Identity-centric SASE with Cisco SD-WAN and Microsoft’s Security Service Edge Solution

In today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape, enterprise WAN requirements have evolved with hybrid work becoming the norm. Security for both on-premises and cloud workloads is crucial, especially for secure access to the internet, Microsoft applications, and other critical office applications. Organizations need a flexible solution that protects against advanced threats, optimizes application performance, and simplifies network management.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers unparalleled choice, meeting customers where they are in their security journey and supporting an open ecosystem. Catalyst SD-WAN allows customers to build secure access service edge (SASE) architectures tailored to their business needs by seamlessly integrating with a broad spectrum of third-party secure service edge (SSE) vendors and, now, Microsoft.These integrations help organizations maximize their investment in cloud security by simplifying the integration process with Catalyst SD-WAN.

Bridging the Gap Between Networking and Security

With Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and Microsoft, businesses can enjoy a more unified and consistent experience for networking and security, all managed through a single dashboard.

The new integration with Microsoft’s Security Service Edge solution (SSE) bridges the gap between connectivity and protection, ensuring that data transmitted across the network is not only optimized for performance but also safeguarded against threats. Combining Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN with Microsoft’s SSE solution delivers a resilient, high-performance, and scalable WAN alongside a comprehensive suite of cloud-based security services designed to protect data, manage risks, and ensure compliance.

Key Benefits of the Microsoft’s SSE Solution Integration

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and Microsoft’s SSE solution integration provides secure access to the internet and SaaS applications with an identity-centric secure web gateway (SWG). This integration enhances the security of branch internet traffic by efficiently redirecting it through Microsoft Entra Internet Access, part of Microsoft’s SSE solution, for secure inspection, helping ensure that traffic from branch edges to the public internet or SaaS applications is thoroughly protected. The result is a secure networking solution that offers peace of mind and operational efficiency for enterprise customers.

• Enhanced security posture: Branch internet traffic is securely redirected to Microsoft’s Security Service Edge solution for advanced inspection and protection against internet-based threats, helping to ensure secure access to public internet and Microsoft SaaS applications. IT teams gain AI-powered visibility into network traffic and security events, enabling fast detection and response to threats.
• Improved cloud security: The integration leverages Microsoft’s advanced security capabilities to protect against malicious internet traffic and other cyberthreats with a comprehensive, cloud-delivered network security toolset that includes web content filtering, threat protection, information protection, and identity management.
• Seamless deployment and configuration: This integration simplifies the deployment and management process by providing an integrated solution for both networking and security. A single solution helps you to reduce operational complexity by eliminating the need for multiple point products, simplifying management, and helping you deliver a unified experience for your users. With a few clicks users can deploy thousands of branches, providing ease of configuration and the added advantage of using a Cisco validated design. Templatized workflows using SIG templates makes setup easy with end-to-end validation and enables organizations to quickly deploy new applications and services.

How Microsoft’s SSE Solution Integration Works

• Secure tunnels: Secure tunnels are created for advanced inspection, helping ensure that traffic to the internet and Microsoft SaaS applications is securely managed and enhancing bandwidth at the branch. Multiple tunnels with load balancing and ECMP give users the ability to select the nearest PoP/DC, perform an application health check through the tunnels, and steer traffic through the right tunnel.
• Traffic redirection: Relevant traffic from SD-WAN branch edges is efficiently redirected to Microsoft’s SSE solution. Users are able to select specific users and traffic, such as applications or IP addresses, to be sent to Microsoft via tunnels instead of sent directly to the internet. Enabling traffic redirection gives users granular control over traffic and allows remote workers to connect to the internet securely.
• Inspection and protection: Microsoft’s SSE solution inspects the traffic to provide robust protection against threats. Microsoft Entra Internet Access enforces unified access controls through a single policy engine and leverages multiple Entra ID integrations, including universal conditional access and continuous access evaluation (CAE), token theft protection, and data exfiltration controls.

Looking Ahead

As enterprise WAN requirements continue to evolve with hybrid work becoming the norm and applications spread across hybrid cloud and SaaS environments, both on-premises and cloud workload security are crucial. Organizations need a solution that protects against advanced threats, optimizes application performance, and simplifies network management. The Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and Microsoft’s SSE solution integration is a forward-looking response to this need, offering businesses a powerful tool to navigate the complexities of modern networking and security challenges.

Source: cisco.com

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Mastering Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure on Cisco’s Black Belt Academy

The digital landscape witnessed a significant milestone on August 28, 2023, when Cisco and Nutanix unveiled a global strategic partnership that promises to be a game-changer in the realm of hybrid multi-cloud computing. This alliance is set to fast-track and streamline the hybrid multi-cloud expedition for customers, all while redefining the core principles of data center modernization. With the integration of Nutanix’s premier software platform and Cisco’s cutting-edge server portfolio, this collaboration has produced what is arguably the industry’s most robust and comprehensive hyperconverged infrastructure solution to date.

When Cisco announced the End-of-Life for Cisco HyperFlex Data Platform (HXDP) on September 12, 2023; it left our customers and partners equally overwhelmed. So, when Cisco proposed that the Nutanix Software, running on Cisco’s Hardware will be a direct replacement of HyperFlex; we at Cisco Black Belt Academy made sure that our partners get prompt guidance on the new solution with thorough details on its enhanced HCI capabilities topped with a direction on transitioning or migrating from HyperFlex to Cisco’s HCI Solution with Nutanix.

The ”Chronicle” of Nutanix on Cisco Black Belt Academy

The Nutanix Stage 1 & 2 tracks on Cisco Black Belt Academy are launched for both Presales and Deployment roles. These tracks cover:

1. Cisco’s Hyperconverged Strategy

Explains how the partnership of Cisco and Nutanix is forged on their combined edge on application, data and infrastructure management.

2. Introduction to the Hyper Converged Infrastructure

Makes our partners acquainted with Next Generation HCI, Benefits of HCI, Sustained innovations and HCI Vendor Landscape.

3. Solution Overview

Details Cisco Compute Hyperconverged solution with Nutanix and covers it’s cloud infrastructure, broad Data Services portfolio, Nutanix Cloud Manager, Nutanix Unified Storage and Prism, the Cloud Management interface.

