Cisco Champion Hosts
Bill Carter (@ccie5022), Senior Solutions Analyst
Dennis Heim (@collabsensei), Solution Architect
Eric Perkins (@perk_zilla), Data Center Solutions Samurai
Jody Lemoine (@ghostinthenet), Network Architect
Tim Miller (@broadcaststorm), Network Engineer
Bill Burnam (@stilgar), Lead Network & Infrastructure Engineer
Change is essential if you want your business to be able to meet the evolving needs of your customers. To succeed, you need to be able to innovate faster than your competitors. At the same time, however, rapid change and rising complexity can disrupt your operations and slow your business down.
The cloud offers organizations many ways to address change and complexity. And when implemented as part of an optimized cloud strategy, the benefits are real:
77% IT cost reduction
72% Ability to meet SLAs
87% Time to Provision IT Services
200% Strategic Allocation of IT Budget
11% Revenue Growth
Yet only 3% of companies have optimized cloud strategies in place. Are you part of the 3%, or are you missing out?
It’s time to reimagine how you see your cloud. With the digital transformation, you can create new customer experiences, empower workforce innovations, and transform your business model and processes.
At Cisco, we make it easy to reimagine your cloud and the way you do business. We believe that cloud should be simple. But we also want to make sure you have options. We do this by:
Bringing together secure hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud managed platforms, and as-a-Service offerings.
Supplying the security, analytics, and application programming interfaces (API) needed for both on-premises and public cloud environments.
Offering a wide portfolio of Cisco Powered services available through our extensive partner ecosystem.
For Cisco engineers, last week was about as inspirational as it can get. We held our annual Pioneer Awards, Cisco’s most prestigious accolade for innovation. These awards are presented annually to the teams or individuals who have delivered breakthrough innovation in product and service design and development. Throughout the night, I had the pleasure of honoring incredible work that was developed through the ideas and ingenuity of many extraordinary Cisco engineers.
As the event was ending, one of this year’s award winners stopped to thank me on my way out. While I appreciated the gesture of course, it was what he thanked me for that stood out. He summed up everything that makes Cisco such an exciting place for engineers. He thanked me for the opportunity to develop innovation at a global scale. While we all know innovation is alive and well in the technology industry, Cisco innovates at a scale that enables our engineers to change the world with their ideas. As I headed to my car, I couldn’t help but think how it’s my job to continue making this opportunity possible for all of our engineers.
I recently took over the reigns for Cisco’s $32B Networking and Security Business. One thing I know from this experience is that alignment across engineering is critical to our success – it’s one of my top priorities – especially when you take into account that we do build at a global scale. Over the past few months, I’ve worked closely with our senior leaders to integrate our development strategies and structure our teams around the technology areas most important to our customers. One of these areas is the data center.
Building a unified approach for our next generation data center strategy means we need tighter alignment. Combining all of our data center assets together under one leader will help us strengthen our position to drive growth and innovation at a pace our customers expect. It also will better enable them to design and build their private and public cloud infrastructure with Cisco’s equipment and software.
On this note, today I’m announcing an integrated next-generation data center team and a new senior leader. Starting tomorrow, Roland Acra will rejoin Cisco as SVP/GM, Data Center Business Group. Roland will be responsible for defining the next phase of our data center strategy and driving development for our data center portfolio. His group will include all data center switching products – NX2/4/5/6K, NX3K, NX7K, and NX9K, UCS, SAN, and associated products and programs. We will consolidate all of the NXOS development team under this group as well.
As a long-standing industry expert in Internet routing, software engineering and communication protocol development, Roland fits right in – once again. He is a Cisco veteran having held several general management and executive leadership positions from 1991 – 2003. In 2010, he came back to Cisco as Vice President in our Smart Grid Business Unit, following the acquisition of Arch Rock , a developer of IPv6-based wireless sensor networks where he served as President and CEO. Prior to Arch Rock, he was the President and CEO of Procket Networks. He holds a Master of Science degree in Statistics from Texas A&M University, a Master’s degree in Engineering from the Ecole Nationale Superierue des Telecommunications in Paris and a degree in mathematics and physics from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.
