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Cisco Migrates Thousands of Business-Impacting Apps with Higher Accuracy and Confidence, Saving 70% in Staff Time

Recently, Forbes Insights published a survey of hundreds of CIOs about their views on the challenges and the opportunities to migrate to a hybrid IT environment. Not surprisingly perhaps, more than 60% of this executive survey said that adopting a hybrid cloud strategy was critical to their overall IT planning. These leaders were also willing to put their money where their mouths were with more than 70% of these IT executives said that their organizations were planning to expand their hybrid-cloud investments from 10 to more than 60 % within the next two years.

One CIO who has his finger clearly on the pulse of this trend is Guillermo Diaz who is leading the Cisco IT through its multi-year transformation as a foundation for the company’s overall digital business transformation. This includes identifying and migrating thousands of business applications to a hybrid cloud and the implementation of a software defined, zero-trust operations that improves operational efficiency while ensuring better compliance of ever-evolving security policies.

This transformation is an ambitious undertaking. Cisco IT’s data center footprint is global and it manages thousands of applications that directly support end users and strategic corporate initiatives such as M&A. Cisco IT is committed to this transformation through process, technology and culture with the goal of fully digitizing its business and operations like so many Cisco customers. Achieving this goal requires Cisco IT to drive simplicity through automation, gather insights and apply data analytics to improve its operations in a continuous develop-and-deliver model.

It is no wonder Cisco IT was one of the earliest adopters of Cisco Tetration Analytics giving the staff visibility into all network flows within the Cisco data centers, in real time. Specifically, Cisco IT is using Tetration as the enabling platform to map application interdependencies in far less time and with much higher accuracy and confidence than possible without this visibility and insights. This is a key step toward the ultimate goal of placing these apps under the dynamic policy enforcement umbrella of Cisco’s Software Defined Architecture, known as Cisco ACI, that extends compliance across different data centers, even as application and tenant policies are modified.

An example of the Cisco Tetration application dependency map, a key insight necessary to ensure fast and reliable app migrations. Tetration enables this type of mapping in just days, not months, resulting in business benefits such as simplifying migration toward SDN and the cloud as well as improving business continuity and disaster recovery.

The impact Tetration has had on the Cisco IT transformation has already been impressive. Cisco IT has been able to identify and prioritize over 2000 applications including business-critical apps and more than 1000 subnets for migration. The visibility and insights Tetration provided reduced the overall staff time needed to carry out the necessary analysis and establish a zero-trust security model by at least 70%. This translates to time savings of 3,650 skilled staff hours for every 100 applications migrated.

Cisco CIO, Guillermo Diaz, explains the quantifiable business benefits of using Cisco Tetration to migrate business-critical applications to a hybrid cloud to achieve cost savings and operational agility.

Cisco IT will be leveraging the capabilities of the latest Cisco Tetration version that delivers enhanced security, new deployment options, and open platform extensibility. This will help accelerate the Cisco IT transformation even faster giving this world-class organization the means to “know the now” and respond just as quickly in ways that were previously unattainable or even imaginable. In this sense, Cisco Tetration is one of the most strategic platforms in the Cisco portfolio, one that embodies every pillar of the Cisco Analyze, Simplify, Automate, and Protect defined hybrid cloud data center.

Guillermo Diaz will be on-hand at Cisco Live! Berlin to discuss Cisco IT organization’s Tetration deployment and its transformation journey. Specifically, he will be a guest speaker in Ruba Borno’s opening keynote address on Tuesday Feb. 21 (9:30 am local time) and then will speak at the Next-Gen Data Center Innovation Talk later that afternoon (2:15 pm local time).

Learn more:

Cisco Tetration Overview

Cisco Tetration Press Release

Cisco Tetration Blog – Turn the Lights on in the Data Center

Cisco Live EMEA Berlin February 20-24, 2017

 



Authors

Adam Ozkan

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure