Cisco Enhances Zero Trust Access with Google

Cisco Secure Access provides a broad set of security functions in one unified solution to make both users and the IT team more productive, but no single solution can cover all security requirements. With this perspective Secure Access is actively building a strong technology ecosystem to more efficiently serve the wider needs in the market. This week Cisco announced an additional collaboration with Google to bring browser-based threat and data protection from Chrome Enterprise to web apps secured by Cisco Secure Access. As more work activities happen on web applications, a secure enterprise browser can strengthen and simplify endpoint security as part of a broader zero trust approach.

Combined, Google’s Chrome Enterprise and Cisco’s Security Cloud can help customers protect against, detect, and remediate a broad range of cyber-attacks by combining browser- and cloud-based protection. Organizations can more easily mitigate security risks while increasing user productivity (including employees, partners, and contractors), and reducing administrative tasks.

As a critical component of a comprehensive security strategy, Cisco Secure Access, an AI-first Security Service Edge (SSE) solution built on Cisco Security Cloud, provides a converged set of cloud security services. These include Zero Trust Access for private applications, Secure Web Gateway for the web, Cloud Access Security Broker for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Browser Isolation for web-based threats, Digital Experience Monitoring to optimize user productivity, Domain Name System security, and more. Chrome Enterprise offers browser-based threat and data protection, policy and access controls and critical security insights.

The combination of Cisco Secure Access and Chrome Enterprise offers enterprises the benefits of both cloud-based and browser-based security. Users are protected across multiple device types, applications, and networks with end-to-end zero trust access, including device trust, strong authorization, and secure application access for both managed and unmanaged devices. Cisco and Google are collaborating to deliver:

Advanced, granular, zero trust security 

The solution protects users, data, and apps through streamlined zero trust access to enterprise applications from managed and unmanaged devices with granular controls.

In addition, independent user-to-app traffic streams and hidden app locations provide unmatched protection against reconnaissance, active threats, and lateral movement. Lastly, an efficient combination of browser and cloud-based DLP controls secure sensitive data and protect against inappropriate copying, pasting, and printing. This includes blocking content transfers to and from GenAI sites when they violate DLP policies.

Frictionless user experience

A good user experience is critical to preventing user subversion of security controls. This solution significantly simplifies the user experience by removing the need for the manual, multi-step, agent and VPN connection process, significantly simplifying the user experience. It provides a one-step, fast connection to private applications through Chrome Enterprise, making it easier for users to access work resources. Users’ devices go through an automated and seamless trust process instantly at login, which ensures they have a strong security posture.

Simplified management

Simplifying the administrative experience is another focus of this collaboration. It starts with an easier deployment process that is enabled by agentless activation of device trust capabilities. Setting access policies for Chrome through Cisco Secure Access centralizes administrative tasks and allows for more consistent policy enforcement across applications. To improve detection times, we allow for security events from Chrome to be collected, analyzed, and extracted, including password changes, unapproved password reuse, data exfiltration, unsafe site visits, extension events and malware transfer events.

Source: cisco.com

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Showcasing Powerful Private 5G Use Cases at Cisco Live EMEA!

For those who joined us at Cisco Live! Amsterdam earlier this month, you might not have noticed that the venue featured a Private 5G Network established in partnership with NTT DATA.

Spanning two halls at RAI Amsterdam, or roughly 26,000 square meters, the seamless integration of this Private 5G network augmented the existing Wi-Fi network, pushing the boundaries of traditional connectivity, and creating a smart venue—a first for Cisco Live!

Built with the support of Intel, the Cisco Country Digital Acceleration team, and RAI Amsterdam—a conference and exhibition space that hosts millions of visitors annually—NTT DATA’s Private 5G network included four radios supporting mission critical and latency-sensitive applications. RAI also had over one hundred Wi-Fi access points supporting the user experience in the same location.

The entire ecosystem performed flawlessly. During busy hours with a full load on the network, Private 5G latency was a speedy 21.9 miliseconds, and Wi-Fi latency was 86 miliseconds. It was incredibly exciting to be part of the future of multi-access connectivity—wired and wireless, Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G, all brought together to enable a seamless digital experience.

The NTT DATA Private 5G-powered communication and streaming services were featured at Cisco Live! Amsterdam as part of the NTT DATA’s Smart Venue Solution, and included the following use cases:

• Mobile broadcasting – wireless video crews roamed the exhibition halls with low latency and high bandwidth, delivering a streamlined multi-camera environment.
• Visitor traffic management – Cisco’s Meraki cameras and NTT DATA’s Smart Management Platform tracked visitor movements and congestion, enabling operations and security teams to communicate real-time, data-driven crowd control decisions.
• Emergency Response Vehicle (ERV) – Pre-packaged, flexible FWA Private 5G connectivity was setup and used to mimic rural cellular/satellite backhaul.
• Premium Booth Connectivity – When the booth is already built and the floor is laid, network cable cannot be raised. P5G provided booth broadband for the exhibitor.
• NTT Coffee Booth – Cisco’s Meraki cameras and the NTT DATA’s Smart Management Platform monitored and managed queues and seating to optimize the on-site experience.
• Enhanced exhibitor experiences – Cisco’s Meraki cameras embedded throughout the venue and in booths captured anonymized data including the number of visitors and time spent in the booth to use for planning and to create better customer experiences.
• Out of Band management – The Private 5G network, backhaul connectivity, and network operations center were integrated to provide the Cisco Live! events team with faster coordination and emergency response capabilities.
• Venue Safety – Machine vision detected whether individuals were wearing Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) through a real-time alert system, helping to ensure safety throughout the convention center’s facilities.

