Year: 2015

February 3, 2015 12 Comments
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Big Results at the Biggest Events

It is only a matter of time before all the major sports venues throughout the world will be connected. Consider this – five years ago, Cisco Connected Stadium Wi-Fi, the only high-density solution of its kind, was in the development stage. The pace of innovation has been exponential, and this past month, AT&T Stadium, host of the NCAA National Championship Game, saw nearly five terabytes of data come across the network. To put that in perspective, the entire printed works of the US Library of Congress is 10 terabytes, so half of that amount crossed the network in just a few hours!

Or, look at this past weekend in Arizona as American football’s Big Game took place. It was the sixth consecutive year that a Cisco Connected venue was chosen to host arguably the biggest one day sporting event in the world. And, what did you see? Scores of fans using the network, sharing photos and video, and engaging through technology. Collaborating with CDW and the Arizona Cardinals has been seamless, and our collective expertise makes the experience fans have at University of Phoenix Stadium flawless.

“There is nothing we get more excited about than seeing fans having a fabulous time using their mobile devices to consume, interact and share content at University of Phoenix Stadium,” said Mark Feller, VP, Technology, Arizona Cardinals. “We worked with Cisco and CDW because they have the track record for being the best in the industry at connecting the unconnected. As host of the Big Game at our Stadium, we needed a network and Wi-Fi platform that would be flawless – and Cisco and CDW delivered.”

Not enough? Look at one of the leagues that is hyper-focused on connectivity and innovation – the NBA. This year’s All-Star Weekend will be held in two venues, Barclays Center and Madison Square Garden, both of which are utilizing Cisco Connected Sports solutions, including Connected Stadium Wi-Fi.

Think about where we will be in 2019? The vast majority of venues will be connected, however, during that time people, things, data, processes and more will also become connected as part of the Internet of Everything (IoE), and the opportunities for fans, players and organizations to capitalize on that connectivity will be transformative. The entire fan experience will always be based on the excitement of the live event. Nothing replaces that, but the opportunities to customize that experience, through analysis of data coming from everything being connected to the network, is incredibly powerful, and it excites us about the future.

This is not just a US phenomenon. It is happening globally as already more than 275 venues in 35 plus countries are operating Cisco solutions. We enjoy a global market leadership position because we focus on delivering solutions that work, and giving fans the connected experience they are looking for in this Internet of Everything hyper-connected world of today!

We are incredibly bullish on how the Internet of Everything is going to benefit the sports and entertainment industry; from the emotional and connections that fans will make with their favorite teams and players to how venues and leagues will create new revenue while also creating efficiencies.  Nothing will trump being in a stadium with 20,000 or 80,000 screaming fans as the game comes down to the last play or shot. But there isn’t any reason that experience can’t be enhanced when it is connected  and part of the Internet of Everything.

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Chris White

Senior Vice President

IoT Global Sales

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Three Mobile Trends to Watch

Updated 2015 VNI Mobile Forecast Reveals Potential “Wildcards” for Mobile Devices, Networks and Services

This week, Cisco released its annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Forecast, 2014 – 2019. Among the traditional top-line growth projections that indicate a healthy mobile industry (e.g., more than 5.2 billion global mobile users by 2019 and 10-fold mobile traffic growth over the next five years), there were several interesting trends that could have significant implications for mobile networking in the near future.

Mobile Devices: Laptops make a comeback and phablets start to emerge

While there is an overall growth in the number of mobile devices and connections, there is also a visible shift in the device mix. This year forecast shows a slight slowdown in the growth of tablets as a new device sub-category, phablets (included in our smartphone category), were began to show global adoption. Tablet growth was also affected by the introduction of lightweight laptops, which are quite similar to tablets in form factor but have more enhanced capabilities. Today, tablets are primarily being used as content consumption devices – ideally suited for video viewing in particular. Laptops are still serving as the dominant content creation device, particularly for business users (e.g., presentation, spreadsheet, and document development). While the absolute numbers or volume for smartphones (4.6 billion by 2019), tablets (nearly 300 million by 2019) and laptops (nearly 250 million by 2019) are growing, they are all losing their percentage share of total mobile devices and connections to the fastest growing mobile connection type – M2M (3.2 billion by 2019).