4. Architecture Deep Dive

Elucidates why Nutanix Architecture is different from other HCI solutions; Shows how Cisco servers, storage, networking, and SaaS operations are combined with the Nutanix Cloud Platform; explains how the controller VM’s are working to get a high performance structure; introduces resiliency and functioning of the storage layer.

5. Configuration & Deployment

In-depth demonstrations and techniques surrounding Nutanix Deployment, covering:

• Initial Configurations/Guide to getting started
• Deploying the Nutanix Foundation installer VM to a VMware ESX 7 cluster.
• Deploying a Nutanix cluster on UCS servers managed by UCS Manager and adding those hosts to vCenter.
• Expanding a Nutanix cluster with a node that has been previously provisioned.
• Deploying Prism Central from Prism Element and registering the cluster with the newly created Prism Central.
• Updating the UCS Server Firmware with Nutanix Life Cycle Manager (LCM) without disrupting overall cluster operations.

6. Migration from HyperFlex

Learn the various options to migrate existing HyperFlex platforms to the new Nutanix Platform. Gain an understanding of how Migrations of virtual machines between clusters of VMware ESXi servers is most easily accomplished via “shared nothing” vMotion. In addition, learn about the a free software tool called Move that Nutanix offers, which acts as an intermediary agent and coordinator to move VMs between two systems.

7. Sizing Cisco HCI with Nutanix

Discusses the Cisco HCI with Nutanix sizing based on:

• Output files from RVTools and Nutanix Collector tools
• Existing HyperFlex and Nutanix Bill Of Materials (BOM)
• VM-based and Capacity-based sizing of the Cisco HCI with Nutanix using Nutanix Sizer tool.

8. Winning with Nutanix

Acquire a knowledge of Nutanix differentiators in the market, Insights on the competitive environment and edge over VMware, HPE & Lenovo whilst covering the ways to successfully navigate CI and HCI customer conversations.

9. Dcloud/Capture the Flag (CTF)

Hands on demo with access to a simple Nutanix deployment on Cisco UCS, with Cisco Intersight, Nutanix Prism Element, Nutanix AHV, Prism Central and Cisco UCS Manager. The Capture the Flag (CTF) missions provide a gamified way of understanding what the new Cisco & Nutanix Partnership brings to the table.

Where to learn more?

With the modern business challenges and the ever-changing Market Dynamics, applications have become the center for every customer and these applications are growing at a fast pace. IT teams are required to deploy these applications faster and that too with a cloud operating model in place. Hence, it becomes vital to learn and understand how the partnership of Cisco and Nutanix can help deliver the infrastructure and applications globally while using the best-in-class cloud operating models, that too with added resiliency and flexibility. The curriculum of “Cisco HCI solution with Nutanix” on Cisco Black Belt Academy, can instill confidence to handle customer conversations and perform a successful PoC/PoV as a Presales SE or navigate thorough deployments of the Nutanix Solution as a field engineer while migrating from the older HyperFlex base.

Source: cisco.com

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Campaign Spotlight: Driving Demand with Marketing Velocity Central and User Protection Campaign

Marketing Velocity Central (MVC) is Cisco’s data-driven demand generation platform created by marketers for marketers. Our partners use MVC to learn, build their brand, launch campaigns, track results and become world-class marketers.

For the past decade, MVC has provided our partner marketing professionals with curated campaigns for today’s biggest opportunities. This month’s spotlight campaign is on end user security with Cisco User Protection Suite.

The User Protection Challenge

One of the main challenges facing organizations today is identity-based attacks. Bad actors are using a wide range of techniques, from phishing and social engineering to supply chain attacks, business email compromise, and more. For many of these attacks, it would take a cybersecurity expert to spot the red flags. This has become a major problem for organizations. Talos, Cisco’s Threat Intelligence Group, found that 80% of breaches were caused by targeting users.

User Protection is a hot topic, and one many security buyers have been grappling with. Each time a new threat emerges, a new solution comes to the market to protect against that threat. In fact, large enterprises have, on average, 76 security products. This is leading to product complexity for security and IT teams and organizations are looking to simplify.

This is where Cisco, along with our partners, can provide a holistic approach to protecting users.

Cisco has investigated and researched this problem and when we asked security buyers what their top concern is, they said over and over that product complexity is the root of the challenge. So rather than continue the vendor-by-vendor approach, we asked if these same buyers would consider a suite to save time managing products, to make it easier to deploy products, and save money.

With the Cisco User Protection Suite, we offer a new approach to protecting users and only Cisco has the scale and network to inform our products to better protect our customers. With over 300,000 customers and over 550 billion security events per day, we see a lot. We are using this information to better protect our users so we know which malicious sites we should block, which IP addresses bad actors are using, or what behavioral indicators should trigger certain alerts.

Cisco User Protection Suite

The Cisco User Protection Suite provides a simplified, integrated user experience. User protection provides better efficacy through an integrated roadmap, comprehensive protection, and incorporates AI to transform management and secure outcomes.

More Info: 500-173: Designing the FlexPod Solution (FPDESIGN)

Products work together and provide customers with:

• Better experiences: enables your customers to be productive at their job with secure, seamless access to all resources
• Better economics: Work with one vendor to provide the breadth of solutions to protect your users – that means one contact, one contract, and one renewal.
• Better efficacy: improve your customers’ security posture, lower their risks, and keep their sensitive information safe.

Cisco User Protection Suite provides our partners with:

• Consolidating cybersecurity solutions under one vendor to simplify subscription management for partners
• Expanding the opportunity into an Enterprise Agreement (EA), making it much more difficult for competitive security providers to displace incumbency
• Collaborating with our customers as a trusted advisor and support customers on their user protection journey
• Improving efficiency and saving customers money, while providing a valuable business outcome

Drive demand and pipeline with Marketing Velocity Central

Did you know that partners who use Marketing Velocity Central (MVC) generate 4 times more pipeline than those who do not? As a benefit for being a Cisco registered partner, you can generate more pipeline and bookings by activating the User Protection campaign on Marketing Velocity Central.