Figure 1. NTT DATA Smart Venue Dashboard

Beyond the experience for event attendees, RAI benefited from the as-a-Service (aaS) model, which made it easy for them to “turn up” and support large amounts of data and real-time insights on the fly, seamlessly augmenting onsite experiences. Turning up 5G capabilities on an ad hoc basis is the ideal solution for conference centers that host large numbers of exhibitors and visitors.

Outfitting RAI with the ability to support advanced connectivity experiences was just the first step, our goal at Cisco is to provide our Service Provider customers with the seamless and flexible technology they need to create business outcomes that deliver on the bottom line.

According to Shahid Ahmed, Group Executive Vice President of New Ventures and Innovation at NTT DATA: “Private 5G and advanced analytics play a pivotal role in accelerating digitial transformation across industries and serve as a driving force to create smarter cities and venues. We are thrilled to partner with Cisco on this unique project. Private 5G excels in a complex environment like this one, and together with our Smart Management Platform will be the catalyst that accelerates the digital transformation journey for RAI and the City of Amsterdam.”

And the next steps at RAI? Cisco and NTT DATA plan to extend 5G coverage following Cisco Live to the venue’s vast 112,000 square meter footprint.

Source: cisco.com

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Empowering an extensible observability ecosystem with the Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform

Businesses today are digitally led, providing experiences to their customers and consumers through applications. The environments these applications are built upon are complex and evolve rapidly — requiring that IT teams, security teams, and business leaders can observe all aspects of their applications’ performance and be able to tie that performance to clear business outcomes. This calls for a new type of platform that can scale as a business scale and easily extend across an organization’s entire infrastructure and application lifecycle. It’s critical for leaders to have complete visibility, context and control of their applications to ensure their stakeholders — from employees to business partners to customers — are empowered with the best experiences possible.

What is Cisco Full-Stack Observability (FSO) Platform?

The Cisco FSO Platform is an open and extensible, API-driven full stack observability (FSO) platform focused on OpenTelemetry and anchored on metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT), providing AI/ML driven analytics as well as a new observability ecosystem delivering relevant and impactful business insights through new use-cases and extensions.

Benefits of The Cisco FSO Platform

Cisco’s FSO Platform is future-proof and vendor agnostic, bringing data together from multiple domains — including application, networking, infrastructure, security, cloud, sustainability — and business sources. It is a unified observability platform enabling extensibility from queries, data ingestion pipelines and entity models all the way to APIs and a composable UI framework.

This provides Cisco customers with in-context, correlated, and predictive insights which enables them to reduce time to resolve issues, optimize their own users’ experiences, and minimize business risk — all with the additional flexibility to extend the Cisco FSO Platform’s capabilities with the creation of new or customized business use cases. This extensibility unleashes a diverse ecosystem of developers who can create new solutions or build upon existing ones to rapidly add value with observability, telemetry, and actionable insights.

Cisco FSO Platform Diagram

First Application on the Cisco FSO Platform – Cloud Native Application Observability

Cloud Native Application Observability is a premier solution delivered on the Cisco FSO Platform. Cisco’s extensible application performance management (APM) solution for cloud native architectures, Cloud Native Application Observability with business context – now on the Cisco FSO Platform – helps customers achieve business outcomes, make the right digital experiences related decisions, ensure performance alignment with end-user expectations, prioritize, and reduce risk while securing workloads.

The following are some of the modules built on Cisco FSO Platform that work with Cloud Native Application Observability.

Modules built by Cisco

Cost Insights: This module provides visibility and insights into application-level costs alongside performance metrics, helping businesses understand the fiscal impact of their cloud applications. It leverages advanced analytics and automation to identify and eliminate unnecessary costs, while also supporting sustainability efforts.

Application Resource Optimizer: This module provides deeper insights into a Kubernetes workload and provides visibility into the workload’s resource utilization. It helps to identify the best candidates for optimization—and reduce your resource utilization. Running continuous AI/ML experiments on workloads, the Application Resource Optimizer creates a utilization baseline, and offers specific recommendations to help you improve. It analyzes and optimizes application workloads to maximize resource usage and reduce excessive cloud spending.

Security Insights: This module provides Business Risk Observability for cloud-native applications. It provides cloud native infrastructure insights to locate threats and vulnerabilities; runtime data security to detect and protect against leakage of sensitive data; and business risk prioritization for cloud security. By integrating features from our market-leading portfolio of security solutions, security and application teams have expanded threat visibility, and the intelligent business risk insights to respond in real-time to revenue-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.

Cisco AIOps: This module helps to visualize contextualized data relevant to infrastructure, network, incidents, and performance of a business application, all in one place. It simplifies and optimizes the IT operations needs and accelerates time-to market for customer-specific AIOps capabilities and requirements.

Modules built by Partners

Evolutio Fintech: This module helps to reduce revenue losses for financial customers resulting from credit card authorization failures. It monitors infrastructure health impact on hourly credit card authorizations aggregated based on metadata like region, schemas, infra components and merchants.

CloudFabrix vSphere Observability and Data Modernization: This module helps to observe vSphere through the FSO platform and enriches vShpere and vROps data with your environment’s Kubernetes and infrastructure data.

Kanari Capacity Planner and Forecaster: This module provides insights into infrastructure risk factors that have been determined through predictive ML algorithms (ARIMA, SARIMA, LSTM). It helps to derive capacity forecasts and plans using these insights and baseline capacity forecast to analyze changing capacity needs overtime.

Source: cisco.com

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What happens to the Cisco Live Network Infrastructure when the conference goes virtual?