The fact that Roland is joining Cisco for a third stint, speaks for itself. He understands the market dynamics, the massive opportunity we have from cloud disruption, what our customers’ need from our development strategies and how to build a software business. Equally as important, he understands from hands-on experience how to operate a large engineering team at the scale of Cisco.
As distributed computing continues to evolve, today’s businesses are managing data center, private and public cloud environments and our customers must redesign their networks to support hybrid cloud strategies. With an aligned team and strong leadership, Cisco engineering is building innovation for the next wave of IP networking – digital-ready infrastructure that is simple, automated and secure.
On 21 October a complex and sophisticated global DDoS attack was launched against US DNS provider Dyn, using a botnet of just 100,000 IoT devices. Despite Dyn’s quick response, countless customers including some of the world’s biggest internet companies were taken offline.
Cisco partner Arbor Networks recorded an average of 124,000 DDoS events per week over the past 18 months. And a 73 per cent increase in peak attack size from 2015 to 1H in 2016, with the US pegged as a top target.
And carrying out these attacks is now easier than ever, as research from Cisco partner Radware discovered. With a host of websites now offering ‘DDoS for hire’ for as little as $9.99 a month, it’s accessible to anyone. Many of the sites investigated in the study had more than 20,000 registered users.
Your business lives and dies on the quality of the service you provide, and even minutes offline can cost you and your customers dear.
Find and Fix
So with DDoS attacks growing in frequency, volume and complexity, what steps can you take to wrest back control? Put simply, it’s all about being able to see the problem, and then effectively mitigate it.
First, this means building up an understanding of how the network operates in ‘peace time.’ With this, you can develop policies to investigate further if network behavior deviates too far from the norm. By collecting and analysing information from appliances, endpoints and networks in real time, you can build a better picture of what’s going on. Some of the more advanced tools act like a kind of ‘network DVR,’ enabling you to forensically analyze network flows one at a time.
Once you’ve spotted the problem, it’s time to mitigate. Best practice is to do this as close to the source as possible to avoid bringing ‘dirty’ traffic across the network. These controls can be put into the network where it makes sense – at the CPE, the network edge and even into the infrastructure of the cloud/service provider.
Defense in Depth
DDoS attacks are usually a hybrid of volumetric and application based threats. These require a defense in depth approach with a portfolio of solutions, marrying threat context to network context. The portfolio includes, but is not limited to: visibility systems, and network infrastructure that feeds those systems the information; DDoS protection systems; content controls; cloud, network and premise-based malware and botnet controls; next-generation firewalls; and email protection.
Different attacks will require different combinations of assets, that provide visibility and mitigation control services. With these systems in place you can find and remove malware as it moves through the network. The result? A major reduction in the density of attack IP addresses.
4 Tips for DDoS Defense
Know the threat. Gain visibility of the network in peace time.
Mitigate as close to the threat as possible. This will minimize collateral damage.
Create mitigation policies well before an attack. You don’t want to do this while trying to resolve an existing problem.
See and disable botnet/malware as early as possible. This calls for a coordinated response between endpoints, networks and the DDoS applications consumed.
Are you prepared?
Cisco and its partners have a broad range of tools and services designed to help you “find and fix” and apply defense-in-depth strategies to overcome DDoS. The aim throughout is to make the “mean time to mitigation” as short as possible. To find out more, watch our webcast, DDoS Protection for the Network.
Every year as QCon San Francisco approaches, I get excited to look at new innovations and learn from bleeding-edge enterprises that are using new technologies to give their companies a competitive advantage. It’s hard for me to believe that 2016 marks the 10th year of this event. And this year’s QCon is shaping up to be a must-attend event. Some of the topics that I find very interesting that we’ll be demonstrating at the event are around deep learning, unikernels, stream processing, serverless, and cloud native (containers and microservices architectures).