MVC accelerates your time to market with ready-to-use content, customizable campaigns including email and social copy, images, logos, and shareable content to drive customer engagement.

To optimize your marketing campaigns, MVC also provides services such as:

• Co-branding: show your credibility by downloading and using your Cisco partnership logo through logo builder
• Customization: set yourself apart by picking a ready-to-go campaign, edit it and choose from the many images in our library
• Account-Based Targeting: upload and manage your list of contacts in one single place while tracking campaign engagement via a lead-scoring method
• Full-Service Activities: hire a third-party marketing agency to help you obtain even better results and use your Cisco marketing funds, or your own funds

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco Secure Connect: The Turn-Key SASE Solution for Managed Service Providers

We understand that Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are always on the lookout for solutions that can streamline their service delivery while ensuring top-notch security for their clients. Cisco Secure Connect stands out as a turnkey Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering that simplifies the deployment and management of multi-customer SASE environments. Here’s why MSPs should be paying attention to Cisco Secure Connect and considering it for their managed service offerings.

What is Cisco Secure Connect?

Cisco Secure Connect is a unified SASE solution that enables secure access to applications and resources no matter where they are hosted, from any location and at any time. It is built on the robust Meraki platform, bringing together networking and security services through a single, user-friendly interface, simplifying the management of complex multi-cloud environments.

Why Should MSPs Care?

Secure Connect MSP portal capabilities are inherited from the existing Meraki MSP architecture. For MSPs, operational efficiency and the ability to provide a seamless service experience are critical. Cisco Secure Connect, with its new Meraki GUI, enhances the admin experience by streamlining workflows, allowing for easier deployment, usage, and management through a unified cloud dashboard. This improves agility, speed, and scalability, reducing operational complexities.

Cisco Secure Connect MSP Architecture

The Global Overview Page, replacing the older “MSP portal page” and offering a summary view of all customer environments. This allows MSP admins to manage multiple organizations with a single login, while still maintaining customer privacy as each organization’s licensing, inventory, users, and configurations are treated independently. The global dashboard is customizable to select and display the required columns. Also the view can change based on “Organisations”, “ Networks” or “Network Tags”.

Cisco Secure Connect Global Overview Page

Benefits of Adding Cisco Secure Connect to Your Managed Offering

Easy Operations: Raise support tickets directly from each organization’s page on Secure Connect. The platform provides unified support, making troubleshooting for both network (Meraki) and security (Umbrella) simpler.

Global Overview Page: serves as the command centre. This page has been enhanced with a new “Ticket” column, so MSP admins can view and manage support tickets for each organization with ease.

Dashboard Branding: Cisco Secure Connect allows MSPs to brand their dashboard, providing a personalized experience for clients. If this feature isn’t visible, MSPs can request activation through a support ticket.

Automation: Cisco is introducing an integrated API for Secure Connect, consolidating what used to require separate calls to Meraki and Umbrella APIs. This streamlines automation workflows and maintains a unified platform approach.

Monetization: Cisco Secure Connect is based on the Meraki cloud platform, enabling MSPs to upsell additional services without added management overhead. For instance, MSPs can extend their offerings to include physical security by provisioning Meraki smart cameras, all managed from the same portal.

Final Thoughts

Don’t hesitate to reach out to your existing Meraki SD-WAN customers and discuss layering security for secure internet and cloud access. With Cisco Secure Connect, you can augment your managed SD-WAN offering by adding security features with just a few clicks, providing a comprehensive SASE experience.

MSPs looking to simplify their operations while expanding their service portfolio should consider Cisco Secure Connect as a strategic addition to their managed services. It’s a solution that not only brings efficiency but also opens the door to new revenue opportunities.

Source: cisco.com

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Maximize Managed Services: Cisco ThousandEyes Drives MSPs Towards Outstanding Client Experiences

IT related outages and performance issues can inflict significant financial and operational harm on businesses, especially in critical sectors such as finance, healthcare, and e-commerce. These IT disruptions not only impact productivity potentially costing enterprises billions annually, but also negatively affect end-users through poor experiences like delays and inaccessibility. The vitality of business applications is crucial, as their availability and performance directly influence stakeholder impact, operational continuity, and profitability. Resolving these issues is often complex and labor-intensive. Any system-related downtime or lapse in application performance can ultimately lead to long-term setbacks for an organization.

Typical Troubleshooting Scenario of IT Infrastructure Without ThousandEyes

As soon as an end-user reports an IT related issue, whether it’s a service outage or slow application performance, the formidable challenge of locating and fixing the issue begins. It’s often like searching for a “needle in a haystack.” The troubleshooting journey to uncover the underlying cause of the IT infrastructure related issues typically involves and unfolds with the following challenges:

• Prolonged Troubleshooting and Finger Pointing – Organizations frequently encounter difficulties in addressing IT outages and performance problems due to limited network visibility and siloed IT teams. This situation fosters a blame culture and hinders collaboration, as teams focus more on debating the cause of issues rather than fixing them, leading to inefficient use of time and resources in Incident Response efforts.
• Limited End-to-End Visibility – Infrastructure and operations professionals struggle to gain a complete and clear understanding of the end-user experience due to the “black box” nature of the Internet and inadequate traditional monitoring tools. These tools often fail to provide detailed performance data across devices, applications, and the Internet, complicating IT teams’ efforts to pinpoint root causes of issues.
• Inefficient Resource Allocation – Addressing outages and performance issues consumes significant time and diverts IT resources from strategic initiatives. In-house monitoring systems frequently produce false alerts, misallocating resources and impeding the IT’s capacity to effectively maintain and optimize infrastructure performance.

ThousandEyes tackles these prevalent challenges by presenting an integrated solution with end-to-end visibility into both network infrastructure and application performance. This exceptional level of insight and actionable intelligence enables IT teams to work together with greater synergy, ability to pinpoint and rectify issues, and optimize the deployment of their IT operations resources. The unparalleled abilities of ThousandEyes sets it apart from other platforms by greatly enhancing the visibility and understanding of the components within an environment.

