Year: 2016

April 27, 2016 1 Comment
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Passing the Torch: Inspiring Girls to Careers in Tech

Inspiration is the name of the game, and Cisco is going for gold!

Everywhere you turn, you find Cisco’s people connecting, innovating and driving change to benefit everyone around the world, and Thursday, April 28, 2016 will be no exception.

Tomorrow, thousands of Cisco employees will turn our focus to inspiring the next generation of Ground breakers, Innovators, Rule breakers and Leaders. In case you didn’t notice, we’re talking about GIRLs. Four thousand of them to be exact.

Girls Power Tech inspires women of all ages to pursue a career in technology
Girls Power Tech inspires women of all ages to pursue a career in technology.

Young women from all around the world will be coming to a Cisco campus near you to learn about technology and engage with over 2,000 Cisco employee volunteers with one single goal in mind – inspiring them to see the possibilities that a career in IT can offer.

This effort – called Girls Power Tech, a Cisco Global Mentoring Initiative — is happening in conjunction with the 6th annual United Nation’s International Girls in ICT Day. Day-long learning events will take place at 103 Cisco offices in 60 countries around the world.  Events begin on Thursday and continue through May 19. These events will empower and inspire students to pursue careers in information and communication technologies (ICT) through exposure to the Internet of Things, Cisco technology and mentoring by Cisco employees.

Kate Baldwin,a Cisco Olympian, will inspire hundreds of young women as part of Girls Power Tech!
Kate Baldwin,a Cisco Olympian, will inspire hundreds of young women as part of Girls Power Tech!

Kate Baldwin, who is a Cisco Olympian and Olympic torch bearer, will be running for the next generation of girls in technology as she carries the torch through the streets of Brazil. Tomorrow, Kate will be speaking to 140 students in person at Cisco’s RTP Campus and to an additional 200 students around the world via TelePresence about her personal journey.

“Growing the number of girls in tech has been a passion of mine since I entered my first Computer Science classroom and realized that no one there looked or thought like I did. Thankfully, Cisco recognizes the importance of this cause and provides opportunities for all employees to make an impact through a variety of giving back activities. It’s basic math and science – we need more technologists, and women are an underutilized resource. Studies show that diversity of teams adds value. There is no debate that we need more women in STEM, the real question is “What are you doing to help?”

In Brazil, Yohansson Nascimento is considered one of the top Paralympic athletes in the world and one of the favorites to earn medals in Rio 2016. Born without both hands, Yohansson learned early on how to overcome difficulties and approach every day with a positive attitude. Tomorrow, Yohansson will speak to Cisco’s Girls Power Tech students in Brazil about motivation, overcoming difficulties and pursuing your dreams.

yohansson
Yohansson will speak to Cisco’s Girls Power Tech students in Brazil about motivation, overcoming difficulties and pursuing your dreams.

Girls Power Tech will be filled with moments of discovery for these young women. I hope you will join me in helping to make sure that #GirlsPowerTech tomorrow and in the future.

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Kirsten Weeks

Senior Manager for Community Relations

Global Marketing and Corporate Communications

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Challenging the Status Quo at FICO World 2016

Digitalization is dramatically changing the world, especially for Financial Services. Having to go inside a branch to schedule a meeting with a finance or mortgage expert is so yesterday. Service, convenience, security and analytics through all channels.

During this week in Washington D.C., Cisco is joining the world’s thought leaders and business experts at FICO World 2016.  It’s quite a meaty agenda covering areas from analytics innovation, customer experience, regulatory compliance, fraud, security and many more.

Continue reading “Challenging the Status Quo at FICO World 2016”

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Leni Selvaggio

Global Senior Manager

Financial Services Industry

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Vblock Systems Built on a Foundation of UCS Integrated Infrastructure

I’m looking forward to EMC World 2016 at the Venetian in Las Vegas where thousands of attendees will meet and learn about the latest in compute, storage, networking, and solutions.  This year Cisco is a Diamond sponsor at EMC World 2016. The Cisco booth is number 412, right near the entrance to the exhibit hall. Please stop for a moment and participate in our interactive booth experience, joint theater presentations, chat with our experts and attend our speaking sessions.  In addition, Cisco will give away three different prizes including Apple TVs after each theatre preso, Cisco hats and Microsoft Surface Pro tablets at the end of day raffles.

