It’s been over ten years since my last visit to the beautiful city of Washington D.C. It’s always great to visit all my favorite monuments and historical landmarks such as the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. I wish I could tell you more about my wonderful dinners at the Old Ebbitt Grill or Brassaire Beck; but onto more important things.
As I walk through downtown, looking around, I was thinking to myself, how much things have changed since my last visit. Gone are the days of disposable cameras, brochures and maps -- everyone around me is using a smart phone to take photos, launching Google maps to find the Smithsonian, or scanning QR codes at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum to view additional factoids as they were walking about the museum. Everything is going mobile!
I’m here this week to attend the 12th semi-annual Telework Exchange Fall Town Hall meeting – “Mobility in the Fast Lane” focused on mobile IT and the mobile workforce. While I was here, my colleagues and I had the utmost pleasure to interview 9 government and industry leaders discussing topics such as security, standards, technologies and telework benefits and challenges within their agencies. It was fascinating to hear from these leaders how they are working in different ways to transform their agencies to better serve the American people, grow their workforce and create a balanced work-life environment for their employees. Read More »
The explosion of mobile devices has changed the way we work, live, and play. Gone are the days of being tethered to PC’s in our home offices or desktops at work. We can now literally take our job on the road and access our desktops and applications from anywhere, anyplace, anytime.
On the road again..
Two years ago, I was a part–time contractor at Cisco and thought it was pretty cool to have the choice to telework and perform my job remotely from any location. With a trusty laptop running my virtual desktop, I was able to be mobile, do my job as a Cisco employee with meetings via WebEx, meet other clients and, take my son to his baseball practices -- all with the freedom and flexibility of work life balance Cisco provides.
Desktop virtualization moves data, voice, and video productivity applications now used on phones and computers onto servers in the data center. This creates a nimble virtual workspace for any agency user who can access their virtual desktop they choose from any device they bring or own in support of their agency’s policy of BYOD.
The 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey, which includes participants from more than 1,300 IT decision makers in 13 countries, was commissioned to measure the adoption of cloud services by IT professionals globally, while examining potential challenges to their cloud migrations. Below, we take a deeper look at some of the positive, negative, and strange aspects to come out of the survey.
On the positive side, 73% of respondents felt they have enough information to begin their private or public cloud deployments. This leaves 27% who claim to feel more knowledgeable about how to play Angry Birds than the steps needed to migrate their company to the cloud. While Angry Birds is a fun game to play, this wan’t the strangest result from this research. Read More »
Co-written by Bryan Mobley, Director, IBSG Service Provider
The business world’s rise to the cloud has been dramatic and increasingly rapid. From an initial attitude of vague interest mixed with trepidation, organizations have begun to embrace the transition in a big way. Some are already realizing the expansive benefits in costs, efficiency, and innovation that come with this game-changing technology.
To keep with the pulse of cloud migration, Cisco initiated a series of roundtable discussions two years ago. The philosophy of each meeting was to bring together 10 to 20 decision makers from a variety of enterprises, midsized businesses, and government agencies. So far, we’ve held 15 of these discussions across North America. In addition to providing a unique opportunity to share our thought leadership, these sessions provide an ideal forum for hearing our customers’ thoughts on cloud: the benefits, the inhibitors, and even a few war stories. In the end, however, it is the advantages of cloud that spark the most contagious conversations.
Here are some of the key trends that have emerged from two years of discussions:
During a recent Desktop Virtualization Webcast titled VDI with Unified Communications: What Architects Need to Know, one of the key takeaways was that Unified Communications (UC) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) teams need to work together and look at the larger user environment in which they are delivering the IT services. When the audience was asked how many of them were collaborating with their UC teams, 53% said they were currently engaging with their organization’s UC teams in their desktop virtualization projects.
Of course, this may be a biased sample, since the survey is of the webcast attendees, which mainly include IT professionals who are interested in the intersection of VDI and UC. However, I believe this is a sign of a growing trend in enterprise IT.