Cisco’s theme for this 10th year anniversary of QCon is “Your Partner for Software Acceleration,” which has a very interesting background in how Cisco has evolved and is continuing to evolve as a software company. There are several areas to address in this statement, but first, allow me to level set for a few moments. The definition of a partner I think about is:
A partner is a member in a partnership, an entity in which both the profits or losses of a business or other venture are shared between all members
The above definition means that to be a partner, there has to be vested interest in both parties being successful and there is an implicit expectation that together they will be more profitable than separate.
The other definition I need to clarify is software acceleration as it’s over loaded too often today. Acceleration is defined as:
Increase in the rate of speed of something
In physics, it is defined as the rate of change of velocity per unit of time: a=vf-vi/t. This makes me think about software development velocity measured by sprint duration. Therefore I would define software acceleration as:
Increasing the rate of software delivered
Coming back to the Cisco’s theme, we have been working very closely with our customers to accomplish their business goals in a way that increases the rate at which they can deliver software. We accomplish this through 4 specific areas:
We are contributing to cloud native projects and focusing in the area of integrated tools and the environments for software development and lifecycle management needed to accelerate delivery.
As containers offer a way to isolate applications on infrastructure and remove inconsistent infrastructure environments, conflicts, and server management headaches, they do present a new set of housekeeping challenges and complexities. Cisco offers developers several options to address their enterprise goals. For those who would prefer to run and manage their containers and seeking an open source integrated container management solution, Mantl will offload the management of containers in a datacenter. For those who want to completely offload container management and achieve NoOp, Cisco, along with our software partners, can offer Container Management-as-a-Service (CMaaS) across cloud, fog, and IoT devices.
For IT professionals who are interested in the benefits of OpenStack without the headache of managing and migrating to the latest versions OpenStack, Cisco Metacloud provides Openstack-as-a-Service.
There is also a PaaS aspect for developers enabled by Cloud Foundry through our Pivotal partnership and OpenShift through our Red Hat partnership.
Stop by the Cisco booth (#4) at QCon and see these four areas in action. We look forward to a great show and hope to see you November 7th thru 9th.
It was an honor to sponsor and attend the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) 123rd Annual Conference in San Diego, California a few weeks ago. The event had a great turnout of more than sixteen thousand, including 11,453 delegates and 4,945 exhibitors.
Shelley Zimmerman, Chief of Police, San Diego Police Department, opened the conference with a fantastic speech about how public safety is a shared responsibility and the need to keep communities safe through collaboration, communication and information sharing.
Simon Sinek, the author of “Start with Why” and “Leaders Eat Last” also delivered an exceptional keynote during the Opening Ceremony, sharing how leaders can inspire cooperation, trust, and change.
“It’s not the people, it’s the environment. That’s why we have leaders,” said Simon.
IACP / Cisco Community Policing Awards Reception
Each year since 1998, the International Association of Chiefs of Police Community Policing Committee has recognized the best community policing practices of agencies around the world. Entries are categorized by population and feature innovative ideas that utilize the power of community policing, through collaboration and partnerships, to make communities safer.
One of the sessions I found most interesting was one that covered Digital Evidence Management in the Cloud presented by Alison Brooks, IDC, Research Director, Global Smart Cities and Public Safety and Eldon Amoroso, Birch Forest Projects Inc., Consultant. The research, which was conducted by Canada’s Center for Security Studies Program, addressed core areas in cloud, including how to manage stakeholders & governance, technology scope and parameters, implementation, security provisions and key business outcomes.
General Assembly, Uniform Day, and Host Chiefs Night
The IACP Elections Commission Report was presented during the General Assembly. All police officials were asked to wear their department’s dress uniform to celebrate the association’s diversity and internationalism. This created a spectacular visual display of uniforms from around the world. Speakers from around the globe also addressed critical issues confronting law enforcement.
Annual Banquet
The IACP Annual Banquet featured the formal swearing-in of the 2016–2017 IACP President as well as the Board of Officers. It was a privilege to spend an evening with so many wonderful men and women from around the world. Congratulations to the 2016–2017 IACP President, Chief Donald W. De Lucca!
