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

The Cisco and Microsoft joint Cross-Animal Technology Project, a well-established player in the field of multi-species collaborative initiatives, is pleased to introduce its next project: a revolution in High Performance Computing (HPC): LOLCODE language bindings for the Message Passing Interface (MPI).

CATP believes that cats are natural predatory programmers.  Who better to take advantage of all the world’s spare, unused computing cycles than cats?  They’re at home when we’re not.  They’re clever, they can problem-solve, and they have lots of free time on their… paws.

Read More »

Tags: HPC, IoE, LOLCODE, mpi

Every Friday, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco partner news and stories of the week, as well as point you to important Cisco-related content you may have missed along the way. Let’s have it.

Off The Top

Sherri Liebo has been named Vice President, Global Partner Marketing, overseeing Cisco’s Strategic Partner Marketing, Channel Programs, Services Partner Marketing and Strategic Partner Communications teams. Bruce Klein, senior vice president, Worldwide Partner Organization, talked about Sherri’s appointment here on the Channels blog and why this is such an important role at Cisco. Channelnomics, CRN and Channel Partners were among the first press to cover it on Friday.

CCNA Redesigned

As you may have seen, Cisco redesigned the CCNA Routing and Switching certification with new training and curricula. It’s part of an overall effort to better align Cisco’s certifications to the demands of an IT industry undergoing paradigm shifts like the Internet of Everything phenomenon we’ve been talking about for a while now. It’s also a way to better train engineers for the types of dedicated, segment-specific jobs that are going to be in high demand over the next few years.

Read More »

Tags: CCNA, Cisco, IoE, partner, Sherri Liebo, Smart Solutions, SolveDirect, Weekly Rewind

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.

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

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. Attackers used a method commonly referred to as “water-holing,” where they compromise a legitimate site commonly visited by employees of their target organizations. Using zero-day vulnerabilities and malicious code that change at a rapid rate, these attacks highlight the need to consistently enhance traditional defenses based on signatures or reputation with global and local context analysis.

This episode underscores how important security is in a more mobile, more connected world—attackers are paying attention, using these industry trends to create targeted and sophisticated attacks that can bypass traditional defenses. The Cisco 2013 Annual Security Report found that Android Malware grew 2,577 percent in 2012 alone. The Internet of Everything is taking shape and the number of online connections is soaring. According to Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013, 30 billion things will be connected by 2020.

Read More »

Tags: attackers, byod, Cisco Security, Cisco Security Intelligence Operations, Internet of Everything, IoE, malware, Mike Fuhrman, mobile, mobile malware, security, sio, zero-day vulnerability