SDN (Software Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) technologies are expected to help Service Providers gain new efficiencies and previously unimagined speed and agility in cloud services delivery so they can seize new business opportunities and achieve continued growth. Specifically, SDN in the data center helps you abstract services and applications from the complexities of the underlying network, making services operations drastically simpler. However, this abstraction layer, referred to as the SDN overlay, must meet very specific requirements to support today’s dynamic cloud environments.
I’d like to briefly discuss a recently released product, the Cisco Virtual Topology System (VTS), a high performance SDN overlay system designed to meet these requirements.
“We are family! I’ve got all my sisters and me!” ~ Sister Sledge. Now that we’ve gotten a disco tune earworm in your brain, let’s talk about how two sisters, Janine and Jina Daniel, are making the Cisco family part of THEIR family.
Janine is a Fresno State graduate, and even when she was still in school, she knew she wanted to work at Cisco.
“It was my #1 choice, because I wanted to make a difference,” she says. “I saw a lot of innovation, and Cisco showing their passion for changing the world. In 2006-2007 I saw John Chambers (then CEO) driving change.”
Janine went on a mission. She attended every early-in-career fair at Cisco that she could find. She says she “met good people” and got advice, and she kept going for her goal until she landed her Cisco job.
Eight years later, Janine is still working for Cisco. After moving through different career opportunities here, she’s now a Global Regulatory Compliance Manager in Supply Chain Transformation. That means she helps innovate and change the way Cisco runs our supply chain.
Jina is Janine’s younger sister – by seven years. She caught the “Work at Cisco” bug hearing her big sis talk about her job.
“Janine started working for Cisco when I was in high school,” Jina remembers. “Ever since then, I have always wanted to be apart of Cisco. Janine shared with me how awesome it was.”
Jina started out as an intern when she was attending San Jose State, and did that for two years. She then came on full-time, and she’s now 3 full years in at Cisco. Currently, she works in Services Portfolio & Enablement (under Services Strategy & Operations) on the operations side. Her organization changes and drives new ways of selling and buying Cisco Services, and makes it easier for the integrated sales force to sell Cisco Services.
“We change people’s lives with our technology,” Jina says. “It’s totally unique to Cisco. And here, we can really change the world. It’s not just a slogan.”
The sisters are close (obviously) and consider working together a built-in support system. Plus, they learn from each other and get insights into other parts of the business.
“We talk a lot about work,” Janine laughs. “I’m sure our parents are tired of hearing about it.”
“Both of our teams have adopted the other one, “ Jina says. “My manager will ask about her and her manager will ask about me. And we’re part of the bigger family.”
Plus, they’re part of the family of women in technology.
“Cisco is the best place for women in tech to work,” Jina explains. “It’s not just for show. It’s about my growth and development. Cisco cares. But I don’t feel like they treat me differently as a woman. I’m just a part of the team.”
“Plus,” Janine finishes her sister’s thought. “We have the women on the leadership team to be role models. They show us that it’s okay to have that personal take on tech, and to be empowered, but you’re playing with everyone fairly. We don’t feel like it’s a ‘thing,’ we’re just Cisco people.”
“No matter who works here, no matter what job, we’re a family.”
In my previous post, I explained how CIOs are reinventing the mission and role of the IT department in order to support the Digital Transformation of their organisation. And that adopting a Fast IT model is less about technology and more about progressive cultural and process changes.
But is this realistic for public sector organisations as well? It sure is. In this post and 2 following ones, I’d like to share some of the outcomes from the Fast IT engagements done with 3 IT organisations in the government sector, a sector that often has the unfair reputation of being overly conservative. I’ll show that public sector CIOs are motivated to change the status quo and disrupt the current operating model to better serve the needs of the public administration, of citizens and of businesses. Naturally, the details are confidential, so I am using pseudo-names to preserve the anonymity of our customers:
Central IT department of a Large International Government Institution: let’s call it “GovIT-A“
Central Government IT Service Provider in Eastern Europe (providing IT services to all ministries in the country): let’s call it “GovIT-B“
IT Department of one of the major German Government Institution in Germany: let’s call it “GovIT-C“
Phase One – Focus on BUSINESS: Clearly identify and document the strategic drivers for IT from the business’ perspective (or ministries, or government agencies). Indeed, you can’t ambition to build Fast IT organisation if you haven’t clearly captured what’s holding you back (the main problem often being culture, organisation and processes), and put a remediation plan in place.
