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My whole career has been in networking. Whether that’s as an engineer or as a marketing professional. Throughout that time, I’ve never seen the speed of innovation in networking that we are experiencing today. I realize that it can be scary for IT leaders and architects who need to make hard decisions about which innovations they need to invest in to keep their organization agile and resilient during these modern times.

That’s why at Cisco we have taken the approach of making every effort to ensure you can enjoy all the most advanced innovations as and when you need them. How? Simply by making the initial investment in our intent-based networking (IBN) platforms. And over months and years, this will continue bearing all the innovation fruits you need to be able to say “yes, we can absolutely do that” when your business leaders have a new digital initiative, regulation or disruption to deal with.

Great things happen when insights meet automation

In IBN, insights and automation complement each other. While we derive insights from deep network analysis to determine what actions to take, we use automation to take those actions. Over the past few years, we have been busy bringing you the insights and automation capabilities you need for a complete IBN platform across access, WAN and data center/cloud network domains.

Intent-Based Networking timeline for automation and insights

By subscribing to our software licensing model, you get the benefit of having the most talented and experienced software and hardware engineers in the industry working hard for you. So, you can have all the capabilities you need to deliver services securely from any user or device to any application or workload, wherever they are located. And even if you don’t see a use case for that innovation today – it’s there, waiting for you whenever the need arises. And it will.

So, what’s next?

Today we are introducing another set of IBN innovations that deliver new advanced insights and automation capabilities. These new capabilities are all designed to help you deliver valuable outcomes to your business and IT teams – and are available through your Cisco DNA Advantage and/or Cisco DNA Premier software subscriptions.

Let’s look at some of these exciting new capabilities and how they help you say “yes” to business intent, whenever the ask is made. Consider these use case examples:

Automation and Insight use cases

 

Insights informs what to do…

 Business: “Over the years we have added many different connected healthcare devices in our clinics and hospitals. We need to keep track of them and make sure they are fully updated so they can’t be exploited to spread malware.”

You:No problem, we can use a new capability in Cisco DNA Center, AI endpoint analytics, to identify even the most obscure types of devices anywhere, determine their attributes such as their make, model, location, OS, and whether they have the latest security patches. Once we know these details, we can accurately make an inventory, and take steps to see they are properly secured.”

Business:  We must comply with new government regulations that mandate that we only allow authorized users to access sensitive information. Can our network do that?”

You: “No problem, we can use another new capability in Cisco DNA Center, group-based policy analytics to analyze and visualize traffic flows between groups of endpoints and hosts. We can use that information to define network policies that will allow only the flows we want and deny others. Using group-based access control, we can then easily deploy these policies on our Cisco DNA ready infrastructure and achieve the segmentation that will help us be compliant.”

Business: “We also want to make sure we can track all those wireless robotic devices we are acquiring to improve our operations.”

You: “No problem, Cisco DNA Spaces Indoor IoT Services tracks any wireless and now also BLE connected devices in real-time, anywhere on the network. Cisco DNA Spaces provides a single, open, and unified cloud-based platform so we can scale and simplify deployments of not just robots but other devices in the future.”

Automation makes it happen…

Business: “We’ve subscribed to a new productivity SaaS application for employees working anywhere – how can we make sure they have a great secure user experience?”

You: “No problem, we can deploy Cisco’s SASE (Secure Access Services Edge) solution with Cisco SD-WAN and Cisco Umbrella (Cloud Security) so our employees and data will be protected by the most advanced cloud-based secure internet gateway capabilities. Best of all, the security kicks in automatically with no extra user or admin effort. And Cisco made it easy to consume through a single license.”

Business: “We need to make sure our students have the best digital experience in their dorms – whether for studies or leisure. And it needs to be secure.”

You: “No problem, Cisco’s User Defined Network allows our students (or travelers, or patients etc.) to self-serve their own private network, add their devices automatically, and keep these devices in their own slice of the shared campus network. It will make our core network more secure and free up our admins.”

Complete the circle

Well, do you think you could get used to saying “yes”? You should because we are in this journey together to deliver the IBN platform innovations that are going to help you make your organization ready for whatever the next “business intent” requirement you’ll be asked to support.

 


For more information about these latest capabilities:

 



Authors

Prashanth Shenoy

Vice President of Marketing

Enterprise Networking and Mobility