Enhancing Managed Network Services for Client Success

ThousandEyes, a Digital Experience Assurance (DXA) platform, equips organizations with comprehensive insights into user experiences and application performance across the Internet, cloud services, and internal IT infrastructure, thereby streamlining the optimization of essential network-dependent services and applications. This platform can significantly expedite problem resolution and reduce the resources required to address common infrastructure problems by offering the following benefits:

• Visibility – ThousandEyes provides MSPs with a holistic view that encompasses their clients’ internal networks as well as external networks, cloud services, and SaaS platforms. This end-to-end visibility allows MSPs to oversee and address issues throughout the entire digital supply chain, from core infrastructure to the application level. With this extensive coverage, MSPs are equipped to quickly locate the source of any issue across the network spectrum, thereby shortening the time required to identify problems.
• Troubleshooting – ThousandEyes streamlines the troubleshooting process by swiftly pinpointing the root causes of infrastructure related issues, whether they occur within the enterprise network or are due to external factors like ISPs, cloud providers, or SaaS applications. The platform fosters collaboration among IT teams by providing a unified data set, which helps eliminate finger-pointing and accelerates problem-solving, thereby significantly reducing the time required to resolve issues.
• Digital Experience Assurance – ThousandEyes conducts comprehensive performance monitoring by tracking key network metrics like latency, packet loss, and jitter, along with application-level metrics that shed light on the user experience and the performance of web and API transactions. Additionally, the platform enhances DXA by simulating user transactions and scrutinizing the data pathways to end-users, ensuring that both customers and/or employees have effective access to business applications.
• Alerting and Reporting – ThousandEyes enhances proactive IT management by providing intelligent alerting and comprehensive reporting. Users are notified of performance degradation in real-time and can access historical data and trend analysis for informed decision-making. This proactive alerting capability allows IT teams to identify and address anomalies early, potentially reducing the frequency and severity of incidents therefore minimizing their impact.
• Optimization – Organizations can optimize network performance and enhance user experience by leveraging insights from both historical and real-time data on application and service delivery paths. This comprehensive understanding enables informed decision-making that not only addresses current performance issues but also helps prevent future ones, ultimately conserving time and resources.

ThousandEyes enhances organizational capability to deliver high-quality digital services through valuable insights and analytics, which strengthen network management capabilities and facilitate more effective decision-making and issue resolution. Although the extent of benefits or efficiency gains varies across different organizations, users commonly report marked improvements after implementing ThousandEyes, with some noting up to a 75% faster resolution of network problems and fewer outages and performance issues. Customers have reported substantial reductions in troubleshooting times, with tasks that previously took hours or days being cut down to mere minutes, thanks to ThousandEyes.

ThousandEyes Enhances the Service Offerings of MSPs, Greatly Improving the Overall Experience

Managed Service Providers can enhance their client’s network management and optimization by leveraging the following benefits of Cisco ThousandEyes:

• Improved Service Level Agreements (SLAs): With detailed insights into network performance and the ability to quickly identify and resolve issues, MSPs can better adhere to, or further enhance their SLAs. This helps in maintaining a high level of service and can distinguish the MSP’s offerings in a competitive market.
• Proactive Problem Resolution: ThousandEyes’ alerting system can notify MSPs of potential issues before they affect end-users. This proactive approach minimizes downtime and can help MSPs address problems before clients are even aware of them.
• Enhanced Customer Experience: By ensuring that applications and services are running smoothly, MSPs can contribute to a better end-user experience for their clients’ customers. This is particularly important for customer-facing applications where performance directly impacts revenue and brand reputation.
• Efficient Troubleshooting: With the comprehensive network telemetry from ThousandEyes, MSPs can swiftly identify the root cause, whether they stem from the client’s internal network, an ISP, or various cloud-based services. This capability decreases the average time required to resolve issues.
• Data-Driven Decisions: The data collected by ThousandEyes can inform strategic decisions about network design, capacity planning, and performance optimization. MSPs can use this information to advise clients on how to improve their IT infrastructures.
• Reporting and Communication: MSPs can use the detailed reports and visualizations provided by ThousandEyes to effectively communicate with clients about network health, ongoing issues, and resolved problems, enhancing transparency and trust.

ThousandEyes: Your Shortcut to Advanced Network Visibility

ThousandEyes simplifies deployment with its cloud-based SaaS model. It integrates smoothly into diverse environments using versatile agents, including the specialized Enterprise Agents—robust, dedicated monitoring nodes that provide deeper network insights. These Enterprise Agents can be deployed on-premises in data centers, within private clouds, or even across public cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure to monitor network and application performance. Additionally, ThousandEyes provides a browser extension designed for monitoring of user experience. Furthermore, its compatibility with Cisco and Meraki infrastructure streamlines integration, facilitating easy embedding into current deployments. The straightforward web management interface streamlines configuration, and the platform’s API accessibility supports automation, making ThousandEyes a highly adaptable and effortless choice for comprehensive network visibility.

MSPs Can Now Leverage Consumption-Based Licensing for ThousandEyes

In addition to traditional Enterprise Agreement licensing vehicles, ThousandEyes is now available through the Cisco Managed Services Licensing Agreement (MSLA), a program that was designed to meet the specific requirements of MSPs. This consumption-based licensing model is flexible and scalable, fitting the service-based business models of MSPs by allowing them to pay based on consumption. The MSLA program allows MSPs to adjust their ThousandEyes usage without complex contract changes, facilitating quick adaptation to evolving market demands.

MSPs and Their Clients Can Garner Significant Return on Investment

The integration of ThousandEyes by MSPs leads to a worthwhile ROI and an enhancement of their managed service offerings, providing benefits for both the providers and their clients. MSPs experience a marked improvement in their ability to offer advanced network visibility, comprehensive performance monitoring, and proactive issue resolution. These capabilities result in elevated service quality and increased customer satisfaction. End users reap the rewards of more reliable and efficient network services, experiencing fewer disruptions and thus less impact on their business operations. Moreover, the operational efficiencies introduced by ThousandEyes help reduce costs and free up valuable resources, enabling MSPs to focus more on business expansion and continued services improvement. In a time when digital transformation and dependency on Internet and cloud services are growing, having complete network visibility is essential. ThousandEyes is critical in this landscape, acting as a GPS for the digital world, offering insights and guidance for effective and efficient navigation.

