Automated Service Assurance at Microsecond Speed

For communication service providers (CSPs), the network trends of cloudification, open, software-based infrastructure, and multi-vendor environments are a double-edged sword. On the plus side, these trends break the long tradition of vendor lock-in, freeing service providers to mix best-of-breed solutions that provide competitive advantages.

But with that freedom comes new and daunting responsibilities. It’s now up to CSPs to ensure that all those disparate solutions, APIs, and network functions work together flawlessly. And in the case of mobile networks, operators have two steep learning curves to climb simultaneously: Open RAN and 5G standalone core networks.

Multi-vendor interoperability challenges highlight the need for vendors to collaborate on solutions that are pre-integrated so they’re ready for flawless deployment. This would free CSPs from the time and expense of performing extensive integration and testing — tasks that delay service launches. Pre-integrated, best-of-breed solutions would also deliver faster time to revenue for those new services. Closed-loop automation with tightly integrated network and service orchestration and assurance is the ultimate goal for efficient operations in this new environment.

Another major benefit is confidence that those services will have the performance and quality of experience (QoE) that customers expect. But to maximize that benefit, operators will need real-time, KPI-level insights into those network components across network domains, as well as the services and customer applications running over them. These insights are key to understanding the customer experience and differentiating services with competitive enterprise SLAs.

Automated Assurance and Orchestration that can Handle SLAs at Scale and Speed

By tightly integrating automated assurance and orchestration, Accedian Skylight with Cisco Crosswork enables closed-loop automation based on end user experiences at microsecond speeds. In addition to real-time insights and actions, the solution enables CSPs to return later and configure their network to fix problems or enhance QoE.

Speed is critical because customers — businesses and consumers — notice within seconds when their connection suddenly slows down or is lost. This puts enormous pressure on CSPs to find and fix these problems as they’re emerging, before customers start to notice. That’s a tall order because operators need to do that 24/7/365 at scale: thousands of types of applications and services with tens or hundreds of millions of simultaneous connections now, and even more in the future as the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes even more prevalent.

Service providers need to act at a microsecond level and it’s a tall mountain to climb, but Cisco and Accedian are here to help.

Accedian Skylight and the Cisco Crosswork Automation platform show what happens in every millisecond and enables service providers to automate intervention, stay in control, and deliver assured customer experience in real time.

Insights in real time are driven through the APIs and cloud native carrier-scale Skylight Architecture, simultaneously collecting and correlating critical network performance at an individual packet level sourced from efficient sensors in the network to measure latency and packet loss. When milliseconds matter, Accedian and Cisco automation are mission critical.

Source: cisco.com

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An always-on strategy to find extraordinary talent for CX Centers Americas

Cisco is widely recognized for helping companies transform. To give our customers a solid foundation to achieve their digital transformations, we have improved our workplace, services, supply chain and security. Ours is a journey to drive workforce innovation, as part of our own digital transformation.

Recruiting extraordinary talent is essential to fuel our constant evolution. Within Cisco’s CX Centers Americas, our highly specialized Technical Consulting Engineers (TCEs) are our competitive advantage. The TCEs in CX Centers solve our customer’s biggest challenges. We do this through our technical expertise, a customer experience to count on, and innovation that puts intelligence at our customer’s fingertips. And we are constantly looking for team members to join our team.

CX Centers Americas Approach to Hiring the Best

We partner with Cisco’s Emerging Talent Recruiting and CX Academy (CXA) to bring the best talent to CX Centers. Our vision is to deliver an extraordinary customer experience. Our TCEs make that happen. We provide them with the tools and knowledge to excel in their jobs. Our training builds a solid foundation that allows them to have both technical skills and be customer obsessed.

Since our TCEs come from all walks of life, we want to make the best of their talent journey. We have designed two streams of engagement based on the population of the person interested in joining us: emerging talent and professional hires.

Emerging Talent

TCE (Technical Consulting Engineer) Graduate Program: After being recruited from universities and undergoing an interview process, new employees go through a six-month onboarding training supported by CX Academy. The TCE Graduate program runs two times a year, following typical university graduation dates. During their first six months at Cisco, we train the new hires from the macro to the micro level. New TCEs rotate through four different teams within a technology group before being placed on one of the teams to begin their team-specific training. Candidates are also exposed to other experts and leaders through activities including Executive Fireside Chats, Living Cisco’s Principles, Coaching Sessions, and more. We accept around 80 new hires annually with this program.

“CXA provided a challenging and collaborative learning environment that allowed me to expand my soft skills and develop acquired technical skills in the field of networking. I learned how to be a successful TAC engineer thanks to the work that my mentors, my trainers and my cohort put in to develop training materials that allowed me to capture the relevant content.”

—Mariana, TAC (Technical Assistance Center) engineer, TAC Collaboration Team in Richardson, TX.