This is a question the Technology Experiences Team (TechX), Cisco’s dedicated team of infrastructure engineers and project managers, asked themselves this year. When our annual, in-person conference suddenly went virtual, it rendered our hardware a little redundant. So, what do we do with the technology we’d usually deploy for our customers at events?

TechX is chartered with the support of events and trade shows throughout the calendar year. It is our fun and often exhilarating task to implement Cisco’s technologies and sometimes our very latest solutions. Supporting our customers, event staff, and partners to host Cisco Live, and building an enterprise class network for 28,000+ people in just a few days is certainly an undertaking.

With no physical events this year, all that amazing Cisco technology is suddenly useless, right? Well, fortunately not. My job within the team is to build out and support the Data Center (DC) for our shows. The DC is home for all those applications that make the event and supporting it a success. Our applications portfolio includes: Cisco Identify Services Engine (ISE), Cisco Prime Network Registrar (CPNR – DNS/DHCP), Cisco DNA Center, virtual Wireless LAN controllers, FTP, Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), vCenter, various flavors of Linux based on our Engineers preference, NTP, Active Directory, Remote Desktop Services, Application Delivery Controllers (ADC), Cisco Video Surveillance Manager, Grafana, NetApp Snap Center, Ansible hosts, Mazemap Lipi server, Find my Friends server, web hook servers, Database hosts, and the list goes on.

What did we do with a DC that supports all of those wonderful applications you may well ask? Well, we did two things. First we deployed Folding@home virtual machines, which as many of you well know is a distributed network of compute power using almost any machine to crunch numbers, helping scientists at Stanford University work toward cures for diseases. What better use of a large Data Center? Not only are we repurposing our infrastructure instead of retiring it, we’re doing our part to help with a healthcare crisis. In fact, Cisco as a whole is using its compute power across the company to contribute, and you can see our progress with the Folding@home project. Cisco’s team ID is 1115, and our group is called CiscoLive2016, as that’s the first time we deployed Folding@home during that very show.

Other important questions arise from this such as:

◉ What are we using to host Folding@home?
◉ How did we deploy the virtual machines?
◉ How are we monitoring our compute?
◉ How do we monitor our progress in terms of the Folding@home project?

What are we using to Host Folding@home?

We deploy two types of compute cluster at Cisco Live, one traditional data center solution with storage and blade servers (UCS B series), known as a Flexpod. The second, a hyperconverged cluster known as Cisco Hyperflex. The Flexpod is a collaborative solution that comprises VMware’s vSphere virtualization software, NetApp’s storage clusters, Cisco’s UCS Blade Servers, and Nexus Data Center switches. In this case we’re using UCS B200 M4 split over two chassis combined with a NetApp MetroCluster IP for a total of 16 Blades. The Metro cluster is a fully redundant storage system that replicates all data between two arrays. As such, if you lose one, the other will allow you to recover your lost data. Typically, these are installed at two different locations, which isn’t possible at Cisco Live due to space and cabling restrictions. You’ll see how we configure it below.

The MetroCluster actually ships with two Nexus 3232C switches to create the IP connectivity between both clusters. The UCS Chassis uses a boot from SAN method, to load their ESXi OS from the Metro Cluster IP. Due to UCS’s service profiles, if we were to lose a blade, we may simply replace the blade and boot the exact same operating system, used by the old host, without the need to re-install ESXi. A service profile is essentially a set of variables that make a host or server operable.  These variables include UUID, MAC address, WWPN’s and many other pieces of information. When we insert a new blade it would take on the appearance of the fold blade using the information created within the profile. This allows it to masquerade as the old host and permits a compute hotswap. Here’s a basic diagram of our design.

Flexpod Design Diagram

How are we monitoring our Compute?

The other awesome thing about Cisco’s compute platform is we have a cloud-based monitoring system called Cisco Intersight. We use this each year to ensure our servers are running without error. You may also access the servers’ management interfaces, UCS Manager, from Intersight, making it a consolidated GUI across multiple sites or deployments. Here’s a Dashboard screen capture of how that looks. We actually have an error on one host which I need to investigate further. It’s great to have a monitoring system, especially whilst we’re all working from home.

How did we deploy the Virtual Machines?

Being a busy guy, I didn’t want to manually deploy all 40 virtual machines (VMs), carrying out a lot of error prone typing of host names, IP addresses and VM specific parameters. Bearing in mind, there would be a great deal of repetition as each VM is essentially the same. Instead I decided to automate the deployment of all the VMs. The great news is, some of the work has already been done as VMware themselves have produced a Folding@home ‘ova’ image running their Photon OS. The image is optimized to run on ESXi and can be installed using ova/ovf parameters. These are basically settings, such as IP address, hostname and information specific to the Folding@home software install taken prior to installation. There are some installation posts regarding deployment and also in the download itself. Please see the link at the end of this post.

Using Python scripting and VMware’s ovftool, a command line tool for deploying ovf/ova files, I was able to take the image and pass all the ova parameters to the ovftool. The ovftool then actually builds a VM on a specified host taking all of your desired settings. Using Python, I can loop over all of these parameters x number of times, in my case forty, and execute the ovftool command forty times.  This was a joy to watch, as VM’s started to appear in my vCenter all of a sudden and I could sit back and drink my cappuccino.

After the installation I was able to monitor, using VMware’s vCenter how our hosts were running. Using Folding@home’s largest VM’s installation, which uses more processing power, I was able to push our cluster to around 75% CPU utilization on each host as can be seen below. Some hosts were spiking a little, so I needed to make some adjustments, but we continued to crunch numbers and use our otherwise idle compute for a greater good.

