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Last week we partnered with the WEF in launching the 2015 Global Information Technology Report highlighting the importance of closing the gender gap in ICT to ensure everybody benefits from ICTs. Today as we celebrate the ITU’s Girl in ICT day all around the world, we recognize the challenge in front of us: fewer women and girls than men and boys use mobile phones and the Internet, fewer girls have shown interest in ICT careers, and fewer women currently hold positions in this industry.

Some of the statistics are sobering:

  • Teenage girls are 5 times less likely to consider a technology-related career compared to boys of the same age, even though the way in which each gender uses computers and the Internet is nearly identical.
  • Only 18% of undergraduate computer science degrees were awarded to women in the United States between 2008 and 2011.
  • In OECD countries, women account for less than a fifth of ICT-related specialists.

The ramifications of not encouraging young girls to cultivate a love of science, technology, engineering, and/or math (STEM) – and more specifically, ICT – are broad reaching and impacts countries, communities and individuals. An enormous gap exists between the size of the ICT workforce demanded and the current global supply. Simply put, more positions are available or are in the process of being created than there are skilled workers to fill them. Employers around the world are struggling to fill hundreds of thousands of ICT jobs, and part of the problem is the lack of women trained in these fields.

Continue reading “No Inclusive Growth Without Women and Girls in ICT”

Authors

Robert Pepper

No Longer with Cisco

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Technology continues to evolve at a break-neck pace, and our definition of the workplace — and how we work with our customers, partners and stakeholders — has expanded beyond the four walls of an office building. The adoption of mobile devices and cloud-based services has created an anytime, anywhere work culture. At the same time, global competition is at its greatest level, and organizations must re-evaluate how they can remain competitive and market relevant in this rigorous environment.

The need to provide products and services faster, reduce cost of operations and automate mundane tasks in order to stay competitive continues to accelerate in today’s digital world. As such, new skill sets and continued talent development are needed that address these changes currently impacting the way we work inside and outside of an organization. This isn’t an obstacle just central to the U.S. or certain markets. This is a global challenge, and will require organizations to rethink how they evolve, retrain and reskill their workforce to best complement this new way of working.

For instance, sales and marketing departments have had to adjust to this digital transformation; nowadays the vast majority of marketing is now done online through mobile and social channels. Manufacturing skills are also changing, the way we design products are changing, and the way we collaborate is changing. Across the board, significant development of new technology skills is needed.

Approximately 90 percent of technology jobs are expected to change in this new digital economy in order to keep up with new business models and technologies, which leaves us with a massive skills transition in the workforce. At the same time, there will be an estimated shortage of between 38-40 million college-educated workers by 2020, which means organizations will be competing for a relatively small pool of talent.

To keep employees up to speed on the skills they now require mandates access to pertinent information and learning, and real-time access to experts on the job, every day.

The time has come for a next-generation workforce solution to empower customers with the digital tools and technology they need to access information, experts, learning, and knowledge in real time – anytime, anywhere. To that end, Cisco is unveiling its new cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) knowledge platform: Cisco Collaborative Knowledge. The platform is designed to help customers reshape the way they work, learn, collaborate and innovate together, creating a smarter, more productive organization.

Cisco Collab Knowledge pic

Continue reading “Building an Agile, High-Performing Workforce for the Workplace of the Future”

Authors

Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn

Vice President and General Manager

Cisco Services

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One of the original projects of OpenStack at the time that it launched was Swift, an Object Storage platform born out of Rackspace. A couple of months ago, we interviewed Joe Arnold, SwiftStack Founder and CPO. This week, we talked to John Dickinson, who serves as Director of Technology at SwiftStack and Project Technical Lead for the OpenStack Swift project. This was a notable day for John and the global Swiftstack contributors because just minutes before the podcast started, two years of effort had finally paid off with the addition of a new erasure coding feature.  Watch the video, download the podcast, or read the transcripts below to learn more about:

  • John’s entry into tech that started with his grandfather’s Commodore 64
  • What Swift is well-suited for, whether you’re a startup or a large enterprise
  • Working with a global team to launch the erasure coding feature
  • Life as a Project Team Lead in OpenStack, and how anyone (even me) can contribute to Swift
  • Challenges in operating Swift at scale, and how SwiftStack solves those pain points
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ORJKia1pQs

You can follow John on Twitter at @notmyname and on IRC at the same name. His blog and other links can be found on his calling card page.

Jeff and I are taking the show to the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver! If you’d like to be considered for a guest spot, tweet us at @openstackpod

See past episodes, subscribe, or view the upcoming schedule on the OSPod website.

For a full transcript of the  interview, click read more below.