Co-Op / Intern Program: After undergoing interviews, students are welcomed to the Co-Op for six months on a full-time basis, 40 hours/week. The Co-Op program runs twice a year in US with ~20 co-ops per cohort. 70% convert to the full-time Technical Consulting Engineer role post-graduation. Students start by learning the fundamentals of the TCE role, spending the first three months of the program supporting simple cases, and slowly increasing in number of cases taken and difficulty. All of it under the supervision of a mentor. At the mid-point of the program, the Co-Ops join the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) teams to learn one of the teams’ technologies and begin to support cases in the queue. Pre-Covid, Co-Ops spent the beginning of their experience in CX Labs, learning the basics of the hardware used to recreate cases.

The internship is a three-month summer experience, currently for returning Co-Ops only, in which they will return to the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) team they had previously supported.

At the end of the experience and depending on performance, the Co-Op will receive an offer to return as a future Co-Op, Intern, or receive a full-time TCE offer.

“Being a TCE Co-op was the best professional experience I have ever had and prepared me for taking on the role of a full-time engineer. Everyone I talked to and learned from offered help and wanted to see me succeed in my role.”

—Anthony, TCE (Technical Consulting Engineer) Co-op

Pre-Apprenticeship and Apprenticeship: The Apprenticeship program is the same as the Co-Op program; the difference is the population we source from. These programs are especially designed for those coming from any walk of life. Candidates could be in the process of achieving their Associates degree, switching careers, or exiting the military. We have partnered with Wake Tech Community College in North Carolina and Collin College in Texas to source candidates who are currently enrolled in a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification course. If these institutions have students who are interested in a TCE Apprenticeship, they join the pre-Apprenticeship to receive professional development sessions hosted by Cisco. After attending at least 80% of the professional development sessions and achieving the CCNA certification, candidates are eligible to apply and interview for the TCE Apprenticeship. The end goal for pre-apprentices is to become TCE apprentices and ultimately TCEs.

The apprenticeship pilot started in the Fall of 2021 and is planning to run twice a year. We started with five apprentices, all officially registered as apprentices with the state of North Carolina. There are also currently 30 pre-apprentices, with plans to enter apprenticeships, which started in March.

PEX (Practical Experience Program): PEX is a rotational program that provides individual contributors with their first opportunity to manage people. The Program is designed to give aspiring leaders practical, hands-on people management experience. Managers are responsible for managing a cohort of 5-10 new hires for the first 6 months of the 12- month CX Academy program. Responsibilities include onboarding of new hires, mentoring/coaching throughout the program, performance management of new hires, collaborate effectively with local and global team members, build relationships with stakeholders, and own the planning/delivery of projects.

Professional Hire

This track is for experienced professionals. It was created to standardize the experience of the new employee and includes a diverse range of activities for the new employee, the hiring manager, and the mentor to make the best of all recruiting steps for the first 90 days (about 3 months).

Source: cisco.com

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Public Sector: Five Steps to Accelerate Digital Transformation Towards eGovernment

If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s if, given the chance, we’ll choose the ease of clicking a button or an automated service over waiting in line any day. Renew my driver’s license online instead of going to the Department of Motor Vehicles? Yes please! I can opt to have my local government agency call me back when it’s my turn in the call queue instead of waiting on hold for hours? Sign me up!

Yes, delighting customers goes beyond traditional customer service industries. It also applies to the superior digital experiences public sector citizens expect from their local and federal municipalities and government agencies. A 2021 study of U.S. state CIOs showed that 90 percent felt the pandemic increased demand for digital government services, with 75 percent stating that the biggest driver behind expanding digital services was to provide a “better online experience for citizens.” And globally, it’s estimated that more than 60 percent of governments will triple citizen digital services by 2023, and half of all digital government key performance indicators will include a citizen/customer experience metric to ensure that services delivered are citizen-centric.

Accelerating digital transformation

Public Sector’s ability to digitally transform and adopt new technologies is key to providing a superior digital experience. But in an industry known for dealing with legacy-driven infrastructures and siloed strategies and resources, this transformation can be a bit of a challenge. Below are five key strategies which should be of keen focus.

1. Empower hybrid work

Now that hybrid work has proven to be technically viable, government needs to create better online experiences for citizens and employees. Empower employees to work from wherever they are – at home or in the field. Expand work-from-home options to include work from anywhere. The key is to enable secure and wireless connections combined with various multi-faceted collaboration tools. This effort allows employees to work, maintain productivity, enhance civic life, and stay mobile.

2. Unify and secure network connectivity

This powers hybrid work and enables employees to work from anywhere. There’s a need to invest in the unifying and hardening of networks. Now more than ever is the need to identify and resolve events faster and keep vigilant for threats. As a government agency, it is imperative to offer encryption and security for work-at-home devices and expand your identity and access management (IAM) solution to employees and your citizen users. A must-have is a zero-trust secure network and sturdy endpoint detection to accompany that expansion. Proactively stopping breaches and automating updates with an expanded unified network and security solution vs. chasing threats and risking vulnerabilities is now a reality.