How do we monitor our progress in terms of the Folding@home project?

Digging into Folding@home, I was able to learn the project has an Application Programming Interface or API. The API allows access to the statistics programmatically. Again, using Python alongside InfluxDB and Grafana, I was able to create a dashboard that the team could view in order to monitor our progress. Here’s a sample that I’ve annotated with numbers so we can refer to each statistic individually.

1. Teams work units, the amount of data crunched over time

2. The score assigned to our team over time

3. Cisco System’s group position out of all companies contributing to the project

4. Within the Cisco Systems group, our own position within the project

5. TechX work units as a numerical value

6. TechX’s Score as a numerical value

I was going to go into what we used our Hyperflex for, but I may leave that to another article as this one is getting a little long!

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Enabling Cisco Enterprise Calling from Microsoft Teams and Slack Messaging

Strategic Alliances and Integrations Enable Comprehensive Calling, Meetings, and Messaging Capabilities

In my role as a product manager here at Cisco, I regularly talk to customers about their collaboration environments. One question I get asked is what they can do to bring together collaboration tools from different vendors…

The Webex unified app is providing our customers with comprehensive calling, meetings, and messaging capabilities that integrate with our award-winning video devices and IP phones. The result is seamless and consistent workflows.

But we are also aware that many customers have existing investments in place with collaboration tools from other vendors, and we are committed to making sure that Webex is an open platform, that integrates with 3rd party applications to ensure our mutual customers have a solution that delivers the best possible outcomes.

Earlier this year one of my colleagues talked about how we are enabling organizations with Microsoft Teams and Slack messaging users to start Webex Meetings from these applications.

Now, new Cisco calling integrations allow you to use all your enterprise-grade voice and video calling features in combination with these messaging platforms.

Cisco Calling Integrations

Calling integrations allow you to expose Cisco calling buttons directly in other vendors messaging apps. We’ve built the Cisco calling integrations to provide you with flexible solutions plus we’ve made them very easy to deploy. We started with Microsoft Teams and Slack messaging apps. To deploy a Cisco calling integration you simply select the Cisco client you are using for calling and the calling platform you want to use.

Figure 1. Cisco Calling integrations for Webex and Jabber in the Microsoft Teams app store

When you have added the Cisco calling integration, you can launch a Webex Teams or Cisco Jabber call directly from your messaging app. When you click the call button, the integrations identify who you’re chatting with, resolves their calling address, and passes this information to your installed Cisco client which starts a Cisco voice or video call. The integrations support all Cisco calling platforms including Cisco Unified Communication Manager (UCM) based on-premises and hosted deployments, and Webex Calling for cloud.

There are no complex back end changes to make as these are client integrations. There are no call routing policies or dial plan changes to make, no additional licenses required, and no new hardware to manage. You can even use the calling integrations with desk phone control, which means your users don’t have to replace their handsets.

Cisco Calling from Slack

Slack has made its messaging platform very open to integrating calling providers like Cisco. Adding the Cisco calling integration to Slack means you use the native Slack call button to start a Cisco call directly from Slack.

Figure 2. Placing a call using Cisco Jabber from Slack

This could be using Webex Teams or Cisco Jabber as your softphone or controlling your desk phone. If your Cisco client is controlling your Cisco desk phone clicking the call button in Slack causes your Cisco desk phone to go off-hook and call your colleague.

Slack is popular with developers where users tend to like keyboard commands to take actions like making calls. Talking to Slack users it becomes clear this is a requirement for Slack users so we implement “/jabber” and “/webexteams” slash command allowing you to make calls at the command line.

We are continuing to work in partnership with Slack and plan to implement Slack’s new shortcut controls shortly. This will give you more calling destination selectable directly in Slack.

Cisco Calling from Microsoft Teams

The Cisco calling integration for Microsoft Teams has been available from the Microsoft Teams app store for just over a month now. This month we have extended it with new features and functionality. In addition to supporting Microsoft Teams desktop and web users, this month we added support for mobile and tablet devices. We also added new contact search capabilities, you can now search your Microsoft 365 Outlook contacts and call them using your Cisco calling platform via the integration.

Figure 3. Placing a call using Webex from within Microsoft Teams

Building Bridges with Webex

These two new calling integrations are just examples of the many integrations that the Webex platform supports, enabling people to enhance their communication and collaboration within their everyday workflows. For example, we’ve also worked with Microsoft to integrate Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions into Webex team messaging services to streamline collaboration on documents.

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Cisco SD-WAN Soars Towards SASE with Simple, Secure and Scalable Innovations

The world is changing, and the workforce is changing with it. The move to distributed teams, telework and pop-up clinics has only accelerated the path to cloud adoption that customers have been on the past few years. IT professionals surveyed by ESG say that half of the workforce will be operating remotely in 2021. The survey also says that 60% of organizations expect that the majority of their applications will be delivered as SaaS then, too*. This makes the Internet itself the wide-area-network, displacing traditional WAN connectivity like MPLS. Enterprises want to be able to extend their reach from campus and branch offices into their employee’s home offices and micro-branches, as part of this distributed workforce trend.

The architectural concept for today’s SD-WAN is often called Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). It reflects the reality that WAN security and features today must be distributed, cloud-based, flexible, and agile. But there is a clear need for an integrated solution from a single vendor and Cisco has been working on this for the past several quarters. Today, we are proud to announce that with the latest 17.2 release of Cisco SD-WAN, we have the industry’s first fully integrated SASE offering that combines best-of-breed SD-WAN with the cutting-edge Cisco Umbrella Cloud Security portfolio.

