Year: 2013

December 18, 2013 3 Comments
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Transforming Child Safety through Mobility

How fascinating is it that in today’s world, a parent can connect to an office network and still remain linked to a child via mobile device?

I recently came across a New York Times article that discussed how mobility is transforming our daily lives and the safety of ourChild Safety blog image loved ones. According to the article, new innovations such as Filip Technologies’ watch and Trax, can help monitor the whereabouts of young children and pets.

As the growth of mobility enables more wearable devices and applications that include GPS and Wi-Fi features, it is becoming increasingly easier for us to remotely monitor our children’s safety while managing daily tasks. Any parent would consider this a win-win.

In light of the capabilities of this type of technology, Gartner predicts that wearable electronics will be a $10 billion dollar industry. There is significant value at stake for organizations that can successfully respond to our rapidly changing mobile landscape by bridging enterprise and service provider networks through an architectural approach to mobility.

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Sheila Jordan

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Beware: Insider Threats Getting Worse

Most recently ESG/Vormetric came out with a threat report that highlighted the increase in insider threats & the significance to augment perimeter and host-based security. The rationale behind the increase was that more people are accessing the network, increase cloud and network traffic are making it difficult to isolate the problem.

Almost 50% of the organizations believe they are vulnerable to insider attacks and have or plan to invest dollars.

This is alarming!

The top methods noted for these insider threat vulnerabilities were abuse of access by privileged users, contractors, and other employees. Security professionals are finding it quite difficult to monitor the users, traffic, ports, etc to identify and mitigate insider threats. They must glean this information from multiple sources and many times need to translate the data. For example, “whose IP address is this and why is Mary from finance, who is supposed to be on vacation, downloading data from the payroll server?” This process slows the resolution time. The criticality of this type of contextual information is enormous to remediate quickly.

Security needs to be pervasive and consistent to manage these inside threats—so how does one do this? Integrate security into your infrastructure (wireless, wired, VPN)! Once security is woven into your infrastructure it provides the visibility and clarity to respond in a timely manner with a high degree of efficacy and is not dependent on distinct and isolated ingress points.

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Kathy Trahan

Senior Security Solutions Marketing Manager

Global Marketing Corporate Communications

December 17, 2013 Leave a Comment
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Digital Disruptors and the Future of Consulting

In my role as leader of the Analytics Practice for Cisco® Consulting Services, I often meet with clients who remind me of how the nature of consulting is changing. Traditionally, a consultant’s value and relevance to the customer has been derived from his or her business background and knowledge of specific industries or areas of expertise. The consultant comes in and takes a look at the client’s critical business issues, then makes top-down recommendations based on his or her specialized business experience.

This traditional model is being challenged by what I call “digital disruptors”—consultants whose credibility comes not just from their past experience, but from their ability to extract value and insight based on data that is gathered at the operational base of the organization: the network. This bottom-up approach is turning the consulting industry on its head—driven by data gathered on the network and turned into business insights by analytics.

Consider, for example, a major enterprise that has made a large investment in infrastructure for video collaboration. The company’s leaders want to see what kind of value they are getting back from their investment in order to evaluate further investment in collaboration. Cisco Consulting can help this customer not only because of our industry expertise, or even because of our knowledge of video collaboration technology—but because we can take an analytics-based, digital-disruption approach to the customer’s challenges. The key is our ability to tap into the video infrastructure itself, combine network and other types of data, and give the client a view of how the infrastructure is being utilized.

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Nicola Villa

Managing Director, Global Analytics Practice

Cisco Consulting Services

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Use SDN Strategically – and NOT as a “Band Aid”

hammer nut

The other week I attended the “Software Defined Networking 2013” conference in London.  This is a UK-based event for the discussion of SDN, OpenFlow and Network Virtualisation Solutions from a strategic perspective.  There were quite a few interesting perspective s I picked up at this conference.  In particular, the conference for me reinforced the potential of SDN – but if you apply it to the wrong problem, you may not get the return you hope for!

Top of mind for me, then, coming out of this conference was a demo of “What SDN Can Do For You” from one of our competitors.  At best, the phrase “using a sledge hammer to crack a nut” comes to mind.

The demo came from our friends in Palo Alto, who once (boldly but incorrectly!) predicted  that “Cisco UCS would be dead a year after launch”. They gave a SDN-focused demo that, when I “peeled back the onion”, didn’t demonstrate a compelling SDN use case.  Rather, it convinced me that if you have this particular problem as illustrated in their demo, you don’t need SDN: you need a new vendor!

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Stephen Speirs

No Longer at Cisco

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Feeding the Children: Cisco’s Global Hunger Relief Campaign in India

Rohini KamathThis post was written by Rohini Kamath, who works for Cisco’s Community Relations team in Bangalore, India, helping employees give back to society.

As we inch closer to the final week of Cisco’s signature fundraising campaign, the Global Hunger Relief Campaign, we look back and feel proud about the 150,000 children we have fed over the last 6 years through our exclusive nongovernmental organization (NGO) partner Akshaya Patra Foundation.