Source: cisco.com

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Mastering Skills with Play: The Fusion of Gaming and Learning in Black Belt Gamification

Welcome to the immersive world of gamified learning, where the addictive pull of mobile gaming and the interactive rewards system of apps like Duolingo are not just for play—they’re the driving force behind our approach to Cisco Black Belt Academy gamification. We strive to transform enablement by harnessing the potent allure of game mechanics, making the learning process not just more engaging but also more impactful. Discover how we integrate the principles of game design to elevate and energize conventional enablement methodologies.

Black Belt gamified enablement incorporates game elements like points, badges, challenges, customizable avatars and themed stories into the learning process, to encourage user interaction and competition via leaderboards. Our objective is to make acquiring new knowledge more engaging and interactive, fostering a sense of accomplishment, and healthy competition among learners.

Classic versus Contemporary: A Comparative Outlook

During our research into gamified learning, we found that traditional training methods often struggle to keep learners engaged, leading to decreased retention and motivation.

The Gamification initiative began to further improve and innovate Black Belt Academy enablement. In today’s fast-paced world, keeping our learners engaged and up-to-speed is crucial. Gamified enablement is a dynamic approach that addresses this by tapping into our natural desire for competition, recognition, and accomplishment.

Our objective has been to use gamification to drive Black Belt participation on a broader level with our partners while deepening their knowledge and making it more fun and hands-on for the learners. ​

Innovation and Opportunities

Partners with 30% of employees engaged in Black Belt grew 10% basis points faster and Partners with above average participation grew 3% faster. Adding layers of gamification will give us the opportunity to increase enablement engagement driving more users, improved completion rate & higher continuation rates (S2/S3), and higher user loyalty.

Cisco Black Belt Academy has planned and implemented gamification strategies in three categories:

1. Single Tournaments are where partner individuals register to compete against others in a single/one-off lab-like (short period) environment where the individual who gets the most points wins.

2. Journey Competitions are where partner individuals register to compete against other individuals over a long period of time with the end goal to get to the top of the tournament table.​

3. Races are where partner individuals register to race against others by completing trainings the quickest. Only a certain number of individuals are rewarded in the end.

Our innovative Escape Room has been met with widespread acclaim and attention. In this space-themed adventure, participants are cast as crew members of a spaceship that has crash-landed on an alien planet. To escape, they must leverage their Cisco Security expertise to locate and gather essential repair elements (crystals) needed to restore their spacecraft.

Our team at Cisco Black Belt Academy is committed to enhancing the partner experience by infusing our platform with engaging value communications. We are focused on integrating gamification elements, create captivating content that keeps learners engaged throughout their gaming experience while also providing meaningful rewards and incentives that align with their in-game achievements.

Source: cisco.com

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Increase Market Share Quickly with Cisco Specializations and GTM Tools

Your Managed Services opportunity with Cisco is exploding, with a total addressable market of $161 Billion by 2027. Within that, the SMB segment is growing 1.6 times faster than other segments. However, you may not realize how quickly and easily we can help you capture more of this market. Here’s how the Cisco Partner Program and incentives help:

• Differentiate yourself from your competition by earning more Cisco Powered Services Specializations and pave your way to Gold-level advantages.
• Use your market development funds for business development, demand generation, funding headcount, and internal training.
• Leverage ready-made marketing kits and templates and get access to experts to help you grow your business.
• Earn greater pricing incentives and discounts that help you reach your revenue goals faster. Cisco continuously updates and adds marketing resources, so you can maximize your earning potential as your sales grow.

Growth drivers

Customers want speed and flexibility when achieving their targeted business outcomes, and with managed services as part of your value proposition, you can deliver both. Organizations across all industries face a common set of business challenges: lean IT staffs in complex IT environments, IT skills gaps, and a lack of resources needed to manage, optimize, and automate their networks. On top of that, security issues can arise when policies do not encompass both on-prem and cloud environments. Often, traditional on-prem consumption models do not align with cloud solutions and marketplaces. As a managed service provider, you can close these gaps, address your customer’s business challenges, and help them achieve their goals.

Greater Together

By working together closely and partnering to create unrivaled value for customers around their needs, we can capture more managed services opportunities. Building on Cisco’s industry-leading platforms and technologies like Cisco Powered Services, you can create and deliver your own innovations that help customers accomplish their specific business outcomes. We can achieve more innovation faster than ever across platforms, networking, security, collaboration, and optimized applications. Together we have a unique advantage, the ability to serve customers of every size and industry segment solving their biggest technology challenges.

Create marketplace differentiation with Cisco

With Cisco Powered Services specializations, you can elevate your organization above your competition. These recognized technology credentials help you build greater demand for your services and win new customers. They showcase your ability to build, provision, manage, and support managed services using industry-leading Cisco technologies that deliver the business outcomes your customers need. Grow your organization’s skills efficiently by building repeatable and scalable managed services. In addition, Cisco Powered Services give you:

• Proven blueprints: Validate your competency in areas including Power Hybrid Work, Secure the Enterprise, Transform Infrastructure, and Reimagine Applications.
• Quicker path to advancement: Meet specialization training requirements with up to 40 percent cost reductions. Role-share using CCIEs and CCNPs helps you meet Provider-level requirements faster.
• Showcase capabilities: Once you achieve these specializations, you gain access to industry-recognized logos and exclusive go-to-market resources to build successful solutions and services for Managed SD-WAN, Meraki, SASE, FSO, and many more.
• Sales acceleration: Expand your Cisco Powered Services portfolio and earn greater rewards within the Provider role, including exclusive upfront discounts and market development funds.

