Year: 2015

August 6, 2015 2 Comments
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The Need To Solve for Time

Ponemon Institute called 2014 the year of the “Mega Breaches,” which will be remembered for its series of mega security breaches and attacks. These “Mega Breaches” are perfect examples of what is commonly known as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). The Ponemon Institute survey asked, among many questions, “When was the breach discovered?” Surprisingly, the results revealed that ONLY 2% of the respondents in the survey discovered their breach within one week of after the incident and a staggering 90% were six months or longer, if at all.

Tom Houge 1

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Tom Hogue

Security Solutions Manager

Security Business Group

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Do You Know the Way to Ballylickey? Shadow IT and the CIO Dilemma

I was once on a driving holiday in southern Ireland. As anybody who has been to that beautiful part of the world will know, the scenery is magnificent, but the road signs can be very confusing. Totally lost I pulled over to ask directions to Ballylickey and a local farmer uttered the immortal phrase: “Well, if I was going there the first thing I would do is not start from here!” Amused by the response and the clarity of his logic, I drove off and tried again at the local pub. But when I think about it that guy was right – starting off from the right place is hugely important. And when we apply that homespun logic to IT most CIOs are not starting in the right place when it comes to their cloud strategy.

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Nick Earle

Senior Vice President, Worldwide Services Sales

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The Puppet Labs Integration With NX-OS Is Here

As we continue our journey of openness that is summarized by ZK Research: Cisco’s Data Center Strategy is Built on Openness, we announced the Open NX-OS at Cisco Live San Diego in June 2015 that runs on Nexus 3K and Nexus 9K platforms.

The Open NX-OS extensibility supports:

  • Object store and model-driven NX-API enhancements. NX-API enables common programmatic approach across entire Nexus switch portfolio (Nexus 2000 through Nexus 9000 switches)
  • Built-in third party DevOps automation tools like Puppet
  • Secure SDK enabling third party and custom application development running natively on NX-OS

The new programmability features in Open NX-OS, such as the bash shell environment, python interpreter and NX-API access, it enables the built-in DevOps Puppet tool to be extended to automate anything on the platform. Cisco and Puppet Labs are excited to make available the Puppet Cisco [NX-OS agent] http://docs.puppetlabs.com/pe/latest/install_nxos.html

PuppetLabsAgent

and Cisco [Puppet Forge Module] http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/ciscopuppet

PuppetForgeModule

Companies are embracing software defined networking (SDN) and DevOps practices to deploy network changes repeatedly and consistently. Customers who run mega scale data centers like Web2.0/OTT and fortune 100 are looking to do more with less, increase “device:admin” ratio and agility, and respond faster to business needs in a world where continuous application update grows by the hour without breaking infrastructure operation.

Using Puppet Enterprise, you can not only realize those SDN benefits, but you also extend DevOps practices to network administration across mega scale data centers, commercial and  large enterprises by defining your desired network configuration with infrastructure as code.  Using infrastructure as code enables cross-team change collaboration, automated infrastructure testing, and automated application deployments that span compute, storage, and network.

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Rami Rammaha

Sr. Marketing Manager

IDS

August 5, 2015 1 Comment
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#WednesdayWalkabout Series: TRAFFIC ALERT: SMOOTH SAILING AHEAD

Co-authored with Dani Schrakamp

Work Day Journey for the Digital Citizen

Wake up. Get ready for the day. Hurry up to…wait in traffic? According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, traffic congestion in the United States alone results in more than 4 billion hours of travel delay and nearly 3 billion gallons of gas used, at a cost of $80 billion a year. More than 25 percent of traffic congestion is non-recurrent, according to the Federal Highway Administration, meaning that in large part, it is caused by traffic incidents. Detecting these incidents early and responding to them effectively makes for safer roads, less congestion, and smoother traffic flow.

Leveraging technology and innovation will be essential for transportation in the world’s swelling urban areas as increasing populations, and other factors like climate change, will continue to impact current transportation systems and roadways.

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Cecile Willems

Director, Global Public Sector

Global Sales Organization

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Why the Fortune 500 is Fast Becoming the Digital 500

As part of its research for this year’s annual Fortune™ 500 issue the magazine polled the CEOs of all the companies on its latest list of industry leaders. When asked, “What is your company’s greatest challenge?” the number one answer among the CEOs was, “The rapid pace of technological change.” Holding second position on their list of challenges was cybersecurity. The magazine remarked on the results, “Today’s CEOs clearly recognize that new technologies are going to radically change the way they do business. And they know that they need to figure it out before their competitors do.”

