Many of us are at Interop New York this week and we’re very excited. In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg runs the entire city from an iPad.  Tablets and smartphones enable new and innovative ways to engage employees, guests and customers; the technology tantalizes with the promise of business transformation. More organizations are allowing mobile and personal devices for work use. But there are also many challenges for IT during these technology transitions.  IT is struggling to keep up with the latest mobility trends.

As you know, we first launched Cisco Unified Access about 3 months ago at Cisco Live in San Diego.  Now at Interop New York, we are announcing a number of significant enhancements to the Cisco Unified Access solutions. Our enhanced solution enables IT to spend less time running the network and more time collaborating and innovating with the lines of business.  If IT organizations want to have a seat at the table and impact the business, a strong and agile IT platform is required, this becomes a business differentiator and will enable business transformation.

This is what Cisco Unified Access is all about -- One Policy, One Management, One Network, enabling the IT platform to discover what is possible with the business.

Read the full article at Cisco Unified Access Shines at Interop New York.

Tags: access points, Catalyst switching, Cisco Unified Access, interop, Interop New York, mobility, network management, networking, policy, wireless, wireless LAN controller

By Howard Baldwin, Contributing Columnist

At a time in the United States when political opinions seem to fly to the extremes, with no middle ground, it’s no surprise that the FCC’s recent report on broadband deployment evokes a similarly polarized reaction.

Of the five commissioners who authored the report, three (including chairman Julius Genachowski) seem to believe that 95% penetration of fixed broadband by any technology (see graphic) is cause for alarm, citing the lack of broadband in rural areas and tribal lands. Two of the three commissioners filed dissents to the conclusions of the report.

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Tags: broadband, FCC, infrastructure, policy, social and economic development

 Millions consumers around the globe are buying smartphones, tablets, and other advanced mobile devices loaded with features and apps that can be used for business as well as for their own personal communication and entertainment needs. Many of these people have started taking these devices to work and integrating them into their daily workflow. This trend is often called “bring your own device,” or BYOD.

Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) wanted to know how prevalent BYOD is, and how corporate IT departments are handling these new devices in terms of support, network access, and security. In the spring of 2012, we surveyed 600 IT decision makers in U.S. enterprises, and then expanded our study in the summer of 2012 to include 4,900 IT decision makers in midsize companies and enterprises – in a total of nine countries.

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Tags: bring your own device, byod, Cisco, desktop virtualization, employee-owned devices, IBSG, innovation, mobile devices, policy, Smartphones, survey, Tablets

• 100% IT is struggling to keep up with mobility trends
• Mobile threats have doubled from 2010 to 2011
• Around four in ten American users are likely to click on an unsafe link

And with all of these changing dynamics, user expectations continue to rise while the risk of security vulnerabilities rises. Yet, one of the expectations is a demand for safe access to essential business productivity and collaboration applications from anywhere, on any device (personal or organization acquisition), along with a consistent experience across multiple device types. This is the new workspace.

So, how do recent data center security enhancements play an important role in an ever more mobile and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) reality?  The reality of the ever-increasing proliferation of devices for each user gives rise to a need for increased scalability and security in the data center even more evident. Users who bring their own device expect a good experience accessing the applications that reside in the data center.  IT wants to ensure that applications delivered from the data center or internally are appropriately accessed and protected from any malicious actions. Securing a mobile and BYOD environment does not simply start at the endpoint; it must take an architectural approach from endpoint traffic traversing through the network to the data center.  Cisco takes a comprehensive approach to securing applications, content, and devices delivered to any workspace, in any location, based on type and posture, location and time, and user’s role—ensuring an uncompromised user experience and giving your employees the freedom to be highly productive.

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Tags: bring your own device, byod, ISE, mobile threats, policy

In this last part of this series I will discuss the top customer priority of visibility.  Cisco offers customers the ability to gain insight into what’s happening in their network and, at the same time, maintain compliance and business operations.

But before we dive into that let’s do a recap of part two of our series on Cisco’s Secure Data Center Strategy on threat defense. In summary, Cisco understands that to prevent threats both internally and externally it’s not a permit or deny of data, but rather that data needs deeper inspection. Cisco offers two leading platforms that work with the ASA 5585-X Series Adaptive Security Appliance to protect the data center and they are the new IPS 4500 Series Sensor platform for high data rate environments and the ASA CX Context Aware Security for application control.  To learn more go to part 2 here.

As customers move from the physical to virtual to cloud data centers, a challenge heard over is over is that they desire to maintain their compliance, security, and policies across these varying instantiations of their data center. In other words, they want to same controls in the physical world present in the virtual – one policy, one set of security capabilities.  This will maintain compliance, overall security and ease business operations.

By offering better visibility into users, their devices, applications and access controls this not only helps with maintaining compliance but also deal with the threat defense requirements in our overall data center.  Cisco’s visibility tools gives our customers the insight they need to make decisions about who gets access to what kinds of information, where segmentation is needed, what are the boundaries in your data center, whether these boundaries are physical or virtual and the ability to do the right level of policy orchestration to maintain compliance and the overall security posture.  These tools have been grouped into three key areas: management and reporting, insights, and policy orchestration.

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Tags: ASA-CX, Cisco ASA, cisco firewall, Cisco Security, cisco sio, Cisco UCS, cloud, data center, data center security, DC, firewall, Identity Services Engine, intrusion prevention, IPS, ISE, it security, netflow, network security, pci-dss, policy, security, server, threat defense, TrustSec, virtual, virtualization, VMDC