Phase Two – Focus on IT: Build the IT Value Map to demonstrate — visually – how IT is structured to deliver value and how success will be measured. Long report are read (sometimes) and then forgotten. But you shouldn’t underestimate the communication power of a large poster in every room of the IT department (and the business): this is how you create alignment in the long run.
Phase Three – Focus on ROADMAP: Using output from phases one and two, identify and prioritise the key programmes and projects – the Strategic IT Roadmap – that will deliver the biggest impact, enabling a successful execution of the IT Management Plan for this year, the next 3 years and beyond.
In this post series, I’ll illustrate the outcomes from the 3 phases, using 1 client for each phase. Let’s get started…
Case Study #1 – Focus on BUSINESS
When we first started talking with GovIT-A about 2 years, the previous CIO (technically-minded) had just been replaced, mainly due to the dissatisfaction of the client departments that he was providing services to. The new CIO (business-minded) was determined to avoid the errors of the past, and wanted to build a strong foundation, based on excellence in customer services. Cisco proposed to engage on a Strategic Roadmap to Fast IT, and we received the list of 8 key stakeholders *outside* of the IT department (the “customers”), as well as the list of 8 key stakeholders inside the IT department (the “providers”).
We started by interviewing the people outside of IT, to get their perspective on the quality of the IT services they were getting. We used COBIT5 as a way to structure all the information that we collected (advantage: COBIT5 was already used by the audit department as well). COBIT5 provides a list of 17 generic enterprise business drivers, of which we identified 8 as being crucial to the future success of GovIT-A:
A culture of partnership for business and IT innovation.
GovIT-A had a major issue: the complete lack of trust between IT and business stakeholders. Fostering collaborative attitudes was absolutely crucial for Fast IT to become a reality one day. We looked at how to build multi-level partnerships and agree on roles and responsibilities to create common goals within a shared IT Capability Framework.
Managed business change programs.
Quickly identifying and empowering “champions of change” (both in the business and in IT) was seen as key to accelerate the transformation to Fast IT. Innovation was to be supported by top management and coordinated through agile, virtual teams. We looked at how well the operational model supported an effective change management.
User-orientated service culture.
IT was focused on its technology stacks, not on the actual services delivered to the users. A move to service-orientation was a key step towards Fast IT. Monitoring KPIs and improving processes would support this. We confirmed what the IT department and LOBs were responsible for, and reviewed how we could cut the overall cost and complexity of IT processes.
Agile responses to a demanding business environment.
IT needed to be much more agile – responsibly meeting the needs of the business in terms of time to service, flexibility and interoperability. We reviewed flexibility and the layers of authorisation that got in the way of creating a responsive IT department.
Financial transparency and value for money.
The whole procurement paradigm of GovIT-A was incompatible with a move towards Fast IT. For example, each technology team (network, server, storage, etc.) was still ordering the equipment it needed, more or less independently from the others. This meant for example that it was impossible to order an integrated compute stack. Or to order Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS). The IT department was unable to tailor its services to meet the unique expectations of the different departments in terms of cost, security and flexibility etc. This lead to each departments trying to avoid GovIT-A as much as possible, and trying to do it themselves – dramatically increasing the share of IT spend outside of the GovIT-A (around 75%!).
Managed Business Risk.
Being a government institution, no compromise could be made around information availability. However, the security team was really seen as “Doctor No”, so departments would do anything they could to find workarounds. We established the need to balance – on a per-application basis – the business benefits with its cost and the security requirements.
Operational and staff productivity.
Many employees within GovIT-A expected IT to work the way they knew was possible. With mobility. From home. Video-enabled. We discussed with the IT team how to adopt a user-centric model, powered by technologies that drive collaboration and delivered in an environment of Continuous Service Improvement (CSI). We identified quick wins, such as BYOD, mobility and telepresence initiatives, with positive results for the end user.
Skilled and motivated people.
As the IT environment evolves, so must employee’s skills. Continuously. We looked at how to create a learning curriculum that was blended, easily accessible and collaborative. Proactive, forward-looking training would help them to take on new roles and adapt to the new technologies or processes that Fast IT brings. This is all too often the piece of the strategy that’s missing to IT roadmap.