Cisco SD-WAN 17.2 offers customers:

◉ Simple Management and One-touch Connectivity from SD-WAN to Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway (SIG),

◉ Deployment Flexibility for any design – Teleworker, Branch or Campus

◉ Automatic assessment of the Identity of the user and their context, to enforce policies,

◉ Simple and Flexible Consumption models that include Cloud Security capabilities at no additional cost,

◉ A complement of the Cisco SD-WAN on-premise security stack that includes the newly added SSL Proxy capability.

We have heard loud and clear from our customers that they simply do not have the time or the resources to stitch together disparate products and build their own SASE solutions. The analogy that customers have given us is that no one wants to buy different parts of a car and assemble it themselves anymore!

Cisco has a clear, differentiated strategy that will enable customers to get the best of SD-WAN and Cloud security as a single, integrated solution. I truly believe no other company is better positioned than Cisco to help customers on their SASE journey as we navigate this new environment.

Cisco SD-WAN 17.2 is the industry’s first fully integrated SASE solution.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to innovations in our new 17.2 SD-WAN release. We are enabling 60+ innovations in this release. Beyond the SASE innovations described above, here are a few more of the most noteworthy capabilities.

◉ Unified Communication Integration: With a growing demand from customers for reliable and secure unified communication from private and public clouds over broadband internet connections, Cisco SD-WAN now supports Unified Communications, with a voice gateway capability. This allows customers to create a communication network that ensures an optimized UC application experience, and it can be managed from a single dashboard.

◉ Cloud OnRamp for SaaS: We continue our Cloud OnRamp journey by adding OnRamp capabilities to the industry’s most-used SaaS products:  Office365 plus 14 other SaaS products on the IOS XE portfolio. This will enable customers to get a differentiated user experience for SaaS, using their existing ISR router installed base.

◉ Managed Service Provider Innovations: Cisco has the largest ecosystem of managed service providers, reflecting our understanding of the complexity of providing a managed SD-WAN offering to our joint customers. We continue to enable our MSPs to deliver flexible and customized WAN services through capabilities like CLI templates that unlock the power of 30+ years of IOS innovations to the SD-WAN. This complements our new post-paid licensing packages.

We have already seen over 3000 downloads of our 17.2 software, which illustrates the demand for these capabilities from our customers. We look forward to even more customers and partners adopting these new SD-WAN and SASE capabilities.

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Workspaces in Control Hub— What’s in it for you?

Optimize your Workspace Through Control Hub

As announced at Cisco Live, we have introduced a new range of intelligent features in Control Hub under the new Workspaces tab. This will revolutionize the way IT, facilities, and HR work together, making the transition back to the office as seamless and safe as possible.

Control Hub is the single pane of glass management platform that provides administrators a view into their Devices, Meetings, Calling and Messaging environments, all without transitioning to different tools. Administrators have the ability to deep dive into analytical trends or troubleshoot reported issues directly in the platform. On the devices side, Control Hub has mostly focused on technical issues, such as packet loss and jitter. Now, we are expanding that to include what is happening in the physical workspace! By giving visibility into what is happening in the workspace, you will gain deeper insights into emerging and existing trends within the four walls of your workspace. Knowledge is power, and with these new insights, you can make better strategic decisions.

How to Navigate the Workspaces Tab

The first part of this new Workspaces section is the ability to set a “Workspace Type.” You can choose between a plethora of room types, such as “Meeting Room”, “Huddle”, or even “Desk.” This allows for effortless filtering and reporting on different workspace types to easily find trends. For example, if a certain style of workspace is not being adopted, or it is all the rave being spoken about around the coffee machine!

The other new attribute you can add to a workspace is capacity. Now administrators can easily find out their capacity in certain locations or find out if their workspaces are being utilized correctly. If the capacity is exceeded, you will be notified with visual indicators. This makes it easy to ensure you are staying in line with the recommended people counts in different rooms.

Real-Time Utilization and Environmental Data

That leads me to the next new change in Workspaces, and that is the ability to see real time usage of utilization and occupancy directly in Control Hub – no need to refresh! This data is not just limited to showing whether the room is being occupied or by how many people, but it also has environmental data like ambient noise level and sound levels. This data is vital to ensure the workspace is the set up for collaborative success. A workspace with ambient noise above a certain dBA level will impact the quality of the meeting experience, both for in-office and remote participants. No one wants to work in a noisy environment. It is simply distracting!

Let’s say you need to install some acoustic treatment based on the recommendations of our advanced troubleshooting tools to test the reverb of the meeting space. Then it is useful to know whether the workspace is booked for later, so that you can schedule the best time to intervene. We got you covered! You don’t even need to leave Control Hub to view the calendar in a different application – booking information for the next 24 hours is right at your fingertips. For privacy reasons the meeting title won’t be exposed, so no worries there.

These are just some of the changes, all designed to give administrators a better experience and help manage their workspaces and devices more efficiently. With the ability to see data directly on one page, it really is like a virtual cockpit for your workspace!

This is just the start of a journey. We are investing in bringing more tools and metrics of the workspace to the fingertips of administrators, the next thing on our roadmap is bringing historical metrics and APIs to connect to existing workflows.

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Webex Cloud-Connected UC: Add the Power of Cloud to Your On-Premises UC Systems

Enabling the Workforce with Cisco Webex Cloud-Connected UC

The last ninety days have transformed business operations, globally. Enterprises are adjusting to the new “work from home” reality and are working around the clock to enable their workforce with the tools they need to be successful. Customers and partners are looking for an easy way to understand how their unified communications usage pattern is changing and how their network is handling the increased traffic load. The need for a single-pane view of business and operational insights is more important now than ever.