3. Accelerate cloud migration

One thing we learned from recent events – It’s now time to “Go to the Cloud”. Digital transformation means a better online experience for citizens as well as employees. It also represents productivity increases and cost savings. If you don’t have a cloud smart strategy in place now, you should be working on it. Most public sector agencies see the benefit of modernizing by moving applications to the cloud where feasible. Whether via infrastructure-as-a-service or a hybrid model with a state-owned data center for many legacy applications. Low code intuitive and friendly apps are replacing web-based forms. These and the new breed of cloud-based applications enable instant flexibility, scalability, and accessibility. Combined with low development and start-up cost via SaaS vendor models enables testing, refinement, and ability to scale as needed. Pilot early, pilot often. Migrate what you can and combine a solid external identity and access management (IAM) cloud security solution, your team can be twice as productive with lower cost.

4. Leverage built-in data analytics

Speaking of budget. Forward-thinking agencies also leverage the innovation built into cloud platforms to leap their public services ahead. With big data and predictive analytics tools, they can purchase and use only what they need, when they need it. The ability to stand up new services and enhance existing ones by processing massive amounts of transactional data enables giant leaps of civic lifestyle, from wait times in lines to stoplight optimization, even public health emergencies. The ability to leverage data analytics is a game-changer for understanding public data.

5. Power automation with AI/Machine Learning 

There is no greater game-changer than the ability to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. AI and ML are now available for even the smallest agencies with limited budgets to make life better for their citizens. Small agencies now can run license plate cameras at heavy thoroughfares; police agencies can process massive amounts of audio/video from stoplights and drone cameras. These smaller agencies can run valuable lifesaving and revenue-producing public services with little to no staff with simple automation.

Make public sector digital transformation a reality

Adoption of these strategies and new technologies shines a light on the widening skills gap in public sector.  Case in point, a recent study of European health, government, and education organizations showed that 63 percent said lack of skills and experience is a barrier to their cloud migrations.

Cisco Business Critical Services provides expert, analytics-driven guidance throughout the entire lifecycle to create transformative, adaptive, and resilient IT to improve digital experience for public sector citizens. Steeped in 35 years of experience, Business Critical Services expertise transcends architectures and provides in-country experts to ensure data sovereignty and security clearance needs are met in over 20 countries.

Reach out to your Cisco sales representative or partner today and accelerate your digital transformation journey today.

Source: cisco.com

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Using INFRAM to Modernize Today’s Healthcare

Healthcare has been digitally transforming during the past several years, but it is now happening at such speed and scale, it is driving convergence of technology and business strategies like never before. From demands on clinicians to integrate technology into their workflows and leverage data insights in real-time, to patient expectations to use a myriad of digital tools throughout their care journey, the need to modernize healthcare is here.

Read More: 350-901: Developing Applications Using Cisco Core Platforms and APIs (DEVCOR)

Today, healthcare organizations invest heavily in infrastructure, along with multi-year network support plans. But much of these investments remain shelf ware without a roadmap for implementation and adoption. A foundational digital infrastructure is key to building a digital healthcare system – one that focuses on the outcomes of the individual, connects all areas of the organization, and provides care when, where and how it is needed, safely and securely.

To support the rising demands for connected digital ecosystems, healthcare leaders need to evaluate their current infrastructure and its ability to support future workloads. INFRAM can help.

What is INFRAM?

The Infrastructure Adoption Model (INFRAM) assesses and maps technology infrastructure capabilities required to reach clinical and  strategic goals while meeting international benchmarks and standards. The assessment is a global eight-stage (0-7) model for reviewing infrastructure adoption and capabilities maturity. By using the adoption model, healthcare providers can help improve care delivery, reduce cyber and infrastructure risk, and create a pathway for infrastructure development tied to business and clinical outcomes.

INFRAM Architectural domains and capabilities:

◉ Transport: Software-defined network across the hospital campus

◉ Mobility: High-availability wireless with services supporting data, voice, video, location, and beyond

◉ Collaboration: Secure, reliable video, voice, and text– enabling better clinical communications

◉ Security: Intelligent automation– enforcing policies for network access and device management

◉ Data Center: On-premises, enterprise-wide hybrid cloud application and automation

The INFRAM Value: Digitally Transformed Healthcare Organizations

INFRAM Maturity Readiness Services give healthcare leaders a clear path to assess the infrastructure needed to drive successful outcomes within their organizations. Depending on gaps identified with an INFRAM assessment, detailed design and execution plans are developed, including KPIs for measuring value and outcomes. This includes:

◉ Optimized Applications Experience: Experience is a new measure for defining a value-based care organization. The data that applications capture will enable transformation and using that data to optimize workflows and operations will drive growth and profitability. The more you see, the more you solve. The more you solve, the more resilient and agile your healthcare organization becomes.