Continue reading “OSpod #28: An Interview with John Dickinson”

Authors

Niki Acosta

OpenStack Evangelist

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“Product Recall.” Just these two words are enough to strike fear in the heart of a manufacturer.  As John Kern points out in his blog, The Internet of Everything Will Help Solve Problems That Lead To Recalls, “Product recalls can be a headache for customers and consumers, but a financial nightmare for manufacturers.” Not only are longer-term corporate reputations and brand promises deflated, but even more insidious, shorter-term litigation and financial liabilities become a daily reality for industrial companies facing recalls.

Issues like the recent Takata air-bags, Blue Bell ice cream and other high profile cases garner news headlines almost every day. Manufacturers continue to wrestle with how to establish robust product design methodologies, component through finished-product traceability and genealogy (including context), vendor accountability and supply chain rigor–as well as production controls and visibility–all in order to avoid future issues with recalls and ensure quality output. And every sub-segment of manufacturing has its own set of related regulations adding a layer of regional complexity to the problem–whether it’s pharma, automotive, consumer packaged goods, high tech, metals, machine builders or otherwise.

The infographic below provides some food for thought with examples of the impact of recalls and how the Internet of Everything (IoE) enables the Connected Factory and a digital manufacturing world where product recalls and quality issues are less the norm and more of an anomaly.

 

Recalls Recalled from Cisco Business Insights

IoE and Connected Manufacturing with predictive analytics and connected supply chains all converge to enable a platform to truly put an end to the tyranny of recalls. With a converged factory/OT and IT/enterprise network, manufacturers tap into the intelligence and accumulated analytics, to further drive innovations and improvements not just in production processes but also development and engineering, so that products are designed AND produced more robustly.

Continue reading “We’re Ready to Obsolete Product Recalls: Are You?”

Authors

Chet Namboodri

Senior Director

Global Private Sector Industries Marketing

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On April 13th, 2015, Cisco PSIRT was made aware of multiple instances of customer disruption in a specific region caused by a denial of service attack against Cisco devices. We responded quickly to support speedy restoration for our customers.

Our ongoing investigation has shown that the storage of some Cisco devices was erased, removing both the Cisco IOS and device configuration from the non-volatile RAM. Once rebooted, these devices became non-operational, affecting connectivity to the global Internet.

Cisco PSIRT, together with other internal Cisco teams, responded to support affected customers, review configuration backups of affected devices, and to analyze all available log files and Netflow information.

At this time, we have seen a common element across all inspected devices: a combination of weak credentials and a lack of device hardening. There has been no evidence of a Cisco bug or vulnerability being exploited. Should this situation change and we discover the use of a vulnerability, Cisco will disclose in accordance with our Security Vulnerability Policy.

Continue reading “Best Practices: Device Hardening and Recommendations”

Authors

Russ Smoak

VP, Information Security

Security Assurance & Response

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Cybersecurity is a company-wide initiative. It touches every line of business, the technology, the fabric of the organization, its culture, brand and reputation. Customers are telling us that their most important issues are security and assuring the integrity of the products and data in their networks. In light of the heightened potential for cyber threats, trust is more important than ever throughout the entire IT industry. A trustworthy product requires that security be integrated throughout the product lifecycle based on a transparent and open culture of the company, its policies, its processes, its supply chain, and its partners.

John Stewart, Senior Vice President and Chief Security and Trust Officer here at Cisco, drives trustworthy systems development, supply chain security, cloud security and customer data protection, as well as validation of Cisco’s cyber security practices. This week, John was presented with the RSA Conference Award for Excellence in Information Security during the conference keynote. We are excited for John and see the award as recognition of the work Cisco is doing around the world to raise security awareness and the importance of trust, accountability and transparency from IT vendors.

I was chatting with John after the award presentation and he told me what an honor it was to receive this level of recognition, because it affirms we’re on the right path. We recognize the enormity of the security task before us and it makes us all proud to work for a company that is totally committed to the security of our solutions and of our company.

You can read more about the award here.

Authors

Anthony Grieco

SVP & Chief Security & Trust Officer

Security and Trust Organization

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My previous blog post considered enterprise agility and our individual responsibility to take some level of ownership by being more present and connected. This week at UC Expo in London I met many industry colleagues, and it sparked off some interesting conversations.

Two themes emerged that made me think about what work might look like in ten years time:

1) Balancing artisan creativity with the art of making money

We agreed that the mass-market appeal and adoption of some technologies and devices have lead to quite bland output by some teams. We have, to some degree, lost the ability to be creative at scale. The pressure of time and money and the corporate iteration process often distil the essence of something beautiful down into something quite vanilla – generic tools often force us down the road to blandness.