This is the first, of a two-part blog series where we will discuss how Cisco is meeting this need, through the introduction of Cisco Webex Cloud-Connected UC, a suite of cloud services that provides global business and operational visibility for our unified communications (UC) customers.

The Unified Communications Landscape

Cisco is the market share leader for on-premises UC, in large part because we have the broadest and deepest UC portfolio. We have helped many on-premises customers migrate their calling and messaging workloads to Cisco cloud offers – Cisco Webex Calling, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), or Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud. For a variety of reasons, many customers intend to continue to operate their UC applications on-premises on their own or their partner’s data centers. We continue to invest and innovate to deliver compelling values for these customers.

Cisco Webex Cloud-Connected UC is one such innovation that enables on-premises customers to reap the benefits of cloud-delivered services while retaining their on-premises investments. For them, it is the best of both worlds. Powerful, agile, innovative management, delivered from the cloud, serving their own secure, reliable, private UC platform.

What is Cisco Webex Cloud-Connected UC?

Cisco Webex Cloud-Connected UC is a suite of cloud services that allow Cisco Unified Communications on-premises customers & partners to connect their UC deployments in their data centers to the Cisco Webex cloud and consume value-added services from the cloud. These services include:

1. Management services, that improve the experience of the UC administrator, and
2. UC supplemental services, that improve the experience of the enterprise end-users.

In this blog, we will focus on management services. We will cover supplemental services in part two of this series.

UC Management from Webex Control Hub

Our UC customers have been asking for an administrative tool that gives them a centralized, single-pane view of their entire deployments, across regions, in order to simplify their administration. Cisco and other industry vendors offer various UC management products. While these tools were fine for handling management requirements in simpler times, they fall short, when compared with the latest cloud technologies and the rapid innovation cycle offered by cloud services.

Cloud-Connected UC addresses this by centralizing and simplifying the on-premises management workflows on Cisco Webex Control Hub. Now, Control Hub can bring you the “single pane view” for on-premises deployments, in addition to the centralized management it already provides for Webex cloud and edge services.

The initial release of Cloud-Connected UC offers the foundational ability to connect on-premises systems to the cloud to get a rich, global cloud analytics service dashboard. We will build upon this foundation by adding various operational workflows to simplify the life of the UC administrator.

Webex Cloud-Connected UC Analytics

Webex Cloud-Connected UC Analytics provides historical insights into business and operational metrics that will serve customer and partner IT administrators, as well as the IT buyer.  Cloud-Connected UC Analytics serves the IT mission by answering the following questions:

For IT Administrators:

◉ What is the operational health of my clusters & servers?

◉ What is the Quality of Experience for my users?

◉ Are there any issues I need to act upon (expired certificates, missing security fixes, etc.)?

For IT buyers:

◉ How are my assets being utilized? How can I optimize my asset usage?

◉ Are users adopting and engaging with new endpoints and features?

◉ Do I need to increase my service capacity to prepare for increased usage?

Tying back to the increased “work from home” usage situation that we started with, the analytics dashboard also provides enterprises the necessary insights to enable work from home usage and manage their users’ return to the office.

Cloud-Connected UC Analytics is built with intelligence to recognize patterns in the historical data, identify potential issues, recommend resolutions, and proactively notify the administrator. We are continuously exploring new ways to leverage cloud technologies, like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing to simplify the life of an administrator. The possibilities are practically unlimited.

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Business Architects at Cisco Live: Innovating with Impact, Speed and Scale

This year at Cisco Live Barcelona, Business Architecture (BA) will feature in many places and times throughout the event, but the center of gravity will no doubt be the BA booth, located right in the middle of the Hub !

Please come and visit us to better understand how Cisco Business Architects and our Ecosystem Partners can accelerate and improve your digital transformation initiatives. To get a sneak preview, read on.

Cisco Business Architects have the know-how, skills and tools to drive innovation with the highest impact to your business:

◉ BAs make technology investments relevant to your key business stakeholders and users through collaborative workshops powered by Design Thinking & visual tools

◉ BAs bridge the gap between business and IT by addressing the hard People/Process/ Technology challenges.

◉ BAs capture new budgets allocated to digital transformation by shaping and telling a story that all your stakeholders understand/support.

◉ BAs look at the big picture, increase the pace of innovation, sharpen your business impact.

◉ BAs skip theory, paper work and the reports no one reads: we focus on tangible outcomes for users and the business. Pilot, fail fast, iterate.

◉ BAs build a trusted relationship between you, Cisco and our ecosystem partners, orchestrating the best resources and experts, delivering ongoing innovation, solving key challenges and positively impacting business, society, and the planet.

Our digital transformation toolbox is simple, powerful and unique in the market:

1. Digital Journey Dashboard (DJD): we create a 1-page strategy to clarify priorities and connect the strategic business drivers with the innovation roadmap. We identify the most business-impactful use cases.

2. Business Innovation Sprint (BIS): we run hackathons and Design Thinking workshops with key stakeholders from Business & IT to develop innovative solutions addressing the toughest business challenges.

3. SCIPAB Storyboard: we write & tell the story which will convince business executives to invest in new technology solutions that accelerate business innovation.

4. Innovation Lab: we bring it all together, collaborating with our customers and our Ecosystem Partners to operationalize innovation, continuously turning ideas into technology solutions that solve industry pain points.

For more details, you can download the 1-pager here below, which Cisco Business Architects affectionally refer to as our “BA Poppy”.

