We are embarking on a new technological journey that will fundamentally change forever the economy, society and the way that we live. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a world where up to 50 billion things (or devices) will be connected to the Internet by 2020; or, the equivalent of 6 devices for every person on the planet.
The clear winners in this revolution will be those companies that, not only embrace the Internet of Things, but use it to transform their businesses. Those winning companies will be the ones that integrate IoT into their operations, products and customer interactions to create new business models and sources of value. In fact, McKinsey estimates that there could be as much as $11 trillion per year by 2025 in new economic value created by adopting IoT.
Me (far left) and my fellow young professionals at Cisco.
The Internet is flooded with ways to succeed in life, business, happiness, relationships, and just about anything else that can be measured. A quick Google search will bring up thousands of articles from people who want to help.
As a young professional here at Cisco, I frequently catch myself wondering if I am on the right track. I’m in a HR rotational program, so I looked to other Cisco HR leaders for their advice.
1. Experience > School
“Don’t depend on everything you learn at school. Exposure to different experiences is key to your early success.” -Kevin Blair (@kevinblair), Senior Director HR
“Be open to new things, work outside your comfort zone, and go abroad (if you can) to meet other people and see new cultures.” -Celia Goudsmit-Gomes Veiga (@CeliaGoudsmitGV), Sales HR
Although it is more important than ever to get a degree, you can’t forget about living your life outside of school. Earning a 4.0 GPA and excelling in all your classes won’t necessarily translate to life outside of school. Sometimes you need to get your hands dirty.
2. It takes some good old-fashioned elbow grease
“Work hard in any job/role that you engage in and do everything you can to be really good at it. Even though it may not be your ultimate dream job, it will be experience that will help you become a true professional along the way.” -Jill Simpson (@jfsimpson2), Sales HR – Canada
“Follow your gut, but know that you won’t get that “dream” job right away. Sometimes you have to earn your strips.” -Amanda Darnell (@adarnellcisco), Recruiter
Don’t shy away from hard work or assume that everything will come to you. It might not be your dream, but if you don’t do it, then someone else will. And that other person will get the experience and earn the trust of senior leaders. We’ve all had those days of just plugging data into an excel spreadsheet… you’re not alone.
3. Know Yourself and the Company
“Figure out your strongest skills. Do you prefer work that is analytical and factual or creative and innovative?” -Elaine McCarthy (@elmccart), Engineering HR- Europe
“Can a company offering you a job take you where you want to go in the next three years? If not – don’t waste time on the position.” -Amanda Hobbs (@mandiehobbs), HR Development- Emerging Markets
You won’t be able to get what you want until you know what you want. Working in research will not be fulfilling if you really desire to interact with people. Although much of figuring out your goals comes from trial and error, knowing what you like and what a company can offer speeds up the process.
4. It’s okay to fail, if you fail forward
“Always be proactive.” -Allan Zhang, HR – Corp Functions
“It’s ok to make mistakes, but learn from them and move on.” -Janice Bergeron (@Janice911S), HR – Sales
Kermit the Frog once said that “life is like a movie, write your own ending.” The only way to get to the end is by moving forward through your own personal story. We all fail along the way, but what we make of those failures determines how our movie ends.
If you have some advice that you would like to add, please write it in the comments below. I certainly couldn’t cover everything in a single blog post!
#WeAreCisco, where each person is unique, but we bring our talents to work as a team and make a difference.
Yes, our technology changes the way the world works, lives, plays and learns, but our edge comes from our people.
We connect everything – people, process, data and things – and we use those connections to change our world for the better.
We innovate everywhere – From creating a new era of networking that adapts, learns and protects, to building Cisco Services that accelerate businesses and business results, we innovate everywhere. Our technology powers entertainment, retail, healthcare, education and more – from Smart Cities to your everyday devices.
We benefit everyone – We do all of this while striving for a culture that empowers every person to make a difference, at work and in our communities.
Colorful hair? Don’t care. Tattoos? Show off your ink. Like polka dots? That’s cool. Pop culture geek? Many of us are. Be you, with us!