Thankfully, some emerging approaches and technology are starting to Continue reading “How and Where Will You Work in the Future?”

Authors

Marcus Gallo

Sr. Solution Marketing Manager

Cloud Collaboration

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CiscoChampion2015200PX#CiscoChampion Radio is a podcast series by Cisco Champions as technologists. Today we’ll be talking about Threat Grid with Cisco Business Development Manager and Threat Grid expert, Jessica Bair.

Listen to the Podcast.

Learn about the Cisco Champions Program HERE.
See a list of all #CiscoChampion Radio podcasts HERE.
Ask about the next round of Cisco Champions nominations. EMAIL US.

Cisco SME
Jessica Bair, @jessicambair, Cisco Business Development Manager and Threat Grid expert

Cisco Champion Guest Hosts
Michael Aossey, @aossey, Solutions Architect
Jake Gillen, @jakegillen, Senior Security Engineer

Moderator
Brian Remmel (@bremmel) Continue reading “#CiscoChampion Radio S2|Ep 14. Threat Grid”

Authors

Rachel Bakker

Social Media Advocacy Manager

Digital and Social

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Just like private businesses, public sector organizations are taking advantage of today’s “boundless” infrastructures. They also face the same challenging reality when implementing those networks: a threat to data security. For public sector, the stakes are especially high. The proliferation of hackers, inevitable human errors, bring-your-own-device initiatives and the ever-broadening need to share information weigh heavily on government and education organizations, and consume substantial resources.

Against this backdrop, it’s more important than ever to be constantly discussing and innovating cybersecurity measures to keep networks safe. Cisco is not only an industry leader when it comes to providing cybersecurity solutions and services for the public sector, but it is also helping drive conversations with government and technology leaders around the country. In fact, Cisco will be attending a number of cyber-focused events over the next few months:

Cisco is a proud sponsor of the RSA Conference, an event that helps drive the information security agenda worldwide and plays an integral role in keeping security professionals across the globe connected and educated. Speakers will discuss everything from cloud computing to quantitative security, and include Secretary Jeh Johnson, Department of Homeland Security.

This year’s CyberTexas conference will explore the intersection of cyber security and the ‘Internet of Things’. Cisco’s Kurt Harris, Senior Systems Engineering Manager, is presenting on This session will explore the importance of securing the IoT and how these security challenges impact the enormous opportunity presented by the IoE for public sector in the future. This session will explore the importance of securing the IoT and how these security challenges impact the enormous opportunity presented by the IoE for public sector in the future. This session will explore the importance of securing the IoT and how these security challenges impact the enormous opportunity presented by the IoE for public sector in the future. This session will explore the importance of securing the IoT and how these security challenges impact the enormous opportunity presented by the IoE for public sector in the future. the importance of securing the Internet of Things and how security challenges impact the enormous opportunity presented by the Internet of Everything for public sector in the future. Cisco is also sponsoring the “Securing the Internet of Things” track.

The 2015 Synergy Forum brings together government and industry practitioners driving our collective technology futures to examine the emerging fusion of physical and digital worlds. Gary Neal Akers, senior vice president of Advanced Security Initiatives, Cisco, will take part in a panel on security and the Internet of Things.

Linked by a commitment to cybersecurity, government agencies, intelligence personnel and industry leaders will gather at the 2015 Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium to discuss successful strategies for improving security. In addition to exhibiting its cybersecurity solutions at the symposium, Cisco’s Kapil Bakshi, Distinguished Architect, will be speaking on a panel titled “Secure, Operate and Defend in the Commercial Sector – How Do We Maintain and Increase Cyber Security While Providing Innovation in IT?”

Digital Government Institute’s 8th annual Cyber Security Conference will explore today’s cyber threats and offer an opportunity for those supporting government security initiatives to collaborate on how to detect, protect, and respond to these challenges. Peter Romness, cybersecurity solutions lead, U.S. Public Sector, will be presenting during the show. Cisco is a Gold Sponsor of the DGI Cyber Security Conference.

The NSA Information Assurance Symposium is a biannual forum hosted by the National Security Agency that brings, policy, governance, technology, hands-on training and networking opportunities to attendees from across government, industry and academia. Cisco will be exhibiting at the symposium.

That is quite the cyber roadshow! Also, don’t miss our webinar with GovLoop on April 30th for a discussion on how to stay secure and connected in the age of the Internet of Things. And of course, we will undoubtedly be talking cybersecurity during Cisco Live in San Diego, June 7-11th. If you are attending any of these events, please make sure to stop by and say hello!

 

Authors

Peter Romness

Cybersecurity Principal, US Public Sector CTO Office