We loved engaging with the community online as well, check out some of our favorite tweets below!
Special thanks to IACP and our Cisco partners who demonstrated digital public safety solutions in the Exhibitor Hall.
We look forward to the 124th annual conference being held in Philadelphia, PA.
Do your peers consider you to be a thought leader based on your strong technical knowledge of Cisco products and technologies? Do you maintain an active online or social presence to interact with others and share what you know?
Cisco Champions are regarded as experts in Cisco products and technologies by their peers and actively share their knowledge, expertise, and thoughts in technical forums, communities, user groups, social media, speaking engagements, and across the social web with Cisco. The program has been running for more than 3 years, and each year open nominations are held to find and select the best candidates from around the world.
If that sounds like you*, we invite you to nominate yourself or someone you know for the 2017 Cisco Champion program. The application form will be open now thru December 15th, 201612/21/2016 (extended!).
Impact: The Cisco Champion program is an an award-winning initiative that connects a passionate group of technology enthusiasts with Cisco subject matter experts. Participants gain access to a global network of Champions and interact directly with Cisco through technical briefings, podcasts, blogs, and in-person events.
What is a thought leader? Thought leaders are regarded as a community influencer/technical authority via online and offline contributions in social media, third-party technical forums, communities, user groups, speaking engagements, or other venues.
Fill out the application to be a 2017 Cisco Champion. 2017 Cisco Champion applications are now closed.
I’ve learned more about trademark rules in the last year than I probably ever wanted to. I’ll explain.
About two years ago, Cisco acquired Metacloud, the company I worked for, along with a team of brilliant engineers, product managers, marketers, and operations folks. As we worked through the integration process, we learned that while our founders secured the Metacloud trademark in the United States, we didn’t own it in France. As a global company, this created an issue for Cisco, so we became Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud, and later, Cisco Metapod.
And yes, we know Metapod is a Pokemon character. And yes, we saw The Register poking fun, and we laughed with you.
Metapod never felt quite right, so a few months ago, we negotiated with the French company. As of today, we’re happy to announce that we have secured the rights to use Metacloud again.
Aside from making a trove of old t-shirts relevant again, this name change also marks a new era for Metacloud under the leadership of Kip Compton. Our product—the combination of software, hardware, and team who operates it in an as a Service model– has undergone some changes resulting in significant improvements. Recently, we rebased our platform and toolsets to leverage Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution so we could focus on adding value beyond what you’d find in a standard OpenStack deployment. We’ve added some additional monitoring capabilities. We’ve hired more folks and introduced a new Delivery Management role to work with our customers as we build, operate, and scale deployments and availability zones.
On the engineering side, we’ve reorganized to drive consistency across a base platform so we can take advantage of security and networking technologies as well as containers and microservices tooling. As we look toward the end of the calendar year, we’ll also have some exciting integrations to announce and additional services and capabilities you won’t find anywhere else.
Operating a cloud can be costly and time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Most of our customers have gone down a DIY path to validate OpenStack for private cloud usage, but struggle to keep their platforms stable, performant, and up-to-date. Others are looking for a way to augment their public cloud usage to save money and keep data on-premises. Then there are those who lack budget or talent to deploy and operate at scale.
Some of our customers have spoken publicly about their success with Metacloud, including Chris Launey of Disney, and Mark Dickerson from Technicolor. Weston Jossey of Tapjoy detailed the cost savings over public cloud and the increase in performance. And not a single customer has left us. In fact, most of our customers continue to grow with us by adding additional capacity or availability zones. Use cases include software testing and development, big data, media storage and/or delivery, ITaaS, and beyond. Pretty meta, right?
Over the course of the next few days, you’ll start seeing Metacloud replacing Metapod on our web pages and in our materials. In the meantime, if you’d like a demo, or you’re interested in a TCO/ROI evaluation, we’re happy to help. Visit the Metacloud website to find out more.