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Mobile Networks: Low Power, Wide-Area (LPWA) networks may be optimal for campus-wide IoE applications

This year’s forecast includes M2M nodes connected via Low-Power, Wide-Area (LPWA) networks. These networks are Continue reading “Three Mobile Trends to Watch”

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Thomas Barnett, Jr.

Director, SP Thought Leadership

Worldwide Service Provider Marketing Group

5 Comments
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Angler Exploit Kit – New Variants

This post was authored by Nick Biasini

On January 27th,  Talos researchers began observing a new Angler Exploit Kit (EK) campaign using new variants associated with (CVE-2015-0311). Based on our telemetry data the campaign lasted from January 26th until January 30th with the majority of the events occurring on January 28th & 29th.

angler_dates

Continue reading “Angler Exploit Kit – New Variants”

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Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

3 Comments
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Our spiffy new tablet app

In case you missed it, Cisco now has a tablet version of our flagship app.  And it’s great. Some new features include:

  • Products use a ‘touch’ visual navigation structure
  • Quicker navigation through ‘bookmarking’  without the need to login
  • Video Datasheets delivered via the tablet app
  • Comprehensive Internet of Everything and social media coverage
  • Partner content, such as incentives, promotions, and support
  • Push notification services
  • Faster updates to navigation and content from Cisco in real time

Get it at:

Some pictures:

2_products 4_video 1_homepage

Enjoy!

 

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Martin Hardee

Director, Cisco.com

Cisco.com

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Giving attention, not getting attention

This recent post in the Harvard Business Review, Your Digital Strategy Shouldn’t Be About Attention, is a good reminder that the best digital experiences come from listening to your visitors and then anticipating what they want.

We’re tried to follow that philosophy on Cisco.com and in our mobile apps, through observing by listening, invisible change,  and continual improvement.

Good read!

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Martin Hardee

Director, Cisco.com

Cisco.com

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Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report: Java on the Decline as Attack Vector

As recently as 2013, vulnerabilities involving Java appeared to be a favored tool of adversaries: Java was easy to exploit and, and exploits involving the programming language were difficult to detect. However, as reported in the Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report, Java is losing its front-runner position as a favored tool of bad actors looking to breach network security.

The decline in Java’s high profile as an attack vector in 2014 was recorded by Cisco Security Research. Only one of the top 10 most commonly exploited vulnerabilities in 2014 was related to Java (see chart below). In 2013, Cisco tracked 54 urgent new Java vulnerabilities; in 2014, the number of tracked vulnerabilities fell to just 19. We saw a corresponding decline in reports from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), which includes all reported vulnerabilities: from 309 Java vulnerabilities in 2013, down to 253 in 2014.

Continue reading “Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report: Java on the Decline as Attack Vector”

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Jeff Shipley

Manager, IntelliShield

Security Intelligence Operations

2 Comments
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Mobile Traffic from Wearables Explodes as the Internet of Everything Accelerates

Are you Ready?

Cisco first asked this question in a 1999 advertising campaign when the incredible potential of the Internet was just beginning to become apparent.

Our ‘Are You Ready?’ ad campaign carried a simple message to the world’s businesses, telecommunications providers, and public institutions: get your Internet infrastructure ready now or risk being left behind in a world that is rapidly moving towards online-commerce, supply chain digitization and connected workforces.

Some moved quickly, but others failed to heed the warning. 45% of the companies on the Fortune 500 list in 1999 were no longer on the 2014 list, with dozens making way for nimbler more web-savvy competitors..

Today, as Cisco publishes its latest Visual Networking Index (VNI) study, our biannual global study of fixed and mobile data traffic, I see another ‘Are You Ready?’ moment in the making.