Business Architecture Clinics at Cisco Live

If you happen to be in Barcelona for Cisco Live 2020, we’d be happy to host you in a 60-/90-minute BA Clinic, which takes place in a private meeting room, away from the hustle and bustle of the BA booth.

A BA Clinic is a highly interactive and practical discussion structured around the “Art of the Possible” for Digital Transformation in your organization. We analyze the innovation trends relevant to your industry (with our “Industry Portfolio Explorer”), and cycle through the Business Drivers (“Why“), the IT Operating Model (“How“), and the Technology Platform (“What“). Finally, we will select the “Business Innovation Sprints” that will yield most impact.

During the BA clinic, Cisco’s seasoned Business Architects will capture the information required to build a draft Digital Journey Dashboard (similar to the one presented below), which we will send you after Cisco Live. From there and if you are interested to do more with us, we can organize a 1-day workshop with Lines of Business and IT stakeholders in your organization, and complete the DJD version 1.0 – which you can proudly hang in your office.

Digital Journey Dashboard (DJD)

Whether you decide to schedule a BA Clinic or simply to pay us a short visit at the BA Booth, please make sure you pick up a couple of California White Poppy seeds, hoping we can create together a fertile ground for innovation to blossom in your organisation!

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Bringing Reality to the Cognitive Contact Center

Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Analytics, and Collaboration Create Cognitive Experiences in the Contact Center

Every interaction between your contact center agents and your customers is a reflection of your brand – positive, negative, or neutral. According to a study by PwC, in the U.S. one bad experience alone will drive 32% of your customers away – even if they love your brand. That figure increases in Latin America to 49%.

We all want our customers to love our brand. So how do we avoid those bad experiences? How do we establish customer relationships and then grow and nurture them to make the next situation a better one – a more proactive, thoughtful, intelligent, and authentic one.

Our answer is by creating cognitive customer and agent experiences. This week at Cisco Live, my team and I will be spending time with our customers and partners demonstrating our solutions, discussing our vision, and sharing our ideas on what it means to have a cognitive and collaborative contact center.

Making it Cognitive

Cognition is what allows us to function as humans. Through cognition we’re able to better understand each other along with all the complexities of communication, evaluate and make judgments, reason our way through problems, and formulate appreciation. Our vision at Cisco is to change the world’s customer and agent experiences – and bringing cognition to those experiences is one of the best ways in which we can help you do that.

Empowering Your Agents

Three weeks ago I shared my view on the myths surrounding artificial intelligence’s role in the contact center. One misconception about AI is that it will replace people or eliminate jobs altogether. AI will likely have a greater role in augmenting, vs. replacing live agent assistance.

Your agents are the front line of your business and their daily interactions with your customers are essential to building meaningful and healthy long-term relationships. As with any relationship, your agents must demonstrate interest, understanding and empathy every time they interact with customers. They’re under pressure to turn potentially bad customer experiences into great ones. So investing in your agents makes good business sense. Companies are spending 1 trillion dollars worldwide a year, trying to understand and shape the journeys of their customers. However, what’s astounding is that companies spend 1000 times less on understanding their employees. Enabling artificial intelligence to work hand-in-hand with your agents is the best combination to helping them succeed.

Let’s take a look at a medical insurance company. Customers interact mostly through the company’s web portal. When the customer engages via chat, the chat interaction is handled by a Bot which is used to provide self-service and qualify the request. When the Bot recognizes a word or phrase indicating the need for a human agent, the Bot escalates the chat to a team of agents in a team collaboration workspace. The first agent to respond “yes” gets connected to the customer chat by the Bot. The agents don’t have any medical experience; they’re not doctors. But they have enough training and skill to handle first line questions. During the chat, AI is listening, and automatically displaying for the agent relevant articles and other pertinent information such as medical term definitions in real-time. However, during the chat, the agent needs expert advice from a medical professional. Without leaving their agent experience, the agent can easily find and reach a trained professional and collaborate about the customer request, while still chatting with the customer. The agent is able to answer the customer’s question on the first contact, and the customer leaves delighted from their experience.

This is a perfect example of agent augmentation – not replacement. Background intelligence is working hand-in-hand to augment the agent’s ability to serve their customer well. The Bot offloaded the initial simple task from the agent. Then the agent received AI assistance and human assistance in order to complete the engagement with the customer.

This powerful combination of AI, APIs, data analytics, contact center, and collaboration technology is the unique value Cisco brings to our customers.

A Compelling Portfolio

One more thing. I’m excited to announce that we’ll be joining the industry-recognized Webex family by renaming our cloud-based Customer Journey Platform solution to Webex Contact Center. Webex is our native cloud collaboration brand worldwide known for its reliability, scalability, security, and innovation – exactly the characteristics of our Webex Contact Center solution. This unique portfolio provides our customers a complete unified collaboration suite with calling, messaging, meetings, team collaboration, devices, and now contact center.

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Webex: Create Smarter and More Personalized Meeting Experiences

We unveiled some new, innovative features that automate and simplify steps in the meeting process, so you can make the most of your meeting time. We want to improve the meeting experience for everyone — from the host, to your attendees, and even IT. Our goal is to help make meetings smarter, more productive, and more personalized. Through Cognitive Collaboration, you can gain greater insights and build deeper connections for team collaboration.

Get Profiles About Who You’re Meeting

One way we are making meeting smarter is with People Insights which helps you quickly learn about anyone in the meeting. We announced People Insights in March and it is generally available to customers this month for the desktop app, mobile app and web page. I like this feature because it saves me from having to spend hours doing Google searches and scouring the Web for other sources of information. It works by creating a rich, dynamic profile of everyone who joins your meeting and displays that information in the Webex Meetings participant panel. Meeting participants can edit the information that’s displayed about them through the settings page. Things like photos, bios, news articles, social links, and directory data (if you are in the same company) are aggregated and available for quick viewing.