Signed,
Your friendly neighborhood evangelista, Niki Acosta
Rockwell Automation Fair: Atlanta Georgia, Georgia World Congress Center – Nov 9-10, 2016
There’s never been a better time to embrace the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), or Industrie 4.0 than now, all while confidently extending security throughout your plant. And there’s no better place to do that than Rockwell Automation’s upcoming Automation Fair (#AutoFair16). As always, this event is a can’t-miss conference for all of you who are in plant management, controls, operations, or IT for industrial companies. The best part of the event – It’s free!
Visit over 150 exhibits and learn from more than 110 industry forums, hands-on labs, technical sessions (also free), and earn Professional Development Hours. It’s also a great opportunity to Network with industry experts and peers.
Reflecting on our strong relationship with Rockwell Automation, Cisco will again have a strong presence (Booth #1331) at this event including speaker presentations (including one by me on Digital Manufacturing solutions in practice!).
Our goal is to help customers start their own digital manufacturing transformation with easy to deploy & manage solutions and by extending security everywhere – from the Enterprise down to the shop floor. And make sure the solutions meet both IT and Operational needs.
Below is a summary of the solutions we will be highlighting in the Cisco booth:
Connected Factory: Includes Converged PlantWide Ethernet that enables solutions like Cisco Collaboration for Industry, Wireless and Location Based Services, and Connected Machines for machine optimization – all protected with Cisco Factory Security.
Connected Factory Security: Manufacturing is the number one targeted Industry for cyberattacks and security breaches. Learn how comprehensive security from the enterprise to the shop floor can lower your costs, improve safety & reduce downtime.
Converged PlantWide Ethernet: A network backbone that can handle the demands and unleash the possibilities of digital technology. Learn how adopting the solution architecture will allow your manufacturing processes to securely operate at higher levels of performance, efficiency, and uptime.
Collaboration for Industry: Learn how remote expert solutions allow you to oversee more plants, in more places, with a smaller team of experts. See how Virtual Expertise On-Demand with Telepresence, Spark, Webex, and other Cisco and partner solutions can lower cost while improving efficiency and uptime.
Factory Wireless and location-based services: See how comprehensive wireless and effective tracking of assets on the plant floor allow you to manage all the materials, people, and products you depend on in your factory.
We’ll also be giving away 1 drone and 3 yeti cooler cups per day to those who participate in our contest:
Follow us on Twitter at @CiscoMFG to see the live activity at the show if you’re unable to make it to Atlanta! If you haven’t registered yet, you can do so here.
Other show highlights include:
Rockwell’s Connected Enterprise booth (#1341) demonstrates a highly connected, knowledge-enabled industrial enterprise where devices and processes are optimized to enhance productivity, safety and security, sustainability, and economic performance. Rockwell will highlight some key Cisco Solutions including telepresence units and our Cisco Video Surveillance Operations Manager software, including feeds from Cisco security cameras around the show.
Visit the FANUC booth (#1661) to see how FANUC machines help aggregate data from devices and analyze big data onsite using Cisco switching, security, and embedded computing technologies before transmitting relevant results to the Cisco cloud for additional analyses. Learn how the solution dramatically reduced production downtime and increased overall equipment effectiveness.
Also find us in the Industrial IP Advantage booth (#1641) to learn how manufacturing and industrial companies can build more successful businesses by deploying a secure, holistic digital communications fabric based on standard, unmodified use of the Internet Protocol.
You can also see Cisco products featured in Rockwell’s premier show area, the Integrated Architecture Booth (#1647), on the Networks Wall display. See you in Atlanta!
Get the Podcast
It was an honor to sponsor and attend the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) 123rd Annual Conference in San Diego, California a few weeks ago. The event had a great turnout of more than sixteen thousand, including 11,453 delegates and 4,945 exhibitors.
Congratulations to the 
We loved engaging with the community online as well, check out some of our favorite tweets below!
If that sounds like you*, we invite you to nominate yourself or someone you know for the 2017 Cisco Champion program. The application form will be open now thru 
software, hardware, and team who operates it in an as a Service model– has undergone some changes resulting in significant improvements. Recently, 
