future.  So don’t bet against innovation.

The next big thing is the Internet of Everything (IoE).  It’s one part evolution and one part revolution.   Network traffic is migrating from people-to-people communication to people-to-things.  The network shift to machine-to-machine (M2M) or Read More »

Tags: Cisco ONE, Cisco Open Network Environment, Internet of Everything, Service Provider, software defined network

There’s an increasing drumbeat of news about the “Internet of Everything” (IoE)— the confluence of people, process, data, and things that makes networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before.

IoE comprises the ubiquitous ways that billions of people and numerous devices on the Internet communicate and report on their status and location. This covers everything from the location of your smartphone, to where a package might be, to the rate of your pulse or your arrival on a street corner, to the condition of a highway.

The Internet of Everything isn’t way off in the future. Today, the number of physical devices connected to the Internet is already six times the number of people on the Internet, even though there are 2 billion of those people. By 2020, there will be 50 billion connected devices.

These devices will come to dominate the “cloud.” Of course, the complexity of a global system that connects all these devices and people is mind-boggling. This global system has the potential for unpredictable and perhaps disastrous behavior. That alone should get the attention of public leaders.

Most of the advertising and news on this topic has focused on how corporations can use the Internet of Everything. Surely they can. Just think of any company that ships things and needs to know the condition of the shipped items and their locations.

But if you look at the “things” there are in the world and where they are, you will realize that companies are usually responsible only for their own office and manufacturing space (for the majority of companies, this represents millions of square feet at most).

By contrast, state and local governments are uniquely responsible for what goes on in a particular territory, which can be many tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of square miles. Eventually, all this territory will be covered by sensors, which will greatly outnumber everything else on the Internet. (Less often noted is that things connected to the Internet can communicate with each other without human intervention. We’ve only begun to think about the practical and fundamental issues this phenomenon will raise.)

On a practical level, people will need to manage this not through on-off switches or gauges, but through policies that can be operated at the same speed as the machines—not at the slow speed of human awareness and decision making.

The benefits for government of the Internet of Everything can be striking. Consider some examples:

• Philips and Cisco are working to connect streetlights to the Internet. Connected public lighting allows cities, for example, to turn on or brighten streetlights automatically based on someone’s approach, enhancing public safety and maximizing energy efficiency.

• A bridge whose sensors detect potential cracks in load-bearing columns can ask a streetlight to turn red to stop traffic, and also tell the police dispatch system to send a couple of police cars to redirect traffic.

• Streets “observe” that a parking spot is not being used and make that information available to residents.

• Minor sewer lines report whether they are getting backed up before this becomes a problem for the main trunks, potentially causing a toxic spill into a major river or lake.

• Real-time knowledge of vehicle locations enables dynamic control of traffic, optimizing traffic flow.

And these examples—which primarily focus on the physical infrastructure of states, counties, and cities—are only the beginning. Further into the future, the Internet of Everything holds the promise of government being able to provide much more cost-effective human services and to create a whole new urban experience.

It’s time for government leaders to start focusing on the Internet of Everything as a policy concern, and as a tool for managing what goes on in their territory.

Stay tuned to the Cisco Government blog for the next installment of the cloud for local government blog series or click here to register and reserve your copy of the complete compilation of the blog series, including this blog as well as a variety of cloud resources, which will be available in May.

To read this in Spanish, click here.  For Portuguese, click here.

Tags: Cisco, cloud, Connected, devices, IBSG, Internet of Everything, Internet of Things (IoT), IoE, local government, state government