◉ Application Enablement: This includes the development, design, and facilitation of:

   ◉ Reimagined Applications: running in hybrid combinations (on-premise, cloud and multi-cloud environments) that allow for flexible distribution of workloads and data, based on the strategic and tactical needs of the organization.

   ◉ Flexible and Inclusive Hybrid Work: an environment that leverages communications and collaboration platforms and supports clinical collaboration experiences​.

   ◉ A Secure Enterprise: based on an automated, security policy-governed network, with integrated solutions for identity and access management.

   ◉ A Cross-architecture, Integrated Infrastructure: to support transformative and consistent experiences with an end-to-end Campus, WAN and data center design and implementation, based on Software Defined Networking.

Additionally, healthcare organizations reap other benefits by leveraging INFRAM, such as  IT and business alignment, budget planning and assistance with comprehensive strategic and readiness plans, support for acquisition evaluation and negotiations, and the ability to leverage existing product investments for quick gains.

Cisco’s Customer Experience INFRAM Program

Since the inception of the INFRAM model in 2018, Cisco has worked closely with HIMSS as a key collaborator on the pilot program, along with other organizations from around the world. So, it was only natural that Cisco was the model’s first Certified Partner, engaging and assisting our clients in advancing through maturity model stages. Today, our Customer Experience (CX) team in the Americas delivers two INFRAM services.

INFRAM Assessment

This service delivers two reports focusing on:

◉ Strategy and Outcome Alignment that gathers the evidence needed to create compelling business cases for investment, linking stakeholder experiences, outcomes, and technology.

◉ Assessment and Gap Analysis that includes an analysis and actionable project plan to identify and remediate capability gaps in the technology infrastructure.

INFRAM Planning

This offer provides strategy roadmaps aligned to a costed program delivery plan, and includes:

◉ A 12–36-month blueprint and investment schedule tailored to infrastructure, systems and applications transformation that aligns business strategies and outcome to technical capabilities.       

By using INFRAM as a strategic blueprint, healthcare providers can help improve care delivery, reduce cyber and infrastructure risk, and create a pathway for infrastructure development tied to rapidly evolving business and clinical outcomes. This helps ensure that healthcare organizations are better prepared to leverage fully digital infrastructures to meet the patient care needs of today and tomorrow.

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Introducing Success Track for Data Center Network

The pace of digital transformation has accelerated. In the past year and a half, business models have changed, and there is a need for enterprises to quickly improve the time taken to launch new products or services. The economic uncertainty has forced enterprises to reduce their overall spending and focus more on improving their operational efficiencies. As the pandemic has changed the way the world does business, organizations have been quick to pivot to digital mediums, as their survival depends on it. The results of a Gartner survey published in November 2020, highlights this rapid shift. 76% of CIOs reported increased demand for new digital products and services and 83% expected that to increase further in 2021, according to the Gartner CIO Agenda 2021.

Today, more than ever, IT operations are being asked to manage complex IT infrastructure. This when coupled with rising volumes of data, makes the task of IT teams more difficult to manage today’s dynamic, constantly changing data center environments. Automation is clearly the need of the hour and automation enabled by AI will play a huge role. Hyperscalers are leading the way in using AI for IT operations and are increasingly setting the trend that will see AI being embedded in every component of IT. Powered by AI, hyperscalers are quickly defining the future of IT– from self-healing infrastructure to databases that can recover quickly in the event of a failure or networks that can automatically configure and re-configure without any human intervention.

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a software-defined networking (SDN) solution designed for data centers. Cisco ACI allows network infrastructure to be defined based upon network policies and facilitates automated network provisioning – simplifying, optimizing, and accelerating the application deployment lifecycle.

To minimize the effort of managing your data center networks, Cisco has created Success Track for Data Center Network, a new innovative service offering. We want to help you simplify and remove roadblocks. Success Tracks provides coaching and insights at every step of your lifecycle journey.

Success Track for Data Center Network provides a one stop digital platform called CX Cloud.

The CX Cloud is your digital connection to access Cisco specialists and customized resources to help you simplify solution adoption and resolve issues faster. This is a new way of engaging with us, bringing together connected services—expertise, insights, learning, and support all in one place with a personalized, use-case driven solutions approach.

CX Cloud gives you contextual guidance for three data center networking (ACI) use cases: Network provisioning and operations, Network automation and programmability and Distributed networking.

The number one issue that we have heard about is that most next generation data centers (based on SDN) are complex and difficult to deploy. All three Success Track use cases will help simplify your network management and operations so you can serve the business more efficiently.

Take network provisioning and operations for example. A box by box, element by element management approach does not scale nor give the confidence for consistency required in today’s fast moving IT organizations.

By using the embedded tools built into the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (or APIC) we demonstrate how to get a single point of automation, orchestration, and troubleshooting that will simplify data center network management and operations for Days 0, 1, and beyond.

