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It’s a router. No, it’s a firewall. No, it’s unified threat management. It’s … the new Cisco ISA500.

We hear a lot lately about how many mobile devices are connecting to the internet. And, with today’s BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend, more employees are wanting to use their preferred devices. They’re also wanting flexibility with where they work. We’re in a new work world, where mobility is the name of the game, and security is the game controller that determines who will have the advantage. Enter: The new Cisco ISA500.

As a recent infographic from research and industry analyst firm Techaisle shows, 61 percent of SMBs in North America allow BYOD; and 53 percent expect productivity improvement. But for those two things to happen together successfully, there needs to be strong security in place. This becomes especially important given that we’re seeing an uptick in the number of SMBs targeted for cyberattacks and the number of employees engaging in risky behavior when accessing the web.

So when Cisco looks at these challenges, we focus on three key things: safeguarding outside threats that can bring down the network, the ability for employees to securely access information, and a simple way to manage it all. The Cisco ISA500 helps customers do exactly that, by acting as a highly sophisticated router, firewall, and unified threat management in one device. Not only did it win “Outstanding Hardware Solution” at IT Nation, it’s also getting a lot of praise from our partners.

We sat down with David Lawrence, president of Smart Technology Enablers, who talked about his views of this offering. Take a look at what he had to say.

https://youtu.be/3bSQMb0bXsc

If you’d like to learn more about Cisco small business products, please visit www.cisco.com/go/smb. And to learn more about responsive, proactive support options that Cisco Services offers to help keep your small business network running smoothly, click here.



Authors

Linda Beaton

Marketing Manager

GMP Data Center Marketing Team

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SteveGBlogBy Steve Gorretta, Product Manager, NMTG

Do you know how fast the Internet connection is coming in and out of your house?  If you are like most broadband subscribers in the US, the answer is “no.”  You probably also share the sentiment (and pain!) that regardless of how much you are paying, your ISP isn’t delivering the promised broadband speed.

These are just examples of what you’ll learn in our Bandwidth Consumption and Broadband Reliability whitepaper, published last year but now brought to life in this creative Cisco infographic which provides a visual snapshot of the challenges subscribers face with respect to the evolving connected home network.

When we conducted this research we gained insights into three main areas:   Continue reading “Challenges of the Evolving Home Network [INFOGRAPHIC]”



Authors

Jamie Lerner

Senior Vice President and General Manager

Cloud and Systems Management Technology Group

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In my previous blog I introduced the concept of Cisco Cloud Connectors, which help enhance cloud services for customers and partners, and listed the latest Cisco Cloud Connectors.

Today I am excited to share the next round of Cisco Cloud Connectors developed with third-parties and just announced at Cisco Live London! These Cisco Cloud Connectors expand further into a broad set of cloud-based applications and were developed by a growing list of third party partners. These new Cisco Cloud Connectors help address pain points in various domains such as storage, hospitality, security, VDI, identity, shipping and digital signage. Continue reading “A new wave of Cisco Cloud Connectors Further Accelerates Adoption of Cloud Services”



Authors

Rony Gotesdyner

Manager of Product Management

Cisco's Cloud Connectors

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My first blog entry from the Education World Forum (EWF) reported how the powerful opening presentations challenged this high powered conference. By the half-way mark we have been given a fascinating snapshot of the issues and opportunities facing education systems all around the world.

Two founding presentations have set the tone for much of the event: from Russell Quaglia, the US’s foremost authority on student aspirations,  on the importance of valuing student voice not only to encourage and motivate the individual learner, but also to help drive education systems; and from Andreas Schleicher of OECD on the importance of developing 21st century skills to meet the challenges of a radically changing employment market where the need for routine manual skills is rapidly disappearing, and individuals will need to change jobs much more frequently.

Continue reading “Education Systems Continue Exchange at Education World Forum in London”



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Increasingly over the past several months, I have been working with more and more retail banking clients. A common theme has emerged during these discussions that centers on video and collaboration in the branch. The top of mind question is, “how are banks using video in the branch to grow top line revenue in a very tightly regulated environment and with ever increasing downward pressure on fee revenues?”

As retail banks have slowly emerged from the global financial crisis of 2008, they are increasingly looking for ways to differentiate themselves with their products and services.  Studies show that the branch is still relevant in the eyes of the retail bank consumer, but the role the branch will play in the future is beginning to change.

Cisco’s IBSG team published a white paper on this topic, which covers the transformation that banks are currently going through. Retail banks are wrestling with moving from a multichannel environment to an omnichannel environment. The difference is, instead of offering a different experience and set of products and services across various delivery channels, they offer a more integrated and consistent experience across delivery channels. These traditional delivery channels include: branch, Internet and contact center to name a few. Currently, the mobile channel is growing in popularity and use, especially with new applications like remote deposit capture right from a mobile phone or tablet. Continue reading “The Evolution of Immersive Video in the Retail Bank Branch”



Authors

Tom Caddoo

Practice Architect

Banking, Americas Business Transformation

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Nexus 1110 Imperva-2We are ramping up another news cycle around our Nexus 1000V and cloud network services portfolio this week at Cisco live! in London. Among the updates, business security solutions vendor Imperva is demonstrating integration of its SecureSphere Web Application Firewall (WAF) into the Nexus 1000V vPath service insertion architecture. This marks the first third party product to participate in the Cisco vPath architecture, which allows virtual services to be easily inserted and chained into Cisco virtual networks and virtual overlays.