It is two years since Cisco quantified the astonishing $19 trillion economic potential of the Internet of Everything at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Today, just twenty four months later, we’re seeing an acceleration of the impact of the Internet of Everything on global networks. Here are some of the highlights of the VNI study:

• There will be eight billion connected mobile devices by 2019
• 3.2 billion of those – 40 percent of mobile Internet – will be machine-to-machine connections, such as wearable devices
• Cisco forecasts an 18-fold growth in mobile traffic from wearable devices (most of it channeled through smartphones) from 2015 to 2019.
• Wearable device traffic growth will be fueled by a five-fold growth in the number of connected devices, reaching 578 million by 2019, up from 109 million in 2014.

Continue reading “Mobile Traffic from Wearables Explodes as the Internet of Everything Accelerates”

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Rob Lloyd

President, Development and Sales

February 2, 2015 6 Comments
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Announcing Cisco Nexus 1000V for VMware vSphere 6 Release

The Cisco Nexus 1000V has been supported in VMware vSphere hypervisor since 4.0 release (August 2009) up to the current vSphere release 5.5 update 2.  We are happy to announce that the Nexus 1000V will continue to be supported in the latest vSphere 6 release which VMware recently announced. Customers who are currently running Nexus 1000V will be able to upgrade to the vSphere 6 release and the new vSphere 6 customers will have the Nexus 1000V as part of their choices for virtual networking.

Cisco is fully committed to support the Nexus 1000V product for our 10,000+ Advanced Edition customers and the thousands more using the Essential Edition software in all future releases of VMware vSphere. Cisco has a significant virtual switching R&D investment with hundreds of engineers dedicated to the Nexus 1000V platform.  The Nexus 1000V has been the industry’s leading virtual switching platform with innovations on VXLAN (industry’s first shipping VXLAN platform), and distributed zone firewall (via Virtual Security Gateway released in Jan 2011).

The Nexus 1000V also continues to be the industry’s only multi-hypervisor virtual switching solution that delivers enterprise class functionality and features across vSphere, Hyper-V and KVM.

In the last major release of the Nexus 1000V for vSphere, version 3.1 (August 2014) we added significant scaling and security features and we continue to provide subsequent updates (December 2014) with the next release planned for March 2015. The recently released capabilities include:

  • Increased scale per Nexus 1000V:
    • 250 hosts
    • 10,000 virtual ports
    • 1,000 virtual ports per host
    • 6,000 VXLAN segments with ability to scale out via BGP
  • Increased security and visibility
    • Seamless security policy from campus and WAN to datacenter with Cisco TrustSec tagging/enforcement capabilities
    • Distributed port-security for scalable anti-spoofing deployment
    • Enhanced L2 security and loop prevention with BPDU Guard
    • Protection against broadcast storms and or attacks with Storm control
    • Scalable flow accounting and statistics with Distributed Netflow
  • Ease of management via Virtual Switch Update Manager (VSUM) – a vSphere web-client plug-in

One of the common questions coming from our customers is whether VMware is still re-selling and supporting the Nexus 1000V via VMware support?

VMware has decided to no longer offer Nexus 1000V through VMware sales or sell support for the Nexus 1000V through the VMware support organization as of Feb 2nd 2015.  We want to reiterate that this has NO IMPACT on the availability and associated support from Cisco for the Nexus 1000V running in a vSphere environment.  Cisco will continue to sell Nexus 1000V and offer support contracts. Cisco encourages customers who are currently using VMware support for the Nexus 1000V to migrate their support contracts to Cisco by contacting their local Cisco Sales team to aide in this transition.

For questions or help, please reach out nexus1000vinfo@cisco.com

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Balaji Sivasubramanian

Director, Product Management

UCS

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Three Dimensions that Influence Location Quality

Since the earliest maps, location accuracy has always been important. Just one degree off on the high seas and the seafaring navigator could be landing in Cuba instead of Florida. As we progress from GPS to indoor location, the quality of location accuracy is no less critical.

To define the quality of location, we really need to understand the variables that influence location. This is especially true with mobile devices in the mix.

Quality of location accuracy has three dimensions:

  1. Location precision
  2. Refresh rate
  3. System latency

These three vectors are functions of how well the infrastructure is engineered and how the Continue reading “Three Dimensions that Influence Location Quality”

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Jagdish Girimaji

Director, Product Management

Enterprise Networking