To achieve these benefits, it is critical that a strong foundation be built on such a simple management infrastructure such as ACI’s single pane of glass tools.

Success Track for Data Center Network is a suite of use case guided service solutions designed to help you realize the full value of your ACI deployment, faster. This holistic service digitally connects you through CX Cloud to the right expertise, learning and insights at the right time to accelerate success.

Get access to experts, on-demand learning, Cisco community, and product documentation on our CX Cloud Portal.

Customers can simplify data center network deployment and operations through access to experts, embedded tools, and a unified digital platform. This results in greater efficiencies, cost savings and a reduction of errors.

If you are looking for a consistent onboarding of network infrastructure, expedited workload provisioning to network fabric, and improved monitoring and insights, Cisco Success Track for Data Center Network will help you get there.

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Revolutionizing Customer Engagement and Collaborative Development

Our customers are looking for ways to simplify management of their Cisco devices and adopt new technologies faster while maintaining strong security across their environment. They are facing challenges in locating the right information necessary for deployment, obtaining access to the right resources, gaining visibility into their assets as well as more automated capabilities to reduce risks, increase uptime, and optimize overall performance.

Cisco CX Cloud was built to address these concerns, alongside the Success Tracks suite of service packages. A cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, CX Cloud provides customers with unified access to all of their Cisco portfolio in one pane of glass. Users can view their assets, contract coverage and licenses, access insights into the health of their network infrastructure, be alerted to security advisories, detect risks, open support cases in-app, and take advantage of contextual learning to train their IT teams all within CX Cloud.

Realizing the value of IT investments quickly is critically important to delivering results with agility. Our customers have told us that they want to be able to self-service, but at the same time be able to leverage consultative subject matter experts to help navigate more complex infrastructures. For example, one of our customers mentioned that often once a vendor sells something, they are left to figure out how to set it up, how to use it, and how to make it work to meet their needs. Another received a mandate to eliminate all critical security vulnerabilities across their entire infrastructure in a relatively short time frame, which is traditionally neither fast nor easy to accomplish, and weren’t sure where to begin.

In partnership with our customers, the CX Cloud Insights & Innovation Team aligns CX Cloud’s platform capabilities with our customers’ goals, so value is realized faster. We help customers learn how to use the CX Cloud platform and move through every stage of the adoption lifecycle, removing barriers along the way and identifying how to make the platform exactly what our customers need it to be. We have engaged with many customers and have learned from them the many ways CX Cloud helps them every day.

We engage with customers early and often, learning together and from one another and working together to solve their biggest pain points. Our engagement enriches the customer experience as we collaborate with our customers to determine how they can leverage the platform and how it can be used to help fulfill their responsibilities. As previously mentioned, one customer had to meet a deadline to reduce critical impact security advisories fast. They used CX Cloud Advisories to demonstrate their progress against this goal. It allowed them to identify what assets were vulnerable and then follow the guidance to remediate those vulnerabilities. From their efforts, they were able to reduce their risk by 33% in a matter of a few weeks. Customers say CX Cloud is intuitive and easy to use, and the expert level guidance from our team takes any remaining questions off the table to help them learn how to get the most from CX Cloud fast. The only question to answer is how fast do you want to go

We actively search for solutions to problems customers face on a day-to-day basis while we train and educate them on how to use CX Cloud. Looking again at our customer who needed to tackle security vulnerabilities across their entire infrastructure, they knew immediately this traditionally is neither fast, nor easy to accomplish. With the capabilities delivered by CX Cloud, customers can be efficient and effective in achieving this goal and be proactively notified of critical vulnerabilities before they become an emergency. How is this possible Using the insights and guidance delivered by CX Cloud, customers can skip the investigation required to identify if and where problems exist. Instead, they can move directly to remediation because CX Cloud will do the investigation for them by automatically scanning the environment. As shared by another customer, it takes on average two hours per week for them to investigate potential problems in the network. With CX Cloud monitoring their environment, those two hours can now be spent implementing fixes to known issues instead. What can you achieve with time back each week And what more can you accomplish when reacting to problems is a thing of the past

Our customers have never had as much say in the development of a Cisco product as they do with CX Cloud today. What is very exciting is how customer-centric CX Cloud really is in its development and product roadmap. Cisco is listening more than ever to learn from our customers what they need from CX Cloud and feed ideas directly into product development either through direct engagement or in-app within CX Cloud. Customer ideas are captured every day and reviewed throughout the week. Often our product managers will directly engage with customers to follow up and better understand their ideas and how they might be best implemented. And by submitting ideas online, customer will receive updates on the status of their ideas and will know when they’ve been implemented into production. Finally, in our weekly CX Cloud Club Conversations webinars, we train on, discuss, and learn about the future of CX Cloud with product management, where they also answer customer questions in a live forum.

What do you want CX Cloud to do for you Through expert engagement you’ll learn how to maximize the value of CX Cloud platform, align it with your goals, and customize it to drive efficiency in your organization.