[Note: Join Cisco for a Live Announcement Webinar on Cloud Innovations on February 5: Register Here]

Regular readers of our data center and cloud blog will probably recall the importance of vPath in enabling virtual services for virtualized multi-tenant cloud environments, and for allowing policy mobility along with VM mobility. The Cisco vPath architecture currently supports our own virtual services including Virtual Security Gateway (VSG), the ASA 1000V Cloud Firewall, and virtual WAAS for WAN optimization. vPath also boosts performance of service traffic paths and orchestrates service chaining so that VM traffic is processed in a ordered chain defined by policy.

Continue reading “Nexus 1000V Expands Cloud Network Services Ecosystem with vPath Integration in the Imperva Web Application Firewall”



Authors

Gary Kinghorn

Sr Solution Marketing Manager

Network Virtualization and SDN

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Making sure your users don’t go to sleep (or worse) waiting to log-on
Hi Everyone! I am the team lead Technical Marketing Engineer for Cisco Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions on UCS and Nexus. While I have done some blogging in my time – this is my first blog for Cisco. I have been in this space for over 22 years, before “virtualization” was called that, working with published applications and published desktops (MetaFrame and early RDP.)
With the Citrix and EMC teams, I have been focused for the past few months on validating what I think is a really exciting solution – even if I say so myself. So recently not much time for blogging I am afraid.
Over the last couple of years we have seen desktop virtualization, specifically Hosted Virtual Desktops (HVD,) become increasingly more mainstream – but today we are really experiencing an upsurge of deployments – and not just pilots – but full blown multi-thousand seat deployments.
As you are probably aware the worst nightmare is that you deploy the solution and the users don’t adopt it because it doesn’t provide them the user experience they need or want.
One of the key requirements for success is an infrastructure that won’t just provide the right experience for the first few hundred users – but that will scale linearly as you grow into the many thousands.
You can rely on Cisco Validated Designs to deliver for you! We use real world test scenarios to insure that you can implement our designs in your environment and be successful.
The keys to a successful deployment of a large scale HVD environment start with:

Continue reading “Zero to 5000 Citrix VDI Users Logged-in and Working in Just 30 Minutes!”



Authors

Mike Brennan

Sr. Product Manager

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Graphics

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IoE is Here

When most people think of their early experiences with the internet, the memory comes with a sound: the scratchy noise of a dial-up modem.

What a long way we’ve come. We have gone from clumsy desktop computing to a world of mobile computing with smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Businesses can interact with customers real-time through video chats and CEOs can talk to shareholders from 20,000 feet in the air. As the capabilities of devices increase, the Internet of Things will quickly evolve into the Internet of Everything (IoE). And Cisco technology is fueling that transition, playing a big role in connecting the unconnected. Continue reading “The Internet of Everything Has Begun”



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Thanks to Altimeter Group analyst Jeremiah Owyang, today marks the third anniversary of Community Manager Appreciation Day.  While there is not a lot of available data on the job outlook for a community manager, you only need to look at the job growth for a social media manager to know the trend is still on the incline. Community managers are the connectors between the community they cultivate and the brands they represent. They are creative individuals who push the envelope in how content and information is shared with their communities. They are analytical – sifting through a multitude of data and using a plethora of social tools to assess on an almost daily basis, how people are engaging with the brand.  They are strategic thinkers who translate often complex business and technology concepts into rich and engaging content that creates meaningful dialogue. At Cisco, they are all of these things and much, much more.

A HUGE thanks to our Community Managers at Cisco globally (approximately 150 total), for continuing to move the needle and advancing the role of community management.  I’ve talked to several of them recently to get their thoughts on what it means to be a community manager at Cisco and of course, their celebratory plans for Community Manager Appreciation Day.

What does it mean to be a community manager at Cisco?

  • Thinking strategically about how and where to effectively communicate our messages, collaborating with other community managers to combine brainpower and synchronize efforts, planning a cadence of social activities for the year, and responding appropriately to open questions and comments on our social channels.
  • Listening to customers to help inform our social media strategy and how we engage with them.
  • Developing, engaging and nurturing a community of people of all different backgrounds and demographics that share one common interest: Cisco.
  • Being extremely alert, organized, creative and engaged to meet the needs of a growing community of partners and customers opting into social networks to learn more about Cisco.
  • Connecting with Cisco fans and employees globally in real-time and 24/7.

How are you celebrating Community Manager Appreciation Day?

  • Go through some social metrics reports and analyzing the effectiveness of social media tactics and performance of the social channels. Hopefully, I’ll be sipping on a cup of Chai Latte while doing that to celebrate!
  • Thanking our community on Twitter and Facebook for giving me the best job ever!
  • Thanking our Cisco Corporate social communities for allowing me to have a role at Cisco that is ever-changing, exciting and challenging all at once.
  • Thanking our Cisco fans for their continual support positive engagement!

  Continue reading “#CMAD: How Cisco is Defining the Role of a Community Manager”



Authors

Autumn Truong

No Longer with Cisco