A major contributor to this change is the emergence of the Internet of Everything. Billions of devices, machines and equipment are being connected to the Internet at astronomical rates. These hyper-distributed things are creating unprecedented demands for data understanding and new business processes from every player in every industry value chain. The result will be a massively connected and integrated digital community that creates new services and experiences for each participant. Continue reading “Why the Fortune 500 is Fast Becoming the Digital 500”

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Mala Anand

No Longer with Cisco

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Continuous Analysis Yields Continuous Leadership Against Advanced Threats

Organizations today have no shortage of challenges when it comes to cyber security and their growing IT infrastructure. Not only is the frequency and sophistication of malware attacks on the rise, but with the proliferation of mobility, BYOD, IoT, and cloud services; the number of entry points an attacker has into the network grows exponentially with them.

Given this landscape we know the most effective way to address these threats is with security offering continuous analysis and retrospective protection that extends across all attack vectors in the extended network. With AMP Everywhere, security is just as pervasive as today’s advanced threats, and thanks to continuous analysis and retrospective protection, our customers gain reduced time to detection.

For the second year in a row, we have third-party validation from NSS Labs that we provide the most effective security available in the market today. Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) was tested along with seven other vendors and achieved a 99.2% security effectiveness score – the highest of all vendors tested in the 2015 NSS Labs Security Value Map (SVM) for Breach Detection Systems. What I find most interesting and rather disappointing in these results is that Cisco is the only vendor in the test to successfully handle all evasion attempts.

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Jason Brvenik

Principal Engineer

CIsco Security Business Group

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Agility. Simplicity. Efficiency.

Cisco EPN Manager for Service Providers

Alison O'BrienGuest blog by Alison O’Brien, Marketing Manager

Following-up on the recent successful announcement of the Evolved Programmable Network Manager application (EPN Manager), we caught up with JL Valente, Vice President of Product Management for Cisco’s Cloud and Virtualization Group. He shared his thoughts on how EPN Manager can be used to manage converged, packet optimized optical transport and Carrier Ethernet networks, as well as enable organizations to address key business initiatives, including:

  • Improving business agility (and responsiveness) to market changes and transitions such as explosive traffic growth, packet optical network convergence and new business models prompted by over-the-top (OTT) entrants
  • Simplifying the overall approach to business operations by eliminating complex management systems and error-prone manual processes
  • More efficiently managing the time and manpower required to support daily network management tasks such as network provisioning, troubleshooting, and proactive network assurance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7mF1GcV9qM

We want to hear from you! Please feel free to comment, share and connect with us on Facebook and @CiscoSP360.

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Greg Smith

Sr. Manager, Marketing

Cisco Solutions Marketing

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Cisco and Illinois School District Make Learning Fun

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Morris (IL) Elementary School District 54 had a problem. The district had recently purchased and outfitted their students with 450 Chromebooks but only five of the computers would connect to a single WiFi coverage area. This spotty connection was frustrating students and teachers alike.

“We learned very quickly that we couldn’t have an effective one-to-one rollout without the infrastructure to support the number of devices we have,” says Dr. Teri Shaw, superintendent, Morris Elementary School District 54. “We needed to change gears and recover quickly before our one-to-one initiative turned into an epic failure.”

Shaw and the rest of the district turned to Cisco.

Thanks to Cisco and delivery partner Unified Concepts, Morris Elementary School District 54 was outfitted with a state-of-the-art wireless mobility solution. The solution was made up of the following Cisco products:

  • Cisco Aironet 3700 Series Access Point with integrated 802.11ac
  • Cisco 5508 Wireless Controller
  • Routing and Switching
  • Cisco Catalyst 3750-X Series Switches

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Byron Magrane

Product Manager, Marketing

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A Cisco employee gift on my first-year anniversary

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A Cross Pen with the Cisco logo — it’s my 1st anniversary gift. I just received it and did the official unwrapping.

Sure, it’s not very expensive, but it comes with whole-hearted, warm greetings from Cisco, delivered across the Pacific Ocean to me here in Shanghai, China, with my 1st Service Year Certificate and Greetings Letter from my boss, Natalie. 🙂

The Years of Service Anniversary Program is one of the Global Benefits programs at Cisco. It’s how they  say thanks to employees for their hard work, dedication, and for being a part of the Cisco family. It recognizes their contributions made to the company growth, innovation and culture.

Employees can select what they love from the Gift Library when the anniversary approaches. When I chose the pen, I saw the gifts awarded for the 30 years, 35 years and even 45 years!

I’m looking forward to the future gift on my 5th Anniversary!

Want to join us? Visit our Careers page!

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Sarah Shen

ASEAN Recruiter