There is no denying it cloud has moved beyond buzzword and become a key foundation element for over 40% of enterprise organizational strategies. Making the decision to “go cloud” is the easy part. Figuring out how to optimize and deliver on your cloud strategy is another discussion.
The “first wave to cloud” was focused on operational and service delivery measures such as reducing IT operational costs and improving organizational delivery to meet SLAs. However, just when you thought you had a handle on these measures, here comes the second wave of cloud.
Reducing operational costs and improving SLAs has become minimum requirements just to get a seat at the table. Being a “player” in the cloud market requires broader impact across the organization and more strategic measures of business success: innovation and increased revenue growth.
#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we talk about the Dream Team with Alumni Zoe Rose and Cisco Networking Academy Program Managers Gena Pirtle and Sara Shreve.
Welcome to our December edition of Carpe Diem, our monthly segment featuring role models across CiscoEWN. We all make resolutions and set goals to improve ourselves– but somewhere along the way, life interrupts our plans, we find ourselves juggling different priorities and invariably things get dropped. What you will find in this segment are experiences of some ordinary people who went on to achieve extraordinary results. Each person featured in this series has faced challenges and opportunities that the rest of us can identify with. Let’s draw inspiration from the choices they made and aspire to the outcomes they created.
Interview with: Bouchra Bouqata, Senior Analytics Product Manager, GE Renewable Energy – Wind Dr. Bouqata has a PhD in Computer Science in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
We all know the importance of using the right tool for the job. Having the right tool can make the work much easier and faster. When you think about infrastructure to support the new cloud-scale applications, you also want the right tool. System vendors have offered a range of options for decades. Servers are designed to support the requirements of different applications and workloads. This same principle applies to composable infrastructure. Even if you pool the infrastructure resources and allocate them dynamically to support each application, there is still a requirement to have different systems architected to support different requirements. A one size fits all approach to this new category of infrastructure is bound to have its limitations.
Hatching brilliant ideas for the world’s next big innovation is the easy part. Bringing those ideas to life — through new software, hardware or services solutions — is the hard part. That’s exponentially true when it comes to the Internet of Everything because of the extra complexity of connecting people, data, process and things through technology.
In our corporate world, it’s called “execution.” How an innovation is developed from concept to concrete is just as important as the original brainchild itself.
In my last blog, I focused on catalysts that can fuel innovation 10x: Inclusion, diversity, inquisitiveness, observation, networking, agility and flexibility – they all fuel innovation. Here, in part two, I want to share some game-changing insights on execution that I learned from industry leaders at Cisco’s recent “Walk the Talk” Leadership Forum.
Safeguarding patient information is critical for healthcare providers. From HIPAA regulations for patient record privacy to PCI standards for credit card processing, there are many areas where information can be compromised.
In a related study, we surveyed CISOs and SecOps managers and found that:
● Chief information security officers (CISOs) in healthcare are more likely than security operations (SecOps) managers to believe that their security processes are optimal.
● Healthcare organizations do not implement as many strong security defenses as organizations in other industries.
● When healthcare organizations experience a breach, they may be more likely to implement a wider array of security defenses.
We invite you to read the new White Paper to learn how Cisco can help enable compliance and help you to prevent your organization from suffering a potentially devastating cyberattack.
When you’re living the Cisco life, having big goals and a life filled with adventure seem to go hand-in-hand.
Just ask Brian Dickinson, Cisco Systems Engineer. Already a fan of hiking and camping, when he moved to the Pacific Northwest of the US, the thought of taking up mountain climbing.
“Once I started climbing, I just wanted to keep going!” Brian laughs.
Keep going he did – as Brian accepted the Seven Summits challenge and climbed the world’s seven tallest peaks: Kosciuszko, Aconcagua, Vinson, Elbrus, Kilimanjaro, Denali, and Everest – the tallest mountain in the world.
It was Everest that would be his biggest challenge. After his Sherpa became ill a mere 1,000 feet from reaching the goal, Brian decided to continue on alone. He made the summit, took a few photos and radioed in, but then became snow blind. At 29,000 feet he was left without his vision and low on oxygen. Suddenly the journey down Everest became harder than the journey up.
Spoiler alert – Brian made it back safely. Since the experience he has also written a book, Blind Descent, and even become a motivational speaker — he credits Cisco in helping make happen.
“Cisco gave me a great platform to reach people just beyond climbing mountains,” Brian said. “They’ve allowed me to really share my experience and motivate others. You can be in the perfect setting and still choose to work yourself to death. If you have discipline for a strong work/life balance and values, then Cisco is the company to work for because they’re all in. They’ll support you in whatever you want to do in your career and personal life.”
Brian had some key points to help you add adventure to your career, based on his experiences.
