The resiliency and determination of America’s sense of justice was thrust into a spirit of rejoicing on Sunday evening May 1, 2011, when President Barack Obama addressed the world, confirming Osama bin Laden’s demise in Pakistan. While watching the breaking TV news coverage, I began to share that sense of accomplishment and joy, less for the act of neutralizing the thought leader and chief architect of 9/11 and other atrocities against Americans, and more for the fortitude and resolve demonstrated by the U.S. commander-in-chief, our military forces, and intelligence agencies. I found myself thinking of what this type of public resolve implies for the future state of our Manufacturing economy in the U.S., whose resurgence is essential to the country’s defenses, global leadership, and the health and prosperity of our citizens, along with those of other democratic nations.
Cisco’s Chet Namboodri, Global Director for Manufacturing Industry Solutions and Marketing, discusses the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC) proposals for Revitalizing American Manufacturing.
President Obama’s determination coming into office in January 2009 to recommit U.S. resources to bring justice to bin Laden, and the U.S. intelligence and military’s subsequent success bodes well as I consider his commitment to U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, infrastructure build-out and job creation articulated during the President’s January 2011 State of the Union address. During the last several quarters, I have had the privilege to present on behalf of Cisco to the Office of the President as part of the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC), a broad cross section of manufacturers, technology suppliers, manufacturing consortia, government laboratories and research universities across industry segments pulling together to recommend programs to revitalize U.S. manufacturing.
Evaluate potential providers based on their responses to these key concerns.
More and more, small businesses are moving to cloud computing, signing up with private providers that make sophisticated applications more affordable as well as setting up their own accounts with public social media sites like Facebook. The trend is confirmed by Microsoft in its global SMB Cloud Adoption Study 2011, which found that 49 percent of small businesses expect to sign up for at least one cloud service in the next three years.
Private and public clouds function in the same way: Applications are hosted on a server and accessed over the Internet. Whether you’re using a Software as a Service (SaaS) version of customer relationship management (CRM) software, creating offsite backups of your company data, or setting up a social media marketing page, you’re trusting a third-party company with information about your business and, most likely, your customers.
Mark Twain once wrote, “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.” Security policy is a lot like that. Creating a security policy is at the top of the list for anyone looking to really secure their network. But the devil is in the details.
Among the things a security policy needs to cover are:
All users
All physical and virtual devices
All access methods
All resource classifications and locations
All compliance requirements
All of the OSI layers, from the physical layer up the stack to the application layer
AND the policy needs to be applied uniformly across the entire distributed enterprise
The very first mobile call took place in 1973. It wasn’t so much a conversation as a taunt: Dr. Martin Cooper, a former general manager for Motorola, used a portable cell phone to call his chief competitor, Joel Engel, from Bell Laboratories. Engel had introduced cellular communications in 1947, but it was Cooper and Motorola who evolved the technology to the point of mobility. So what was said on that historic mobile call? “Hi Joel – guess where I’m calling from?”
How far we’ve come since then is staggering. Now, not only can we make calls from pretty much anywhere, but the devices have evolved to become powerful mini computers.
As I tweeted recently, Gartner predicts that by 2014, 90 percent of organizations will support business apps on personal devices. And as the Wall Street Journal reported just a few days ago, companies need to think through how they’re going to handle that.
The Cisco Identity Services Engine continues the relentless march on both policy definition and the all-important, yet difficult to deliver -- policy enforcement. This is a first generation product with a multi-generational pedigree granting it a maturity worth considering for many networks. We created another one of our fundamental’s explanations for this one humbly think it does a good job of explaining both what the ISE is for and what you should be able to get out of it.
Couple of great places for more information of course.