New resources available

You don’t need a large marketing team to reach current and potential customers. Cisco provides a variety of marketing materials and creative assets to help you highlight your unique capabilities. These ready-made materials will help you build targeted campaigns quicker and reach your customers faster. Newly added assets within Marketing Velocity Learning include a video and a companion guide with step-by-step guidance to help you grow your managed services business more quickly.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco and Megaport Simplify Cloud Networking with Pay-As-You-Go Model

In the ever-evolving world of digital connectivity, Cisco continues to pave the way with innovative solutions not just centered around technological advances, but also around how those advances can easily be consumed by customers. Over the last three years, Cisco and Megaport have collaborated deeply by:

1. Integrating Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN with Megaport global network connectivity services (Megaport Virtual Edge and Megaport Virtual Cross Connects)

2. Delivering a single vendor consumption model for customers to purchase Megaport services via Cisco (available since September 2021 on Cisco Global Price List)

Cisco’s Pay-as-You-Go Initiative

Today, we are happy to announce that Cisco and Megaport are extending their partnership by introducing a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) offer for Megaport Virtual Edge, Virtual Cross Connects, and Ports through Cisco’s Global Price List. As an alternative to the existing term-based offer, Cisco’s pay-as-you-go offer provides businesses with unprecedented flexibility, scalability, and a cloud-like consumption model for Megaport underlay services.

Cisco’s PAYG offer for Megaport services is a dynamic approach to network resource management. It is designed to ensure businesses only pay for the infrastructure resources they utilize, providing an efficient and economical solution. This model signifies a shift from the traditional, static network infrastructure to a more dynamic, flexible, and cost-effective alternative. The pay-as-you-go offer will be available in March 2024 and will be integrated with Megaport Virtual Edge, Megaport Virtual Cross Connects, and Megaport Ports.

Both consumption models give customers a single vendor experience for their global connectivity requirements through Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, allowing them to bring up network infrastructure to create global wide area networks, connect to multiple cloud environments, and setup easy data recovery systems in a matter of minutes. There’s no need for customers to deal with multiple vendors, manage various contracts, or navigate multiple portals.

Key Benefits of Cisco’s PAYG for Megaport Services

Currently adopted by a wide variety of business verticals (healthcare, tech, global IT services, financial services, and public sectors), middle-mile optimization with Catalyst SD-WAN and Megaport, allows businesses to realize a range of benefits.

• Flexibility and scalability: The PAYG offer allows for dynamic scaling of network connectivity, thus creating a cloud-like consumption model for site-to-cloud, site-to-site, and cloud-to-cloud connectivity requirements. This flexibility is crucial in today’s ever-changing business environment, where adaptability, agility, and ease of use are key determinants of success.
• Cost-effectiveness: Organizations can manage their network resources based on their specific requirements and only pay for the resources they consume. With a $0 upfront commitment and a single billing and support platform, Cisco aims to reduce the multi-vendor requisite customers must deal with for their global networking infrastructure needs.
• Secure and reliable: By leveraging Megaport’s robust global platform with a 99.999% SLA, businesses can enjoy seamless, secure connections to a vast network of service providers (data centers, public clouds, and SaaS) in a colocation-agnostic manner, while Catalyst SD-WAN ensures end-to-end encryption for data at rest and data in transit.
• Global WAN: Megaport’s extensive global footprint allows businesses to deploy Megaport Virtual Edge hosting the Catalyst 8000V in 70+ metros across the globe, giving users access to Megaport’s backbone in a data center agnostic manner. Multi-national enterprises have deployed resilient and responsive global WANs in a manner of minutes using Catalyst SD-WAN and Megaport underlays, thus empowering them to do away with their legacy networks, long term contracts, and the insecurities of using public internet services. This global reach, combined with Cisco’s Catalyst SD-WAN, enables organizations to create a truly borderless and responsive network infrastructure.

Cisco’s launch of the pay-as-you-go offer for Megaport services delivers unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency to organizations looking to modernize their global network infrastructure while transforming to a cloud-first environment by providing a network that mimics the same.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco and Nutanix Team Up in Response to Customer Demand: Another Win for Customer-Centric Innovation

In the ever-evolving landscape of IT, organizations continually seek solutions that simplify complexity, break down silos, and enhance agility. At Cisco, we’re continually tuned into the demands and requirements of our customer base, and it’s this laser focus that has led to our most recent collaborative venture. We are thrilled to announce our new integration with Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing solutions.

Listening to You: Our Driving Force

Time and time again, our commitment to delivering top-notch, efficient solutions is fueled by the needs and feedback of our customers. You spoke, and we listened. The partnership with Nutanix is a direct reflection of this two-way dialogue, a testament to our commitment to not just hear, but actively listen and respond to what you are saying.

Bridging the Gap with ACI VMM Integration

One of the key facets of this collaboration is the integration of Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) with Nutanix. This marriage of technologies effectively bridges domain silos between the network and server teams. Network configurations and server deployments, historically segmented tasks, can now be coordinated more efficiently, fostering a more agile and responsive infrastructure. This integration is designed to simplify operational complexities, promoting a more streamlined and efficient operational workflow.

Cisco ACI: Beyond Traditional Networking

Before we jump into the integration, let’s re-familiarize ourselves with Cisco ACI:

◉ APIC (Application Policy Infrastructure Controller): It’s not just a management tool; think of it as the brain behind the orchestration of network policies.

◉ Spine and Leaf Architecture: This ensures a swift and efficient flow of data, connecting all aspects of the data center seamlessly.

◉ Policies: The linchpin of ACI, these pre-defined functionalities ensure the network is adaptive and responsive to specific needs.

Why Nutanix?

Nutanix is a frontrunner when it comes to hyperconverged infrastructure, bringing together compute, storage, and virtualization under one roof. Their solution, which focuses on simplicity and scalability, offers an ideal playground for ACI’s capabilities. Integrating with Nutanix’s VMM functions ensures that ACI’s policy-driven approach aligns perfectly with the agility and dynamism of virtualized workloads.

The Power of Integration

Holistic Visibility: ACI’s already granular insight extends into Nutanix environments. Network administrators can track activities from the physical infrastructure up to individual VMs in the Nutanix cluster.

Elastic Networking: As virtual machines and workloads shift within the Nutanix ecosystem, ACI adapts, ensuring network policies remain consistent and effective.