Set A Goal – What is it that you want to achieve? Do you want to advance in your career or write a book? Maybe you want to dive the Great Barrier Reef or become a motivational speaker yourself! Decide on your goal – go as far as saying it out loud, writing it down or telling a close friend/family member to help keep you accountable. Then get to working on it!
Focus – To achieve your goals you’ll need a plan, some preparation, and perhaps even additional training. Once you know what steps you’ll want to take – get to work and focus on the plan you created. A lot of people use planning as a way to keep postponing the real work, yet still feel as if they’re accomplishing something. Don’t let this happen to you. As Brian made his way back down Everest without his vision (which would not return for another month and a half) he said his focus kept him going so he could safely return to his family. Sometimes you just need to put one foot in front of the other and inch along as best you can.
Learn From Failure & Adjust Your Course – Sometimes the best-laid plans don’t pan out. Don’t let this discourage you! Know that even an attempt is a step forward, re-access what may not have worked, adjust your course and plan of action and use that to your advantage in your next attempt.
Know that Success Does Not Happen Overnight – Climbing Everest is a two month process. Summiting these mountains comes with many dangers, unpredictable weather – that can delay or end your journey all together, and a vast array of unknowns. Success takes time. Wear your patience with pride. A lot of hard work goes into “overnight” successes.
Find Your Balance – By infusing your life and career with adventure, it’s also a great way to involve your family and friends in those experiences! Brian says, “You get married and have kids – that’s not an excuse not to live life in an amazing way, just involve your kids, family and friends. People go through tough times, but it’s these adventures and the people around you that make life worth living.”
Gain Perspective – Whether it is from one of the highest points on Earth, or from your workspace at sea level it’s imperative to have perspective. Know that living a life of adventure is contagious and you can impact a lot of people in a positive way by doing the very things you love and reaching for your goals. Know when to play it safe, and when to push a little further.
Give Back – On many of Brian’s expeditions, he has taken Cisco technology with him to give back to the communities he’s experiencing, “Tech brings people together!” Typically, he will visit orphanages in the area and deliver toys to the kids, before Everest he also brought Cisco technology that enabled the children in different area orphanages to connect and communicate with one another. It was an all-new experience for them and they loved it! How can you give back?
“Cisco is not one dimensional,” Brian says. “There is so much opportunity here, with a simple left or right alignment you can achieve so much.” So how do you plan on adding a dose of adventure into your day? Let us know in the comments!
Think Cisco is the place for you? We do too! Join us.
The next big phase of the Internet is the race toward digitization, which brings together people, processes, data, and things in new, more productive ways. In this emerging hyper-distributed digital world, connectivity is even more vital than ever before. Companies that are going to thrive and realize new opportunities will be the ones that adopt digital strategies to bring new services to market faster, securely connect people, things, and stitch hyper-distributed processes across internal and external systems.
Cisco’s research shows that 75% of organizations need help in clearly defining the digitization opportunity that exists for each of them. This research is consistent with what I hear from customers across many industries that are challenged with integrating systems and processes rapidly for:
Becoming agile as a business, adapting to changes with speed
Engaging better with customers and leveraging partner ecosystems
Improving productivity to improve revenues and profits
Expose, Compose, and Govern Any Asset
If every enterprise asset ranging from legacy applications, cloud services, data, partner services/apps, machines or things, to network/compute/storage infrastructure is viewed as a service, we need the following three capabilities to make those assets available within and across the enterprise:
All this sounds good on paper, but difficult to realize in practice. This requires organizations to think about their assets differently – both tangible assets such as people, machines, buildings etc. and intangible assets such as processes and data. All organizational assets need to be treated as services that are consumable by external or internal consumers; treated as services that are produced by various producers within the enterprise in a federated fashion.
Expose assets as services –provide a catalog of assets exposed securely as apps, services, or APIs via marketplace catalogs and web or mobile portals
Compose new services via mixing services – create new services, apps, and outcomes by connecting data, cloud, and enterprise systems
Govern the services – develop policy-based access and control via API access control, fully federated single sign on and ID management.
These three capabilities will enable organizations to treat any asset as a programmable service that can be used by various consumers; to mix it with other services as needed to make new services, and to govern these services with the right authentication and authorization. This new approach to managing hyper-distributed assets provides your business with a framework that lets you automate and integrate your unconnected processes with complete security, governance, and visibility at every stage, allowing us to effectively collaborate with your customers and partners and improve operational efficiencies.
To help with this transformation, today I’m excited to introduce the Cisco Automation and Integration Platform that allows organizations to quickly Expose, Compose, and Govern (“E-C-G”) every enterprise asset as a service. The platform enables customers to act on insights through process automation within and outside of the enterprise, and across business and IT. It offers lifecycle management of digital assets across design, provisioning, publishing, and support. With the Cisco Automation and Integration Platform, our customers will be able to accelerate digital transformation initiatives by streamlining processes and simplifying collaboration amongst customers, partners, and internal stakeholders, as shown below.