Of course, these 8 strategic drivers are not something to we can solve over the matter of a few months. It takes at least 5-7 years, to gradually evolve the IT Department to Fast IT. Today, we are pleased to continue our ongoing collaboration with GovIT-A, and seeing initiatives and projects that are approved by management, implemented in the field, and gradually reaping their benefits.
Don’t hesitate to post your comments if you’d like to get more details on some particular aspects of our engagement with GovIT-A.
In my next posts, I’ll cover the work we did with 2 other government agencies:
Case Study 2 (“GovIT-B”): the focus of the post will be on the IT Value Map
Case Study 3 (“GovIT-C”): the focus of the post will be on the Strategic Roadmap to Fast IT.
Recently, I had a conversation with a CIO and her team. We were reviewing the extraordinary growth of unknown and known cloud services within organizations like hers. She turned to her team and asked “well what should we do?” Some of her leaders said: “we can’t control it, so why should we discover it?” Others pushed to learn more and help enable rather than inhibit cloud use. She absorbed this, and then simply said, “We either can be ostriches, burying our heads in the sand, or eagles. But we should keep in mind that eagles see what is coming.”
By JT Taylor, Senior Marketing Manager, Service Provider Solutions Marketing, Cisco
It goes without saying … Securing your prized assets is paramount. There is no upside to being King of the Kingdom if someone else has the keys. As our market evolves and RDK (Reference Design Kit) evolves with it, keeping your content, and your network, secure is at the forefront.
As application performance, security and delivery get more critical, and as the need for network automation grows, the vision of an architecture that allows easy integration of L4-7 services into the data center fabric is increasingly getting validated. We’ve seen at least two services load balancers and firewalls in every application tier our customers deploy. Traditional deployment models are also shifting, as we have seen the model evolve from north-south traffic (perimeter based approaches) to east-west traffic patterns bringing new requirements of scale, security and application performance.
Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) architecture was designed to help both easy integration and scale of network services. ACI can manage physical switches, virtual switches in hypervisors as well as L4-7 services from multiple vendors stitching everything under the umbrella of applications. Recognizing that customers have a choice of L4-7 vendors, ACI has taken an open approach to accommodate automation of network services from multiple vendors (for both physical and virtual form factors) with its policy-driven architecture, delivering greater operational simplicity to customers.
Traditional way of inserting L4-L7 devices, from any vendor, in the network is to manually steer traffic through L4-L7 devices and configuring each of these devices independently. The manual steering of traffic is done by carefully provisioning VLANs/VRFs/Subnets etc by a network administrator today.
While ACI supports traditional mode of L4-L7 insertion from any vendor device, ACI provides additional capabilities for automating the entire workflow and tying it to applications. There are two steps in automation of L4-L7 integration through APIC:
Automatically steering traffic from one application tier to chain of L4-L7 service devices and finally connecting back to another application tier.
Automatically configuring all L4-L7 devices in a chain as the application are deployed and modified
The step (2) is ultimate level of automation; configuring all L4-L7 devices as needed by application and keeping it up to date as the application life cycle changes. For example customers add security policies into their firewall, but never clear them since it’s hard to correlate which policies to clear when application goes away, or when there are organizational changes with the relevant SME moves out. With APIC managing application tiers and configuration on L4-7 device, the configuration is added and removed dynamically as application are added or removed.
What’s new?
Since day 1, APIC supports traditional manual way of inserting L4-L7 services from any L4-L7 vendor. Similarly ACI supports fully automated mode called “Managed” mode, where both the network services stitching and device configuration is performed as described by both 1 and 2 above. The managed mode requires a “device package” which is typically provided by the concerned L4-L7 ecosystem partner and jointly qualified by Cisco/Partner for ACI.
A second new automation mode called “Unmanaged” will be introduced that equates to network stitching only as described in #1. Customers have realized that traditional manual mode is error-prone and hard to automate as workload moves around. The “Unmanaged” mode will provide a middle ground between traditional L4-L7 mode and fully automated ACI “managed” mode. Continue reading “New Innovations for L4-7 Network Services Integration with Cisco’s ACI Approach”
Someone at a meeting recently told me how cool it was that big data was finally moving out of the early adopter phase. He’s lucky I wasn’t drinking a beverage at the time, or he might have ended up wearing it.