If you want to see our culture in action, follow @WeAreCisco on the social channel of your choice:
In a recent review posted on Forbes.com, tech writer Kurt Marko heaped praise on the Cisco Aironet 1830 and 1850 access points. He called the Cisco products a, “stellar example of enterprise wireless system designed for small-to-medium sized businesses.” The article went on to further praise the ease and the short time it took to set up the access points.
In the article, Mobility Express was also praised. Marko said, “(Mobility Express) features a beautifully designed Web management interface exposing a plethora of network data and configuration settings.”
Life in the Digital Vortex is challenging—especially for retailers. In an environment where averaged across industries four of the top 10 incumbents will be displaced by digital disruption in the next five years, retail ranks as the third most vulnerable out of 12. Retailers are also being squeezed between online-only retailers and traditional competitors that are further along with their digital transformations.
But with the threat also comes opportunity. Cisco’s most recent Digital Value at Stake research highlights specific digital use cases that industries can implement now to drive new sources of value.
According to the research, six industries—manufacturing, financial services, retail, service provider, healthcare, and oil and gas—will account for 71 percent of the total private sector Digital Value at Stake over the next decade. Yet, retailers captured only 15 percent of their potential digital value last year.
For more digital transformation stories in retail, click here.
It is clear that retailers need to begin their digital transformation journeys, and do so immediately. If you’re like many retailers, however, you may not know where to begin. What’s needed is a clear path to creating business value from digitization.
If you are thinking about digital transformation, just getting started, or well on your way, I invite you to join me at my Big Idea presentation at NRF on Monday, Jan. 18. Specifically, I will be detailing a roadmap to digital value for retailers, including how to:
Assess your current digital assets and capabilities
Understand and select specific digital use cases based on our economic analysis
Close the gap in digital capabilities to achieve your business goals
By attending my session and learning about a digital transformation roadmap for your business, you will avoid being part of the 40 percent of retailers that could be displaced by digital disruption. Instead, you will be on your way to capturing your share of digital value that’s there for the taking.
Cisco partner Honeywell have published great customer story illustrating the OneWireless* Network Infrastructure solution that features Cisco innovation and ruggedization. It addresses customer issues of safety, reliability and efficiency. It provides true visibility for the customer. Read on to find out more…
SAMREF is a joint venture between Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco) and Mobil Yanbu Refining Company Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Exxon Mobil Corporation. The case study tells us that the SAMREF refinery complex in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia produces approximately 400,000 barrels of product daily including gasoline, heating oil, LPG, jet fuel and other energy products.
“Since 2013, SAMREF has used a wireless network to enable Wi-Fi clients and ISA100 Wireless field instruments to wirelessly connect and to obtain measurements in hard-to-access locations; this works consistently and reliably in areas previously considered impractical or off-limits.
Even with the flexibility to quickly and cost-effectively employ wireless closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, however, it is impossible to cover the entire site. As a result, those in the central control room can end up with no view of intrusions, fires, explosions, or other incidents facing emergency response teams. Plant managers or operations directors are left in the dark, usually completely reliant on verbal information from the teams on the ground.
To overcome this problem, an industrial wireless provider worked with SAMREF to deploy a live video solution for its emergency command vehicle, a first responder to any incident”***
Well, you now know that the industrial wireless partner was Honeywell, providing a solid Cisco mesh-based solution, with an architecture similar to the Honeywell image shown below.
It’s clear that SAMREF were looking for a solution that would provide strong business benefits:
Safety: improving plant and worker security.
Reliability: improving maintenance program and/or reducing maintenance costs.
Efficiency: managing long distance installations or remote sites with minimal up-front and life-cycle costs.
So Honeywell were charged with enhancing the customers incident management procedures and rescue ops to improve employee safety. The solution had to have a wireless network that was rugged and able to reliably transmit quality video from cameras to central control sites and mobile “Incident Commander” vehicles. That’s where Cisco and our partnership comes in:
There’s been a lot of talk in the past several months about composable infrastructure. It’s a new product category that has gained attention as Cisco and other vendors have introduced new products into the market. A webinar on January 21 with Forrester Research analyst, Richard Fichera, will provide insights into what is driving the demand for this new technology and explain the technology. The webinar will also feature a customer describing how they use composable infrastructure.