Banking on Adaptive IT for Digitization
Organizations are putting pressure on IT to deliver solutions to business challenges that create value and leverage technology as a real differentiator for the organization. It’s a tall order under any circumstances, but especially in an age of rapid technology changes and high customer expectations. Existing solutions, as many organizations have discovered, are not up to the task.
For example: a large bank seeking to deliver on-demand IT services struggled with pressure from the business to deliver new services.
Like many enterprises, the bank was burdened with legacy IT architecture and manual processes that hindered service provisioning and resulted in average service fulfillment times of four to six weeks. To meet the business need to innovate and deliver new mobile and digital services, the IT organization needed to find a way to quickly use and reuse digital assets with speed and simplicity, while reducing process complexity and lowering delivery costs.
The bank leveraged the Cisco Automation and Integration Platform to automate organization, delivery, and consumption of information, creating an internal IT services marketplace portal that automated the workflow and delivery of development resources. The bank experienced rapid development, expanded offerings, and streamlined the procurement of IT services.
The bank cut their development time of new business applications from 180 days to 2 days, while reducing their costs by 30 percent. They transformed their IT delivery model to one of on-demand self-service for their employees and became a Fast IT organization.
The Mantra for Digitization: Expose…Compose…Govern
The Cisco Automation and Integration Platform helps you digitize your business processes. It gives you the business agility to re-imagine existing business processes and create new business processes that better serve your business needs. The platform automates interactions at scale and captures key data for operational intelligence and service utilization. Tying business interactions to trigger actions within the IT infrastructure paves the way for business SLAs to be provided by an intelligent infrastructure, such as adapting network bandwidth for business needs. At Cisco, we are well on our way to the next stage of the Internet – to enable industrial automation at scale.
In future blogs, several experts from Cisco and I will showcase examples of customers who have achieved digital transformation in many ways: through business process automation, supplier collaboration, IoT integration and network automation. Meanwhile, I’m interested to hear about your challenges and opportunities to achieve digital transformation through process automation. Let me know what you are experiencing in this race to digitization.
I remember when I started working, laptops were something that executives could borrow from the company. Those laptops were clunky and connected via dial-up to the company’s modem banks, but they allowed us to continue to stay productive even when we traveling to visit customer sites. Over time, laptops became more prevalent, allowing us to work from anywhere with the click of a simple virtual private network (VPN) client and an Internet connection. And now, that VPN client is available on mobile devices to enable me to connect from anywhere, at anytime, on any device.
Enterprises are taking the next step beyond VPNs and are purchasing dedicated mobile network services from their Mobile Service Provider partner. With the emergence of such private enterprise virtual mobile networks and the increased prevalence of hetnet services offerings (corporate Wi-Fi, community Wi-Fi, and cellular), Cisco Policy Suite, with such capabilities like access selection, can be delivered in such virtual corporate networks. Therefore, corporate devices and private devices can always benefit from always-best connected experiences. Any enterprise-issued device can easily connect to the enterprises’ mobile network and access internal information and applications quickly and securely, and with the appropriate Quality of Service in line with their SLA with the Mobile Operator. At the same time, employees can purchase their own device, following the trend of bring your own device (BYOD) and connect to the private mobile network using a VPN client and an access network discovery and selection function (ANDSF) client. Continue reading “Anywhere, Anytime Mobile Enterprise Access Using NFV and Policy”
The “first wave to cloud” was focused on operational and service delivery measures such as reducing IT operational costs and improving organizational delivery to meet SLAs. However, just when you thought you had a handle on these measures, here comes the second wave of cloud.
We all know the importance of using the right tool for the job. Having the right tool can make the work much easier and faster. When you think about infrastructure to support the new cloud-scale applications, you also want the right tool. System vendors have offered a range of options for decades. Servers are designed to support the requirements of different applications and workloads. This same principle applies to composable infrastructure. Even if you pool the infrastructure resources and allocate them dynamically to support each application, there is still a requirement to have different systems architected to support different requirements. A one size fits all approach to this new category of infrastructure is bound to have its limitations.
Hatching brilliant ideas for the world’s next big innovation is the easy part. Bringing those ideas to life — through new software, hardware or services solutions — is the hard part. That’s exponentially true when it comes to the 
I remember when I started working, laptops were something that executives could borrow from the company. Those laptops were clunky and connected via dial-up to the company’s modem banks, but they allowed us to continue to stay productive even when we traveling to visit customer sites. Over time, laptops became more prevalent, allowing us to work from anywhere with the click of a simple virtual private network (VPN) client and an Internet connection. And now, that VPN client is available on mobile devices to enable me to connect from anywhere, at anytime, on any device.