Enhanced Security Posture: ACI’s renowned micro-segmentation, when combined with Nutanix’s security features, offers a formidable defense against malicious activities and breaches.

Unified Management: With APIC interfacing directly with Nutanix’s Prism management, it consolidates the administrative experience, simplifying operations.

Getting Started with ACI and Nutanix

Integration at a glance:

• Kickstart with a robust ACI environment and an operational Nutanix cluster.
• Through APIC, navigate to VM Networking, and add a VMM domain specific to Nutanix.
• Detail out the Nutanix cluster specifications and correlate with ACI’s bridge domain.
• Watch as ACI seamlessly integrates its policies with Nutanix, creating a cohesive networking environment.

Joint Commitment to Customer Success

Both Cisco and Nutanix are firmly committed to jointly supporting our customers. Our shared goal is to deliver the best infrastructure automation experience possible. By harmonizing the strengths of ACI’s policy-driven architecture with Nutanix’s prowess in hyperconverged infrastructure, we aim to offer a solution that epitomizes efficiency, simplicity, and most importantly, customer satisfaction.

In Conclusion

The integration of Cisco’s ACI with Nutanix marks a pivotal moment in data center networking. It signifies a future where the physical and virtual, the network and the application, are in perfect harmony. For enterprises looking for agility, security, and simplicity, this integration opens up new vistas of possibilities.

Source: cisco.com

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How Cisco Black Belt Academy Learns from Our Learners

Cisco Black Belt Academy offers the latest in technology enablement to our partners, distributors, and Cisco employees. With ever-changing industry trends and market dynamics, an in-depth understanding of end-users’ requirements is of supreme importance, and we strive to offer the best in Partner Experience.

Learning from our learners

Listen-Learn-Act-Repeat is a never ending cycle at Black Belt Academy. We endeavor to engage our partners in a variety of ways to offer Black Belt Academy courses that help them succeed. With an exhaustive enablement catalogue, we ensure that we are in sync with the wants of our learners. Our Partner Experience team works tirelessly behind the scenes to support learners when they need help.

In principle, we believe in having a symbiotic approach in the way we go about doing business: we are as good as our learners on any given day.

Constantly refining based on learners’ input

We have identified specific touch points to include our partners’ input in refining our Learning Plans:

Voice of the Partner: The initiative is a part of Global Partner Routes and Sales. It is designed to understand the perspective of our consumers across all Cisco verticals. Such inputs help us in innovating and upgrading our offerings.

Partner Listening: Taking cue of the Voice of the Partner initiative, we have set forth a Partner Listening activity that caters to Black Belt-specific partners and distributors. We take pride in the fact that the initiative has increased our engagement levels with our consumers. Our platform refinement and the revamped framework of our learning courses exemplifies our commitment towards developing user-oriented products.

Review and Feedback: At the end we have the Review/Feedback option attached to our courses. This might be a contemporary tool, but it is nevertheless very important at sorting escalations at the earliest.

Your voice, our actions

The feedback received is diligently addressed by our entire Black Belt Team. We make deliberate efforts to accommodate the requested changes from our partners, especially those that affect our overall engagement and user experience. Our Annual Refresh is dedicated to integrating these changes into both the Platform Experience and the curated content. The Black Belt Content BDMs collaborate to enhance the quality of assets and the context of trainings each year, ensuring we provide what you need in the manner you need it.

An experience based on learners’ needs

We take pride in being among a handful of organizations whose product orientation is based on customers’ wants. Through the implementation of both proactive and reactive measures, we ensure our learners have the best experience. As you learn from us rest assured, we are continuously learning from you.

Source: cisco.com

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Unlocking Success in the Digital Landscape: Deloitte and Cisco

For more than twenty years, Deloitte and Cisco have been dedicated to creating meaningful results for our mutual clients in the ever-evolving digital landscape. By combining Cisco’s market presence with Deloitte’s expertise, we deliver scalable, adaptable solutions tailored to support unique digital transformation objectives. Our work together merges Cisco’s leadership in IT infrastructure, security, and related sectors with Deloitte’s expertise in digital transformation, analytics, and cloud services.

Our clients access Deloitte’s customized solutions across its consulting, advisory, and tax divisions, leveraging profound industry insights to achieve their business goals. We identify the optimal blend of products and services that integrate seamlessly with their environments, driving digital transformation in areas such as full-stack observability (FSO), connected factories, the future of work, sustainability, and security.

Improving application performance with Full-Stack Observability (FSO)

Deloitte and Cisco collaborate to offer FSO to SAP and AWS clients. By integrating Cisco AppDynamics (AppD) with other monitoring tools, we enhance application performance and drive better business outcomes. AppD addresses SAP visibility and performance concerns at the advanced business application programming (ABAP) code level to provide essential visibility data.

Our efforts offer several benefits to our clients, including:

• Real-time discovery and visualization of all SAP components and their dependencies, helping to ensure a comprehensive view during SAP cloud migrations
• Reduction of inter-team conflicts by providing a unified source of truth for application performance that bridges the gap between development, operations, and SAP Basis teams
• Code-level visibility into SAP ABAP and connected non-SAP applications, expediting root cause analysis and performance issue identification
• Establishing baseline health and performance metrics for applications before cloud migration, simplifying issue detection at every migration stage and validating success by comparing pre- and post-migration metrics

Enabling Industrial Smart Operations

In the age of Industry 4.0, leading organizations are transitioning from traditional to digital supply network operations. Traditional linear supply chains lack agility and efficiency, inhibiting broader revenue streams and profit growth. The Digital Supply Network is a dynamic system that incorporates ecosystem partners and leverages digital technologies such as predictive algorithms and real-time IoT sensor data.

Cisco supports secure data collection with sensors, multiaccess wireless, and a cybersecurity platform. Deloitte provides industry expertise and helps transform supply chains through strategy, implementation, cloud operations, and AI solutions.

The outcome? Industrial Smart Operations, delivered by Deloitte and Cisco.

Driving a sustainable future of work

Deloitte and Cisco collaborate to create the contemporary employee experience while reducing the global carbon footprint of offices and factories.