The increasing demand to provide an infrastructure that is more flexible and adaptable while still being easy to use is causing Cisco and other vendors to introduce new types of products. Composable infrastructure is a new category of systems that addresses this requirement. With new categories also comes some confusion, so we’ve asked an industry expert to provide some perspective for this webinar. The guest speaker, Richard Fichera, is a Vice President with Forrester Research. Rich is a principal analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals.
Malware sandboxes are automated dynamic analysis systems that execute programs in a controlled environment. Within the large volumes of samples submitted daily to these services, some submissions appear to be different from others and show interesting characteristics. At USENIX Security 2015 I presented a paper in which we proposed a method to automatically discover malware developments from samples submitted to online dynamic analysis systems. The research was conducted by dissecting the Anubis sandbox dataset which consisted of over 30M samples collected in six years. The methodology we proposed was effective and we were able to detect many interesting cases in which the malware authors directly interacted with the sandbox during the development phase of the threats.
Another interesting result that came from the research concerns the samples attributed to Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) campaigns. Surprisingly, some of the malware samples used in these sophisticated attacks had been submitted to the Anubis sandbox months — sometimes even years — before the attack had been attributed to the proper APT campaign by a security vendor. To be perfectly clear, we are not saying that it took security vendors months or years to detect a threat. Most times, we are able to detect the threats in no more than a few hours. It is just that the malware samples were mislabeled and not properly associated with APT campaigns. In general, the same goes for non-APT malware campaigns. In this blog post, we tried to see if the same applied to the Cisco dataset. Specifically, we chose ten APT campaigns, — some of which were already covered in the Usenix paper. We decided to inspect two different datasets: our incoming sample feeds / malware zoo, and the telemetry associated with our Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) solutions. Talos receives samples from over 100 external feeds ranging from anti-malware companies to research centers, while the AMP dataset contains telemetry from the Cisco AMP user-base.
The remaining part of this post is organized as follows. First, we show the APT campaigns we investigated. Second, we summarize the results of the analysis of the Talos dataset. Third, we show the results from the AMP dataset. Finally, we summarize our findings.
So you want that internship (at Cisco) but you’re not sure how to go about it? Never fear, Jackie Shuler is here (interviewing with me)! She’s the University Relations Lead – East at Cisco, and she gave me some great tips and insights to share with you.
Start Early – There’s simply no time like the present! Often, freshmen and sophomores are just trying to “find themselves” and figure out what they want to do. However, you should still be attending as many events and networking as much as possible. Starting early may even help you acquire multiple internships. Begin to build relationships in this time with recruiters so they can begin to know who you are and help you when the time comes to go after that dream internship.
Learn as much as you can about the industry and company. This one might seem like a no-brainer to some, but many applicants never even check out a company’s website! Take the time to research the company so you have a better understanding of what they do, the type of applicants they seek, and what opportunities may be made available to you. This will also help you develop questions to take with you to info sessions when campus reps visit your school.
Use Career Services – get your resume ready! Every campus offers resume building workshops and even interview preparation opportunities. Don’t pass these lessons up! Take this time to really work on having your resume stand out from the crowd, and have others look over your resume for any advice they can offer or typos.
What makes an Intern resume stand out? Jackie says overall relevance to the position is key, while showing a well-balanced skill set, leadership roles, and project experience. Show your accomplishments, previous project roles, languages, and tech challenges you may have worked through. These points help to open doors for conversations during the interview process!
Network with former interns! Many of Cisco’s former interns make it out to various events throughout the year, get to know them and learn about their experiences as a Cisco intern. Take this opportunity to ask them questions and gain a peer’s perspective on what a Cisco internship might look like.
Use LinkedIn Search! A great feature on LinkedIn is the ability to search for alumni from your school that currently work at Cisco. Briefly take the time to reach out to them and ask them any questions you may have. Connecting on LinkedIn is a great way to further your research and many people will be open to helping someone who is early in the career.
Remember that during this process you want to take initiative and show that you’re interested and even passionate about Cisco as recruiters will do their best to set those candidates up for success. Don’t be afraid to ask as many questions as possible, and continue to network and reach out to our recruiters. Many times our recruiters will recognize candidates as those relationships build or they ask more questions which can lead to landing your dream internship role with Cisco!
Do you have any insights on what helped get you’re an internship role? Share them with us in the comments below!
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