I’m accused of being sort of a unicorn when it comes to the Big Data ecosystem, having worked with engineered Big Data environments since 2004 or so and Hadoop proper since 2009. And while some individual companies may be emerging from early adopter, it’s hard to say that Big Data itself is that new. You just have to look at the conference world to see how big this ecosystem has become, and how it’s shifted from theory and skunkworks projects and resume fodder, to technology solutions for new and metamorphic problems in business.
Some people will say “But surely there’s only been a competitive landscape for Hadoop distributions since 2012, right?” That’s true, but as I’ve said in 20 or more presentations in the past year, Big Data is more than Hadoop. And don’t call me Shirley.
One of the oldest companies driving Big Data software predates commercial Hadoop by a couple of years. In fact, they’re just about old enough to go into fourth grade (with apologies to Judy Blume for my title on this post). And you still have time to join Splunk (and Cisco) for their seventh annual worldwide user conference the week of September 21, 2015.
Buttercup at .conf Search Party via Lily Wai (@lgwai)
DON’T SEND OUT THE SEARCH PARTY YET: JOIN SPLUNK AND CISCO AT .CONF SEPTEMBER 19-24
Thursday, September 24, 11:15am: Cisco and Splunk: Under the Hood of Cisco IT (with Robert Novak and Cisco IT’s George Lancaster)
Learn how Cisco IT uses Splunk software to gain deep operational visibility into applications, accelerate problem resolution, and drive better business outcomes.
Thursday, September 24, 1:15pm: Event-Driven SDN with Splunk and Cisco’s Open SDN Controller (with Steven Carter and Friea Berg)
This session presents and demonstrates a system using Splunk and the Cisco Open SDN Controller for steering large data flows around firewalls and other devices that could disturb their performance while actively blocking threats.
Guest Blog by Ian Ross, SP Business Development Manager
As businesses globally begin to recognize the potential of the Internet of Everything (IoE) in terms of how they structure, manage and improve their operations, it’s leading waves of network-led transformations. Whether in resources, energy, transport or utility verticals, the network is adopting an instrumental role in supporting the production systems that can improve productivity, safety, cost efficiency, visibility and control. With many of these environments being dynamic, distributed and highly mobile, the need for mission-critical, high-performance wireless networks has become obvious, and with it the demand for solutions that offer more throughput, better access and reduced complexity.
While a range of wireless technologies are available, LTE has been gradually seizing mindshare of OT network managers and strategists as a platform for the future. Enjoying global standardisation Continue reading “The Rise of Private LTE Networks”
Defining what is malware relies on determining when undesirable behavior crosses the line from benign to clearly unwanted. The lack of a single standard regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior has established a murky gray area and vendors have taken advantage of this to push the limits of acceptable behavior. The “Infinity Popup Toolkit” is a prime example of software that falls into this gray area by bypassing browser pop-up blocking, but otherwise exhibits no other unwanted behavior. After analyzing the toolkit, Talos determined that software exhibiting this type of unwanted behavior should be considered malware and this post will provide our reasoning.
Overview
Without a clear standard defining what is and is not acceptable behavior, identifying malware is problematic. In many situations, users are confronted with software that exhibits undesirable behavior such as the Java installer including a default option to install the Ask.com toolbar. Even though many users objected to the inclusion of the Ask.com toolbar, Oracle only recently discontinued including it in Java downloads after Microsoft changed their definition of malware which then classified the Ask.com toolbar as malware.
There is more to unwanted software than just browser toolbars or widgets. Suppose a piece of software exhibits the following characteristics. Would this be considered malware?
The user was not given a choice whether or not to execute this piece of software.
The software was designed to specifically bypass browser security and privacy controls using clickjacking techniques.
The software avoids detection by encrypting portions of its payload.
Extensive fingerprinting (browser, plugins, operating system, and device type) takes place and sent to a third party without user consent.
By JT Taylor, Senior Marketing Manager, Service Provider Solutions Marketing, Cisco
Guest Blog by Ian Ross, SP Business Development Manager 