This transformation is influenced by four important trends:

• Expansion of a remote hybrid workforce
• Reevaluation of real estate requirements and evolving workplace dynamics
• Increasing integration of artificial intelligence and telemetry in workplaces
• Organizational imperative to embrace a broad range of energy efficiency measures in support of net-zero carbon emissions objectives

Fueled by rapid connectivity, innovative talent models, and cognitive technologies, Deloitte and Cisco are actively shaping the modern employee experience while simultaneously driving environmental sustainability in offices and factories worldwide.

Enhancing security postures

Together, we help our mutual clients confidently transform their cyber and strategic risk mitigation programs and reduce overall risk exposure. Deloitte also works with Cisco to integrate the Cisco Security Portfolio into the Deloitte Zero Trust PRISM Financial Risk asset. This zero-trust cybersecurity posture makes it possible to create more robust and resilient security, simplify security management, improve the end-user experience, and allow customers to incorporate cyber risk elements into their overall risk exposure.

Making an impact that matters

Cisco’s cutting-edge cybersecurity technology, industrial IoT, network transformation, collaboration and observability solutions, and SD-WAN, combined with Deloitte’s distinguished professional services, provide significant value to customers around the world.

Source: cisco.com

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Enhance operational performance and agility through your network

The network has never been more important to running mission-critical IT applications and solving business needs. To drive business advantage, an organization’s network must support hybrid work and cloud-centric models, stay ahead of cybersecurity threats, while providing automation capabilities and network insights from real-time analytics.

This is further complicated by managing across multiple sites, meeting compliance standards, and monitoring a range of technologies from multiple vendors. Rearchitecting the campus network to accommodate these challenges can increase the burden on IT teams already struggling with skill shortages and staffing constraints.

The criticality of the network to the business underscores the importance of working with leading networking and IT services companies to overcome these challenges and provide the managed solutions and expertise enterprises require. That’s where NTT’s Managed Network Service for Cisco Catalyst Center, underpinned by NTT’s Spektra platform, comes in. NTT’s Managed Catalyst Center offer helps customers enhance network performance to meet the demands of the digital organization.

Improve network performance with NTT and Cisco

NTT’s Managed Network Services with Cisco Catalyst Center provides a cloud-based network automation, advanced monitoring and management solution. Cisco Catalyst Center becomes the brain of the network – monitoring and automating network management and providing event correlation, real-time analytics and insights. Catalyst Center is underpinned by AI-enabled network management that can streamline configuration, troubleshooting and operational functions by making recommendations based on Machine Reasoning Analytics.  NTT’s network transformation platform, SPEKTRA, delivers an additional layer of AI-enabled automation, predictive analytics and event correlation techniques.

This integrated solution uses advanced AIOps to deliver innovation and intelligent workplace features by using Cisco Catalyst Center DevOps API services layer. Monitoring, event correlation, automation and real-time analytics provide the insights that network administrators need to manage the IT ecosystem more efficiently. End-to-end managed services encompass design, support, delivery, and lifecycle services with a single, unified services portal.

Benefits of true integration and managed solutions

NTT’s technical expertise brings the full range of Catalyst Center features into its Managed Networks solution to provide numerous advantages, including:

• Real-time analytics helps administrators quickly identify and resolve network and security issues before they become major problems.
• Automation of up to 90 percent of network management tasks reduces the workload and lowers downtimecaused by manual configuration errors and troubleshooting.
• Simplified network management with a single dashboard view covers the entire network.
• Proactive management and operations by using advanced monitoring and event management keep the network running smoothly, 24x7x365.
• Access to technical expertise for managing and supporting the solution reduces the pressure on in-house IT staff.

This solution can be adapted to meet infrastructure needs across a range of situations: large, complex networks that require automation, segmentation, and real-time analytics; network management for multisite organizations; and migrations to the cloud with automation and real-time analytics that support cloud-based services.  Additionally, NTT helps customers meet compliance requirements with policy-based access control and network segmentation.

Unlock the potential of advanced functionality

“Our Managed Cisco Catalyst Center offering is another example of how we combine innovation in AI with our network management expertise to help our clients improve their network performance and find operational efficiencies while simplifying management requirements,” said Amit Dhingra,Executive Vice President: Managed Network Services at NTT in his blog, Introducing NTT’s Managed Cisco Catalyst Center. 

NTT’s Managed Catalyst Center offering uses a framework of platform, people, and process to redesign the network and deliver operational excellence.

Source: cisco.com

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Introducing Black Belt Academy’s New Flexible Validation Criteria

The goal of Cisco’s Black Belt Academy is to provide our partners with an efficient and effective role-based learning journey, which is presented in two or three sequential Stages. There is a strong correlation between partners’ revenue growth and the number of their employees who earn Stage 2 and 3 certifications, which require a deeper understanding of the subject matter, so progress requires validation.

However, we received feedback from partners that our validation criteria aren’t always appropriate for some roles. We listened. The result: more flexible validation criteria.

What’s changed – New flexible validation criteria for Presales and Deployment Roles

In the Black Belt Academy, as learners progress on their journeys from Stage 2 to Stage 3, new options are available depending on the role and the technology. We have provided alternatives other than the Deal ID submission for Stage 2 Learning Plan completion.

Alternative criteria include:

• Completing a “Capture the Flag” mission
• Creating a Perfect Pitch video of how you would present to a customer
• Proof of concept document of a test environment setup for a customer
• High-level design document of a customer solution

These details, which are built into the Learning Plans, will be available as the learner’s progress on their journeys.

Solution specialization tracks like SASE, FSO, Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid WFH will still require a Sales Order number from learners who are planning to apply for solution specialization at the partner (company) level. Partner admins should refer to program guidelines here.

Overall Impact

• More learners are progressing to Stage 2, which increases the number of those eligible for Stage 3 and certification.
• More options will make this validation process less complicated.
• A more streamlined learning journey, including automated ‘Capture the Flag’ missions.
• An overall improvement in user experience.

These changes represent our direction towards making the learning experience better for our partners. We are working on future improvements for you. Stay tuned!

Source: cisco.com

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