Apple_TV     Surface Pro    Cisco_hats

 

At EMC World 2016 and Cisco booth 412 attendees also get to see how Cisco MDS 9000 Series Switches have met and often exceeded the demanding requirements for storage area networks for more than a decade. They offer a combination of performance, non-stop operations, and multi-protocol flexibility.  In addition, learn more how Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) reduces TCO, automates IT tasks, and accelerates data center application deployments. It accomplishes this using a business-relevant software defined networking (SDN) policy model across networks, servers, storage, security, and services.

Many of these theatre presentations will also revolve around Cisco UCS servers and Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure.  What are Cisco UCS servers?   It can really be summed up in a few words: software-abstracted hardware.  The “secret sauce” of UCS is really is software–compute hardware (servers) are abstracted in software objects, called service profiles that live in the network.   It sounds like a simple concept, but it affords both UCS Servers and UCS Integrated Infrastructure customers numerous, business-altering advantages.  These are real-world advantages that accrue to customers just like you.

Two of our earlier blogs take a look explaining what UCS Server are by metaphor and analogy:

UCS Integrated Infrastructure take UCS Servers and their benefits to the next level by with combining UCS Servers, Nexus switches and UCS Director with EMC storage to form a vBlock. One could think of an equation:

  1. UCS Integrated Infrastructure plus EMC Storage  = Vblock

 

Vblock_LCD

UCS Integrated Infrastructure can really be thought of as the “Intel Inside” of Vblocks.   Much of the IP of a Vblock is contained in these Cisco technologies that are branded UCS Integrated Infrastructure. Looking a little deeper inside a Vblock show that  UCS Integrated Infrastructure offers many advantages and benefits that aren’t readily apparent from looking at the outside of a Vblock.  Next time you hear the word “Vblock”, please also think of the benefits that the Vblock gains due to UCS Integrated Infrastructure.

Another interesting question is if UCS Integrated Infrastructure comprises such a large part of the Vblock value proposition: what kind of benefits does it in fact provide to a Vblock?   Luckily, we have such a proof point in a recent IDC study.    For example, this IDC study showed how 15 companies running Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure achieved 483% 5-year ROI, 7-month breakeven.

Click On IDC Paper Image to Get Paper

IDC_UCSIII

This same study went on to list benefits beyond these significant monetary benefits. Some of these benefits include:

  1. 76% decrease in unplanned downtime per year
  2. 56% decrease in a mean time to repair
  3. Large increases in productive staff hours

UCSII_Benefits

 

These and other benefits are listed in the IDC paper.  However, what really matter is how UCS Integrated Infrastructure helps your company and employees.

  1. Could your staff be working on other high-value projects due to the productivity benefits gained by UCS Integrated Infrastructure?
  2. Could you have less infrastructure downtime?
  3. Could your business automate processes and bring software benefits to compute hardware provisioning and deployment?
  4. Could your business have lower environmental costs due to SingleConnect technology of UCS Integrated Infrastructure?

Could your IT shop be missing out on these benefits?  Please stop by booth number 412 and learn more about how UCS, Vblock / UCS Integrated Infrastructure can help your business and IT experts become more productive.  In fact, perhaps, with UCS Integrated Infrastructure, your infrastructure can truly serve your business, not the other way around.

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Bruno Messina

Product Manager

Unified Computing Systems Data Center

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The Power of Cooperation and Imagination

Lew Tucker delivered a keynote at the OpenStack Summit yesterday. Which isn’t actually all that unusual. He’s been up to his neck in OpenStack for quite some time, leading cloud efforts at Cisco, and serving as Vice Chairman of the OpenStack Foundation.

Lew spoke yesterday, and for me, the two most interesting ideas he shared were these: One—that humans are designed to cooperate. Or rather that our ability to cooperate on a large scale around abstract ideas (religion, government, the concept of nations) is what’s allowed us to rise above the other creatures competing for dominance on this small blue planet. That idea didn’t come from Lew—it came from an Israeli history professor who studies early humans—but Lew shared it to illustrate the notion that cooperation is a winning strategy, and that we’re absolutely heading in the right direction when we work on open source projects. We’re employing an approach that has been tremendously successful in the past, and although we have often gotten away from it and embraced more proprietary models in the service of individual profit, we may have been sacrificing some of the significant advantages we gain when we work together.

I liked that. Great point.