Put a Name to Every Face in the Meeting

Another way we are making your meeting smarter is with the use of facial recognition. When you use a Webex device for your meeting, the system scans the faces of anyone showing up on the video and is able to not only calculate also but identifies participants by name. It starts with a profile picture that meeting participants submit on the settings page. The Webex device then logs the picture and gives it an identifying number, which represents the participant. When you’re in a meeting, the system will scan the faces of meeting participants and use the same algorithm to calculate an identifying number for the participants. The information is encrypted and then matched against the numbers stored.

Never Miss an Action Item From the Meeting

Transcription in Webex Meetings is another feature. I use it when I need to recap what was said in the meeting or follow up on critical action items. It works by using natural language processing to deliver high-quality transcripts of your Webex Meeting recording. When you record a Webex Meeting, a transcription is saved and will appear during recording playback. You can search for text in the transcript to verify what was said, and when. All I have to do is search the recording for keywords – like my name, for example – and I can quickly review any actions assigned to me or my team.

Deeper Integrations and Interop with Your Collaboration Workflow Tools

At Cisco, we are always looking for ways to build bridges between Cisco and other collaboration solutions you may choose to use every day. That’s why we’ve upped the ante on interop too, by offering more integrated and intelligent experiences with 3rd party tools, from Microsoft, Google, Jira, and Zapier in this latest release.

For example, we improved sharing content in Webex Meetings from within Microsoft Office apps. And starting Personal Meeting Room (PMR) and recording notifications within Microsoft Teams has never been easier. The Microsoft O365 add-on recognizes meetings scheduled from Exchange for automatically synching schedule changes.

We’ve also added improvements for G-Suite users in phase two of our integration work with Google. Important features like scheduling your PMR and ad-hoc meetings, as well as advanced settings like templates, alternate hosts, audio type, and call-in details are available in the add-ons framework. Check them out soon in the Webex meeting settings, inside the Google Calendar interface. In addition, we are now integrated with Google home devices so now you can ask, “Google, what’s my meeting schedule today” or “please play my recording.”

Improve User Management for IT

And we can’t forget IT, an important persona in improving workplace experiences. We’ve made some additional improvements to Webex to help IT manager and make the most of the Webex management experience.

We expanded global audio coverage so more people can dial into Cisco Webex Meetings seamlessly through the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Your users now have access to the broadest global PSTN coverage of any other web conferencing provider, covering nearly 200 countries across all audio plans. This global coverage expansion allows you and your meeting participants to join with PSTN audio from more countries than ever. This increase represents 11 new countries included in our base Webex Flex Meetings offer at no additional cost, and the remaining countries were added to our usage audio offer for additional toll and toll-free coverage.

Last but not least, Webex Control Hub is a single pane of glass that give IT not just diagnostics, but also the ability to manage users and services. You can drill down on analytics at the individual participant level for detailed, continuous analytics on how an end user’s device is behaving or look at usage to determine whether or not certain services are
valuable or need further investment. In this management portal, you can also provision, administer, and manage Cisco Webex services and Webex Hybrid Services, such as Hybrid Call Service, Hybrid Calendar Service, Hybrid Directory Service, and Video Mesh.

These are just some of the ways we are improving the meeting’s experience.

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Introducing the new Webex Meetings in DevNet

At Cisco, we’re dedicated to providing the best experience for our customers as well as for the people who make technology work at its fullest potential—our developers. If you were at Cisco Live, you heard the incredible momentum that our DevNet community has had in the recent timeframe, reaching 500K members. While the network is certainly one of the leading focuses of DevNet, Cisco is also making it easier for developers to get access to all the resources they need to develop for Collaboration.

What’s New

The new Webex Meetings page brings you updated XML API schemas so you can easily develop for Webex Meetings. We’ve included easy access to quick links to help you get ramped up, as well as community support if you want to chat with experts.

Get Started

The Webex Meetings page on DevNet now has a brand-new interface complete with all the tools you need to get started. You can watch video tutorials, access learning labs, and read through release notes to stay up to date on all the newest features.

Community and Support

Need to talk to an expert? Check the links under our “Community & Support” section to talk to Webex Meetings experts at Cisco as well as within the developer community. Check the knowledge base to see if other people have addressed your questions already. You can also send email support for direct assistance and send in feedback.

Explore API Reference Documents

We’ve added a repository of all reference documents that you can access at your leisure, from Data Management to Site Services. You can review the full XML API reference guide to help you as you’re working through your development process.

Webex Meetings APIs Sandbox

Our DevNet Sandboxes are provided by Cisco as a cloud service to help provide guidance for customers, partners, and developers as they integrate their solutions with Cisco technology. The sandboxes are a great way to have a personalized space to design, develop, and test customized integrations using Webex APIs.

Let us know how we’re doing!

We’re constantly looking to improve the experience for our developers to make it easier and faster to implement integrations. You can send us your feedback on how your experience is with our APIs in our developer forum to help us make improvements for the future.

Our redesigned navigation allows easier access to your core Webex Meetings functions, including (but not limited to): scheduling meetings; managing attendees, viewing meeting lists, cross-launching meetings, pulling usage reports, retrieving recordings, and more. With these tools, you’ll be able to seamlessly integrate Webex Meetings into your applications. In addition, we will be using this same portal to introduce new capabilities and new APIs going forward, so be sure to check back regularly for updates.

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