Source: Cisco.com

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Building Adaptive IT that Runs at Market Speed

The challenges of 2020 have pushed the reset button on nearly every aspect of business, including the way you work, operate, and deliver products and services. As organizations work toward recovery and growth, there needs to be a focus on creating an adaptive IT environment.

Why adaptive IT? New research tells us adaptive organizations enjoy three times’ faster revenue growth than their competition. Given that 80% of revenue growth could depend on digital offerings and operations by 2022, adaptive IT is necessary for delivering a resilient and sustainable future.

Cultivating adaptive IT starts with your workforce

There are several ways to improve your adaptability as an organization, according to Forrester. These include:

◉ Acting on insights: Let the data drive your decisions to boost your odds of meeting future customer demand.

◉ Leveraging platforms to deliver new value: Use powerful technology advancements to transition to new business models.

◉ Building a culture that embraces change: Inspire employees to think outside of the box to improve flexibility and reduce fear of change.

The success of these actions depends on the capabilities of your workforce.

With 76% of organizations challenged to find the expertise they need, organizations need to think differently about how they build and maintain an adaptive workforce.

Creating a flexible workforce

Engineering an adaptive workforce enables you to address evolving business priorities as the market changes. This means tapping into the right skill sets, where and when you need them. To ensure organizations of all sizes have access to the expertise, analytics, and insights they need, Cisco Business Critical Services (BCS) recently restructured our lifecycle services portfolio into a three-tier service: Essentials, Advantage, and Premier.

With each tier, you get a pre-determined set of services with the right amount of intelligence and guidance – at every step of your Cisco lifecycle journey. For organizations that need access to dedicated experts, our Specialized Expertise – Scrum Services and Expert-as-a-Service – can help.

With BCS, your teams can create adaptive IT by:

◉ Identifying capabilities and deliverables to address changing priorities, speed adoption, support cross-architecture projects, and accelerate transformation.

◉ Augmenting your workforce with industry-leading expertise in strategy, design, implementation, operations, and optimization

◉ Accelerating complex problem solving through 1:1 coaching sessions and workshops based on specific use cases and insight reviews

Ever found yourself in a situation where you didn’t have the right capabilities to drive a new initiative or address a technical initiative? For assistance with priority projects or unexpected events, Specialized Expertise is a great fit.

Say your business kickstarted its digital transformation journey, but it’s progressing at a slow and steady pace. You realize the urgency of enabling digital ways of working and delivering services. However, to ramp up digital transformation, your IT teams need to modernize legacy systems to ensure applications run smoothly.

With our Scrum Services, you could proactively address your top initiatives throughout the lifecycle with​ flexible IT engagements that allow you to adjust skill sets to match the evolving business needs of your large, multi-domain Cisco solutions.​ Capabilities range from planning and architecture, design and engineering, implementation planning and execution, operations and enablement, automation, cloud transformation, to security readiness, and security breach and attack simulation.

With BCS Expert-as-a-Service, you can close technology gaps by adding the precise expertise you need to elevate collective knowledge and perform at peak levels.

◉ For domain knowledge and architectural design and support, you might select a solution architect.

◉ For hands-on confirmation of your Cisco technologies, a consulting engineer could be the right choice.

◉ For large strategic projects requiring end-to-end delivery management and team coordination, a project manager can assist.

In addition, BCS also offers teams Accelerators best practice coaching sessions to skill-up together.  During these sessions, your staff get the chance to dive into real-world technical cases and engineering challenges, analyze your IT environment to uncover strengths and opportunities for improvement, and learn best practices from experts.

With continuous access to expertise, analytics, and insights, our customers have achieved three times’ faster software upgrades and 70% faster configuration changes.

An operating model to help you adapt

For more than three decades, Cisco has been helping organizations operate at market speed to address changing business priorities. Whether you’re looking to optimize performance and de-risk IT, accelerate technology adoption and transformation, or address the changing priorities of your multi-domain solutions, BCS can help.

To fast-track your path to recovery and growth, BCS recently created a business resiliency operating model that accelerates transformation by improving IT resilience and adaptability. Grounded in best practices and Cisco intellectual capital, this model can help you survive and thrive in these dynamic times.

When used in conjunction with our lifecycle services, our model empowers organizations to respond quickly to emerging needs with an adaptive workforce, enable continuous transformation to strengthen infrastructure to support emerging workforce models, and deliver a fully optimized digital customer experience.

Find out how Cisco Business Critical Services can help you create an adaptive workforce with Specialized Expertise.

If you missed our webinar on how to create resilient, adaptive, and transformative IT, you can watch it on demand.

Source: cisco.com

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The Must-Know Techniques to Prevent IT Downtime

Everyone in IT knows the feeling. It’s the little voice in your head that pings you out of nowhere, and asks:

“Have I covered everything? Are we as prepared as we should be for an outage? How much does our resiliency plan have to change?”