The other message he wanted to get across was that when it comes to open source in general, and OpenStack in particular, Cisco is all-in.

I think that sometimes, because we’ve made such a name for ourselves in the networking hardware business, people assume that Cisco is not really a committed player in the open source software space. That we’re dabbling, or we’re latecomers.

But the truth is quite the opposite.

Yes, we are a networking giant, and hardware continues to be our bread and butter. But we figured out long ago that a shift was afoot. That software was going to reshape our industry and all the industries we serve. So we got involved early. We were part of the Diablo design summit in 2011, and were part of the original group of sponsors that supported the formation of the OpenStack Foundation in 2012.

Today, cloud is absolutely central to our long-term strategy at Cisco. We’re acquiring solutions externally (Metapod, Piston, CliQr), building new technologies internally (Mantl, Shipped, Contiv), and partnering with software innovators (Pivotal, Apprenda) to make private cloud easier than ever to deploy, manage, and use.

Want the full story? The recording of Lew’s keynote:

Also, information about each of the products and partnerships I’ve mentioned can be found at the links above. Better yet though—stop by the Cisco booth C11 sometime over the next two days and ask any of the Cisco engineers on hand for a demo. We’re all really excited about the direction this company is headed, and these guys in particular will be happy to talk to you about our newest innovations all day long.

So pick their brains. Wear them out. Squeeze them until you’ve extracted every ounce of cloud knowledge they have to offer. And debate them on points where you disagree. The more we exchange information about these abstract ideas–like all those that came before–the better off we’ll be.

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Ali Amagasu

Marketing Communications Manager

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The “Wizzards” of Adware

Talos posted a blog, September 2015, which aimed to identify how often seemingly benign software can be rightly condemned for being a piece of malware. With this in mind, this blog presents an interesting piece of “software” which we felt deserved additional information disclosure. This software exhibits several questionable behaviors including:

  • Attempts to detect sandboxes via a number of techniques
  • Attempts to detect AV
  • Attempts to detect security tools and forensic software
  • Attempts to detect remote desktop
  • Secretly installs software on the end host without user interaction or EULAs
  • Informs C2 via encrypted channel what software was installed and what “effective_price” was associated with it

Read More >>

 

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Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

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Vulnerability Spotlight: Further NTPD Vulnerabilities

As a member of the Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative, Cisco is contributing to the CII effort by evaluating the Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd) for security defects. We previously identified a series of vulnerabilities in the Network Time Protocol daemon; through our continued research we have identified further vulnerabilities in the software.

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Talos Group

Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group

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Win – Win: Enterprise-Grade Data Preparation for Business and IT

According to leading analyst firms, in the next two years, the majority of business analysts will be using data preparation tools to access, prepare and deliver data for analysis.

Significant reductions in time and effort benefit the business. However, because these efforts often occur outside the domain of IT, the traditional guardians of governance, scalability and security, enterprises are at risk.

Cisco has the answer with Cisco Data Preparation, the only enterprise-grade data preparation solution that satisfies Business and IT needs.

Demand for Data Preparation is Driven By Business

Following the rise of self-service analytics and big data, self-service data preparation demand is exploding as organizations struggle with all the manual steps typically required to get the data ready in advance of analysis. Slide1

Business users quickly fall in love with Cisco Data Preparation’s ease-of-use, agility and comprehensive functionality. This is critical as traditional integration methods, even agile ones such as Cisco Data Virtualization, still require bottlenecked IT’s help.

And the results are tremendous as faster data preparation yields faster insights and thus better business outcomes sooner.

But IT Needs a Seat at the Table

While it is fabulous that business is readily embracing data preparation, IT still requires a seat at the table. Why? IT is responsible for data governance, security and scalability. This is especially important as the number of users rise into the hundreds and the volumes of data being prepared rises into the terabytes. And no one wants a “Wall Street Journal Moment” where your company is on the cover of the Journal due to a data security breach.

Win-Win with Cisco Data Preparation

So as you, like many others, adopt data preparation tools over the next few years, remember to consider both the business and IT requirements.

Here is the essentials checklist from the business side:

  • Easy to Use
  • Agile
  • Comprehensive

And here is the essentials checklist from the IT side:

  • Governed
  • Secure
  • Scalable

It doesn’t have to be a win for the business or a win for IT. With Cisco Data Preparation it can be a win for both.

