If you happened to have your Thanksgiving meal last week with a person of Greek heritage, you may have heard them toast “Yia mas”, that literally means “to our health”. And that is exactly what I am thankful for each day, my family’s health.

I am also thankful for the health of our wireless business, which is going great thanks to professionals such as doctors, and nurses that want to want to use their personal devices (smartphones and tablets) at work.

At Cisco we have long been talking about how we enable this proliferation of devices in the workplace and how we make it easier for IT to onboard and troubleshoot these “un-managed” devices. We also provide a robust wireless infrastructure that enables these professionals by providing the best possible mobile experience. But the trend of personal devices in the workplace does pose a valid concern: “As more and more doctors start using their personal iPads at work, will my patient data be secure?”

Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to look at some data over the long weekend to better understand how healthcare data breaches occur. This is by no means a scientific analysis, I just crunched some data I downloaded from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website (hss.gov), so the findings are not conclusive, but rather indicative of what is happening. The data represents HIPAA breaches of 500 or more records per incident over the past 2-year period.

Here is what the data says: Read More »

Tags: 802.11n, compliance, doctors, healthcare, HIPAA, iPad, mobile devices, security, tablet, wireless

At Interop New York last month, Cisco’s Sujai Hajela, VP/GM of Wireless Networking Business Unit, said “people are falling in love with their mobile devices,” during his keynote. He was right. People are so in love with their mobile devices that they’ll choose mobile device flexibility over salary.

Consider this. According to the second chapter of the 2011 Cisco Connected World Technology Report, one in three college students and young employees under the age of 30 would prioritize device flexibility and social media freedom over salary in accepting a job offer. In fact, 40 percent of college students and 45 percent of young employees said they would accept a lower-paying job that had more device flexibility and social media access, than a higher-paying job with less flexibility. Wow!

People are so in love and attached to their mobile devices that half of college students and young employees said they would rather lose their wallet or purse than their mobile device, according to the study. And their mobile devices are multiplying – 77 percent of employees have multiple devices and one in three employees globally uses at least three devices for work.

Their attachment to their mobile devices goes a step further. More than half of college students and young employees want to use their own devices to access corporate networks, and two in five consider it a critical function of their job to be able to connect to the network from any location at any time.

So, what does this mean for businesses? People will want to continue their love affair with their mobile devices at work, so it’s better to be prepared to support employee-owned devices as the “bring your own device” trend is only becoming more prevalent.

Tags: college sutdents, employees, mobile devices, social media, wi-fi, wifi, wireless, wireless LAN, wireless network, wlan, young professionals

Okay, this may sound like gibberish. But I’m sure that many of you know what I mean. Just to be clear, let me put the title in plain English: Mobile Device Management (MDM) is not the only approach to help secure a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environment.

Read More »

Tags: bring your own device, byod, MDM, Mobile Device Management, mobile devices, SecureX, security

It is no longer a question of “if” your organization will face the new reality of mobile device proliferation, just an ever closer “how soon.” Users expect the network to enable trends like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and they aren’t just using smartphones and tablets to be more productive, they are falling in love with them. For businesses, simply allowing access isn’t the answer. It’s a question of relevant, secure access across the entire network, while protecting corporate assets and delivering an optimal user experience. Cisco focuses on exactly that -- how to enable a simple and secure mobility experience, with a consistent end-to-end architecture across wired, wireless and VPN access.

As a cornerstone of this wired-wireless access architecture, the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) has already been helping customers like Whittier Union High School, San Antonio Water System and BlueWater Communications Group apply consistent security across the entire network through a centralized, single policy source.

Whittier Union High School District, a California high school district serving more than 13,600 students, was facing the challenge of mobile devices. Both faculty and students were bringing their personal devices on campus, many for educational apps and tools.

“It’s becoming increasingly critical to provide employees, students, and visitors access to our network and extensive educational resources given the growing expectations of our tech-savvy population,” stated Karen Yeh, Director of Information Technology, Whittier Union High School District.

Whittier needed a way to apply differentiated policy across their student and staff populations, somehow managing access for both personal and corporate devices, all without increasing IT resources. Karen called Cisco, and two weeks later her team was deploying the Cisco ISE, implementing a single point of security policy for their networks across wired, wireless and VPN. Considering that Richard Nixon, the 37^th president of the US went to Whittier High School, the flexible network access enabled by Cisco ISE may be empowering the next generation of leaders, scientist or artists. But, mobile devices aren’t confined to education. San Antonio Water System, a public utility owned by the city of San Antonio, is seeing surprisingly similar issues.

Read More »

Tags: 802.11n, 802.1x, byod, Identity Services Engine, ISE, mobile devices, mobility, network management, policy, security, Smartphones, Tablets, vpn, wi-fi, wifi, wireless, wireless LAN, wlan

Collaboration has always been an important factor for successful businesses. Heck, it’s an important factor for successful relationships, conversations, parking-lot navigation. Wherever more than one person is involved in a process of any sort, collaboration is a must for that process to succeed. 

Collaboration, plain and simple.

So (don’t tell my manager this…), it was initially a bit funny to me that we would have a “Collaboration architecture.”  I got the whole Data Center thing – a data center is and always has been a big ol’ box of technology. But to me, collaboration was always a human interaction, relationship, agreement to cooperate. Maybe it’s all of the organic vegetables and driving a hybrid that kept me resistant to considering collaboration as a technology architecture. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Cius, Cisco Jabber, Cisco Quad, collaboration, device independence, mobile devices, Post-PC Era, workplace mobility