You’re certainly not alone. Over the past three years, 96% of IT leaders have experienced at least one significant outage. In the same period, the average U.S. organization experienced 10 IT blackouts or brownouts.

Outages have become alarmingly close to common. Thankfully, there are strategies you can introduce to prevent unexpected downtime before it happens – and get the reassurance of comprehensive network insight to preempt issues.

The true cost of IT outages

When an organization’s network goes down, the effects can be anywhere from inconvenient to catastrophic. In total, IT outages cost North American businesses $700 billion every year.

These losses aren’t confined to revenue. Losses can impact internal productivity, mitigation costs, and even the brand. Just one hour’s downtime can cost an average of $250,000 to $300,000, depending on the size of an organization and its industry.

In the new era of ‘the customer experience’ – where expectations for a superior experience and network access continue to grow – the stakes for staying connected have never been higher.

The basics of incident prevention

The biggest challenge in preventing brownouts and blackouts is identifying root causes in advance and preempting their effects. To achieve this, your organization needs proactive processes to monitor your network, identify risks, and take preemptive actions.

However, monitoring can be difficult for understaffed IT teams, who are focused on the delivery of immediate business goals. Monitoring takes time, and automation is required to identify risk faster, accelerate remediation and reduce the chance of error.

There is another way. Cisco Business Critical Services (BCS) augments your team with analytics and expertise. By investing in experts who’ll continuously engage with your IT professionals and share proactive recommendations to prevent incidents, your teams can get greater visibility into their IT infrastructure to improve uptime, performance, and availability.

Become an expert by learning from others

It’s one thing to understand what could go wrong in your organization. The next step is learning from other businesses’ experiences, and how their outages can help prevent yours.

Thanks to advances in predictive analytics and machine learning, businesses now have access to global intelligence to predict weak points in their own networks. For example, Cisco’s BCS experts draw on their anonymized and proprietary database collected and aggregated from over 30 million devices worldwide.

By cross-referencing our data with your devices, we can help you identify and mitigate vulnerabilities before they impact your organization. Empowered by Cisco intellectual capital, our expertise – powered by analytics, insights, and automation – can help your IT teams avoid costly downtime.

How to review an outage

Likewise, if an outage does take place, a consistent, proactive approach is critical to reaching a positive outcome. As part of Cisco BCS Advantage, our Expert Incident Review recommends best practices to shore up your own incident review framework, then practice it, to improve your network stability and performance:

Turn adversity into opportunity

Network brownouts and blackouts are costlier than ever. But with incident prevention, regular reviews, access to Cisco experts, analytics, insights, and more, IT decision makers are well-positioned to deliver an always-on network.

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Get Back to a Safe Workspace Faster with Cisco CX Location-Based Analytics

The advent of COVID-19 has affected the way people live and conduct business. It has necessitated new business and epidemiological practices for ensuring business continuity. Many businesses and institutions around the world have moved from absorbing the effects that lead to most workspaces being shut by enabling their employees to work remotely and securely by leveraging video conferencing and VPN solutions. The return to normalcy requires the implementation of specific measures that will help businesses prepare to return to their usual physical workspaces. In some locations around the world, campuses that were closed are beginning to re-open, and employees are gradually returning to work through a phased approach. However, now more than ever, organizations need to ensure their workspaces offer the most secure and safe working environments, which strictly adhere to the COVID-19 guidelines for social and physical distancing.

Some of the most common questions emanating from customers in this situation include the following:

◉ “I want to see how my business is impacted by COVID-19. How can I ensure my campus is safe to re-open?”
◉ “How can I provide personalized customer experiences while ensuring social distancing?”
◉ “How can I ensure the number of employees attending work is within the safe threshold?”
◉ “How can I track and alert employees if the number of people within the campus at a given time poses a threat to the safety and health security of all in attendance?”

Get Help Safely Returning to Your Campus with the Cisco CX offer for Cisco DNA Spaces

Cisco offers a location-based analytics solution—Cisco® DNA Spaces—which digitizes physical spaces to provide you with insight about people throughout your workspaces, including how, where, and when they move through your location. It collects data from your existing Cisco Wi-Fi access points to provide information about people, including employees, customers, patrons and visitors, as well as things, such as assets and sensors, within your properties. Built with a variety of applications (apps), Cisco DNA Spaces sets up workplace density thresholds to monitor the number of employees in buildings across campus, provides notifications when thresholds are reached, shares safety information, and enables rapid response to incidents via proximity reporting.

In line with this, Cisco Customer Experience (CX) has introduced a new Service offer that helps you deploy and address your use cases with Cisco DNA Spaces. The Cisco CX offer for Cisco DNA Spaces delivers our new Advise and Implementation Service that helps with design, configuration, deployment and post-implementation support of Cisco DNA Spaces, which empowers businesses to analyze data from their workspaces and define actionable insights to accelerate office re-openings.

