Meeting Customers in the Moment with Cisco Cloud and Compute

There is no doubt we are living in challenging times. IT leaders are asking themselves:

“What do I do now?”
“How do I emerge from this?”
“What could I have done to prepare for this better?”

These are big and daunting questions, but there is much to learn from some of our customers who have weathered this crisis better than others. These customers had already “reimagined” their environments and were better prepared to “respond” to this crisis and “rebound” from it. Let’s take a closer look at these three dimensions to see how this framework can help IT meet today’s challenges.

Respond – Equipping IT heroes serving the front lines

Behind the front-line heroes who are featured in the news are IT heroes who make it possible. This is even more important today – in a 24×7 digital world – where applications are the way you reach your customers, partners, employees and stakeholders. IT heroes need to evaluate and focus on the services that need to be up, responsive and reachable. Some services need to be scaled up. Others need to be managed remotely. And yet others need to manage themselves so time and resources can be diverted elsewhere.

To ensure business resiliency and meet the demands of the moment, Cisco has solutions and offers to help IT organizations:

Rapidly deploy VDI to support remote workers with easy to deploy validated bundles built around Cisco Hyperflex
Ensure critical application experiences with AppDynamics and Workload Optimizer, connecting app and infra teams with insight and automation to meet exponential demand
Enable rapid scale across multicloud with HyperFlex and Workload Optimizer, to quickly deploy and optimize resources on-prem and in the public cloud
Manage the distributed data center remotely with Cisco Intersight, bridging remote IT operators to on-prem infrastructure in any location with cloud-based management
Control cost to preserve capital with Workload Optimizer, to optimize on-prem workload utilization and avoid over provisioning or unused services in public clouds

“We had to very rapidly scale into different technologies we’ve never used before and what made this possible was hyperconverged infrastructure. With Cisco, that was all deployed and ready to go.”

John Gaede, Director of Information Services
Sky Lakes Medical Center

Rebound – Digital experiences are essential to recovery in a changed world

As customers start to rebound, they will be faced with two immediate questions. First, are the measures they put in place during the “respond” phase sustainable? Out of necessity, this phase may have led IT to rapidly scale in the public cloud. While this response may have been appropriate at the time, it is often not optimal. Moving into the rebound phase, IT will be looking for help to optimize a multicloud footprint for the long term. Cisco can partner with IT to help control costs and preserve capital with Workload Optimizer to ensure that the rapid growth of cloud usage in response to the pandemic does not go unchecked.

The second question customers face is whether they are well positioned to ultimately deliver for the longer term. This not only includes responding to the new demands for increased digital experiences, but also having the ability to handle ever more complex and heterogeneous application delivery environments – often spanning multiple platforms, clouds and tools. More importantly, delivering a good application experience requires coordination across multiple teams. Cisco is ready to partner with IT to help connect app and infra teams with insight and automation to enable rapid troubleshooting of applications and proactive maintenance through our integration between Intersight, the Workload Optimizer and AppDynamics.

Reimagine – a new application experience for a multicloud world

As we look past this current crisis, IT leaders will have to reimagine the application experience and the type of elastic infrastructure needed to make this experience a reality. This infrastructure will need to stretch across on-premises data centers, edge and the public cloud, and combine network, security and governance. To support this, they will need to put in a management system that enables visibility, insights and action as the underpinning of a new operating model for a multicloud world. Finally, IT leaders will need to work with companies who have both this breadth of solutions and a history of putting the customer first.

At Cisco, we are committed to helping you reimagine your architecture through products like HyperFlex for elasticity and Intersight for full stack visibility across infrastructure, apps and business outcomes. Customers like Sky Lakes Medical Center, who had built their data centers on top of some of these products and others in the Cisco portfolio, found themselves better prepared to handle this crisis. We can learn from them as we sketch out the right patterns for our reimagined world.

Cisco – Your partner in the moment and in the future

We are living in challenging times. Cisco is here to help our customers not only navigate this new reality but also shift their digital transformation into high gear and capture the opportunities that will be waiting for them in the future.