Learn More
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfOCyaWbpmw&list=PLFT-9JpKjRTDSyR4jbCVS5e94fzzhIzWz&index=8

Also check out Cisco Data Preparation’s homepage for additional insights.

 

Join the Conversation

Follow @CiscoDataVirt and @CiscoAnalytics.

Learn More from My Colleagues

Check out the blogs of Mala Anand, Mike Flannagan and Kevin Ott to learn more.

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Bob Eve

No Longer with Cisco

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Hybrid Cloud: It’s Here!

We are living in the digital age and the effect it is having on the way we work and live are continuing to grow. IT professionals have never felt as much pressure to help their organization to move with speed and agility than today.  In response, large number of organizations are implementing private cloud.  But with the broad range of cloud platforms, along with the explosion of new infrastructure and application services, private cloud management is no longer sufficient.

Developers and business leaders want to build new software across a wide range of cloud platforms. But how do you source and manage all these ecosystems without placing your company, reputation or even your job at risk?   If you feel like you are scrambling, you are not alone.   Hence the rise of hybrid cloud.

Continue reading “Hybrid Cloud: It’s Here!”

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Joann Starke

No Longer with Cisco

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Interop and EMC World – A double header in Vegas next week

If it is May, it must be raining conventions in Las Vegas. I am heading for a double header the first week of May to be part of the excitement at Interop and EMC world. It is going to be extra exciting for me personally, as I will be shuttling from Mandalay Bay (Interop) and EMC world (Venetian) every day to meet Cisco’s customers and partners and share with them what’s latest from Cisco on the technology innovations front, and how they can derive business outcomes deploying them.

In this blog, I want to give a quick tour of Cisco ACI presence at Interop and EMC World. First, Interop.

interop1.jpg

Interop is near and dear to me. Both in 2014 and 2015, I have fond memories of walking up to the awards stage to receive Best of Interop awards for Cisco Nexus 9516 and Cisco APIC products .This year  we have several in the list of finalists and running for the coveted winner’s spot. The ringside view to catch all Cisco ACI excitement is no doubt, the Cisco booth. Jeff Reed’s keynote on May 5 is a must attend if you are embarking on a digital journey to transform your business.

Next, I’d like to draw your attention to the Cloud Scale Nexus 9200 and 9300 Series Switches we recently introduced to the market. Visit Cisco booth# 105 in the world of Solutions to see these switches up close and personal, and learn how you can future-proof your data centers with the option of 10/25/40/50/100G – an “all-in-one” offering. Our product experts will be on show-floor to explain the latest ASICs powering these switches, and how they enable greater application visibility via real-time telemetry. Besides, we have compelling Ted-style talks at the Cisco Theater featuring ACI Security and  L4-L7 services automation with ACI among some of the major topics.  And should you desire a deep-dive on these or any topic, do not hesitate to stop by our demo Pods where we can engage you in a one-one style white-board architecture discussion. Plus there is plenty more and our booth ambassadors will be happy to assist you.

After spending the morning session at Interop, I will be heading to EMC World during the afternoon session to continue my customer engagements.

interop2.jpg

At EMC World, the CliQr-ACI joint solution will dominate in both the world of solutions and in the breakout sessions. Cisco Insieme Product experts Carly Stoughton and Farid will lead a breakout session on May 4 about Cisco’s recent acquisition of CliQr, and how Cisco’s DC portfolio and VCE Vblock enable customers to embrace hybrid-cloud, and gain new business opportunities. We will also have technical demos at the World of Solutions featuring CliQr-ACI-EMC and ACI-EMC RecoverPoint. This validates the breadth and depth of Cisco’s DC portfolio. For a detailed tour of our solutions and product showcase visit Cisco Booth# 412

interop3

We will also have meeting rooms for one-on-one  customer engagements.  Please let us know if you have a desire to engage our Product Managers for a deep-dive.

It won’t all be hard work as there will be plenty to party hard about. EMC World will be providing attendees a music feast on Customer Appreciation Day with Duran Duran. I could go on and on, but it wouldn’t do justice to the vast array of activities in store for you.  Have a great Interop and EMC World – see you there!

interop4

Useful Links

www.cisco.com/go/aci

www.interop.com

www.emcworld.com

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Ravi Balakrishnan

Senior Product Marketing Manager

Datacenter Solutions