Akshaya Patra, one of the largest mid-day meal programs in the world, serves meals across 10,000 schools in India. The Global Hunger Relief Campaign this year aims to fundraise to benefit 40,000 children for an entire year. To add momentum to the effort, the Cisco HR team in India organized a marathon in support of the campaign. With the mission of “achieving miles for smiles,” over 300 employees participated.

Food packages that Cisco employees put together are delivered to students at a government-run school.
Food packages that Cisco employees put together are delivered to students at a government-run school

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Alexis Raymond

Senior Manager

Chief Sustainability Office

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Predictions 2014: Wager on the Internet of Everything

You heard it first here: “In 2014, the Internet of Everything (IoE) will accelerate the growth of manufacturing industries to outpace overall U.S. GDP growth by >3x.”

As my colleague Jim Grubb points out, the IoE itself is no longer a prediction in-and-of-itself.  The joining of people, process, data and things to transform information into actions and create new capabilities, richer experiences and unprecedented opportunities is already a global reality.  Just how IoE impacts our economies and industries —including what many believe to be an American Manufacturing Renaissance— is what remains for our collective imaginations, innovations and entrepreneurial ingenuity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMEwZUNH0co

To gain some insights and guidance on manufacturing movements, I turn to industry analyst expertise.  Bob Parker, IDC Group Vice President, last week hosted the IDC Manufacturing Insights 2014 Predictions: Worldwide Manufacturing, one in a series of annual web conferences where IDC analysts share their industry outlook for the upcoming year in the form of a Top 10 Predictions.  Below, I provide a recap of what Bob and his team had to say about global IT investment trends and business initiatives relating to key process areas within manufacturing, along with my contentions around the impact of IoE on the manufacturing economy and why I believe we will see a growth inflection in the industry next year.
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Chet Namboodri

Senior Director

Global Private Sector Industries Marketing

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Announcement: Nominations Now Open For Cisco Champions for Enterprise Networks

Possible Cisco Champions 2Are you passionate about Cisco’s networking technology?  You know, routing, switching, mobility and more? Run for routers? Swoon over 11ac? Named your turtle Captain Catalyst? Do you love sharing your knowledge? Do you want unique access to Cisco experts? Today is your lucky day my friend!

 

I’m excited to announce the call for nominations for the all-new Cisco Champions for Enterprise Networks!

 

From now until January 10, 2014, please nominate yourself, a friend, a mentor, a luminary in the community or your favorite awesome person for inclusion in this program.  

 

Here is what’s in it for you (aside from Internet fame, adulation, and people rushing the stage at your next speaking session*) :http://www.cisco.com/go/ciscochampions

 

Submit your nomination today to cisco_champions@external.cisco.com! Be sure to mention “Enterprise Networks” in your nomination, so it will be routed correctly. All Cisco Champions for Enterprise Networks will be selected and alerted no later than January 17, 2013.

 

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Lauren Friedman

Marketing Manager

Enterprise Networks

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Ahead of the Competition With Innovation

Current Analysis Enterprise WLAN 2013 v2013: A Year of Growth and Innovation for Cisco WLAN

As we approach the end of 2013, I feel it is important to reflect on what an important year it has been for Cisco in mobility. 2013 marked continued growth in the WLAN space overall. It’s exciting to to see the continued gain in market share. Innovation has been a key differentiation against our competitors, and we will continue to strive towards providing the best solutions for our customers’ current and future needs. I truly believe the preservation of our market growth is attributed to the cutting-edge solutions that only Cisco can offer to meet the increasingly complex challenges of mobility in the enterprise, BYOD and beyond.

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Sujai Hajela

Senior Vice President,

Enterprise Networking Group

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Cisco Announces Acquisition of Collaborate.com

As the rapidly developing mobility and cloud markets transform the technology landscape, the population of mobile workers looking to extend the boundaries of their offices continues to grow. They want to connect, communicate and collaborate seamlessly, and their organizations are seeking user-friendly, mobile-centric collaboration tools that enable teams to work faster while being as productive as possible.

Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco’s acquisition of Collaborate.com to help capture this market transition in mobility and cloud. Collaborate’s skilled team of cloud and mobile software developers has created a mobile collaboration application that provides unified document sharing, task management and team communication capabilities, enabling today’s mobile workforce to collaborate with team members on projects. Workers can instantly create virtual collaboration rooms where they can chat and share documents, notes, photos and videos.

Collaborate’s platform integrates with email and third party cloud services to make collaborating efficiently with others while on-the-go that much easier.  Collaborate’s flexibility also enables teams to integrate collaboration and communication into their enterprise workstreams, as the application helps keep teams aligned and accelerates decision-making.

Cisco’s acquisition of Collaborate supports our goal of driving market leadership in Collaboration. Together, Cisco and Collaborate plan to provide a comprehensive solution that enables the mobile workforce to work smarter and more efficiently from virtually anywhere. Collaborate’s cutting-edge technology and strong engineers as part of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group will help accelerate Cisco’s innovation in Collaboration.

With deep experience building innovative mobile-centric collaboration experiences, we are excited about the new opportunities the addition of Collaborate and its talented group of individuals will provide to Cisco. The Collaborate team will enhance our ability to deliver industry-leading solutions and unique value to our customers.

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Hilton Romanski

No Longer with Cisco