Our CX experts analyze your current environment and requirements, advise you on the best solution design and configuration for agreed upon use case(s), and tests and validates the desired functionality prior to production use. You’ll get expert help with right-fit use-case implementation, including a knowledge transfer session and post-implementation support to enable ongoing use of the solution and help you maintain essential business operations. We’ll make sure you can take full advantage of these location-based services to leverage critical visibility throughout your physical workspace locations, which plays a crucial role in managing the safe return of people to your workspaces.

Two levels of Advise and Implementation packages are available for Cisco DNA Spaces—small and large packages—based on the size of your organization. You’ll have the option to get support for up to five buildings (or 30 floors or shops) to cover your physical workspaces, smart captive portals for enhanced customer experience, CX post-deployment use assistance, and more.

How Cisco CX Simplifies and Accelerates Your Safe Workspaces

Next-generation sensing capabilities are already built into your Cisco Wi-Fi access points—such as Cisco Catalyst®, Aironet®, and Meraki®. However, they need to be turned on and aligned, and Cisco CX will do that for you. If you don’t already have them, Cisco CX can quickly deploy new Cisco Wi-Fi access points for you. We’ll take care of complete connectivity between your Cisco Wi-Fi access points, Cisco network, and the cloud-based Cisco DNA Spaces solution. Furthermore, the granular data collected by your Cisco Wi-Fi access points feeds the Cisco DNA Spaces apps. From this app data, you can then leverage advanced analytics to achieve powerful insights into end-user behavior​—how people use, move, and occupy spaces. The following apps are seamlessly bundled in our Cisco DNA Spaces solution:

◉ Right Now App​: Sets workplace density thresholds to monitor the number of employees in Wi-Fi enabled zones across campus.​

◉ Notification Trigger: Uses a rule engine to power an API, which triggers notifications when thresholds set by the Right Now App are crossed. Keep your teams updated at all times with automated notifications via Webex Teams™, SMS, or email.​​

◉ Impact Analysis App​: Helps you determine whether your operations need to be adjusted for the improved safety of your people by measuring the effectiveness of your back-to-safe-workspaces policies, including whether it’s safe to introduce more people into your physical workspaces.

◉ Proximity Reporting App​: Delivers historical analytics, allowing you to trace the steps of your Wi-Fi connected people. This app reports the presence and path down to individual users, while also reporting who else was present, allowing you to investigate incident impact across employees and zones by tracing proximity.

◉ Engagements App​: Shares contextually triggered safety information with employees based on where
they are in any of your buildings. ​The rule engine drives dynamic engagements based on each building classification as well as individual employee personas for more relevant information.

With the data stream created by Cisco Wi-Fi access points and fed to the bundled Cisco DNA Spaces apps, you can gauge the effectiveness of your back-to-work policies, and determine when it’s safe to allow more people back into your office. This includes the ability to determine if there is an area in any of your workspace zones where people are clustering and breaking your distancing guidelines. The real-time analytics offered by Cisco DNA Spaces make it easy to monitor the number of people across campus, including the effectiveness of your distancing policies with workspace density thresholds throughout all your monitored zones and across points of ingress and egress. Notification triggers generated by policy breaks and proximity reporting help you take action to keep your people safe. Your employees can also receive safety information triggered contextually based on their presence in any of your monitored physical zones. All this can be managed through a single, cloud-based pane of glass to simplify how you consume and leverage location services to keep your people safe.

Safety Can’t Wait—Start Your Location-Based Analytics Today

If you plan to re-open your campus gradually, we’ll work at your pace, easing into a broader rollout and expanding to deploy more specific use cases when you’re ready. Regardless of your rollout scheme, you’ll enjoy easy procurement and fast deployment. Leverage the right expertise to get up and running quickly with Cisco DNA Spaces in days, versus weeks, all while prioritizing the safety of your people.

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6 Essential Elements of Your Managed Detection and Response Lifecycle – Part 2

This is Part 2 of our series on developing a managed detection and response strategy. If you missed Part 1, catch up here.

In the first part of this blog, we discussed the growing trend of remote work, how organizations have adapted to new working styles, and how this shift has created new challenges for security operations. We introduced a security operations detection and response methodology created around use cases, examining the first two of six phases – identify and prioritize.

In Part 2, we’ll guide you through the remaining four lifecycle phases: develop, evaluate, deploy, and enhance.

Develop

As we discovered previously, establishing and documenting a procedure for identifying and prioritizing threat scenarios allows you to maintain rigor and discipline throughout the security operations lifecycle.

Here’s an example of steps SecOps teams could follow when developing a use case:

◉ Step 1: Review and refine the description of the threat and the requirements for addressing it

◉ Step 2: Ensure monitoring tool deployment and configuration

◉ Step 3: Validate data sources

◉ Step 4: Validate context sources

◉ Step 5: Perform a gap analysis against security operations procedures

Evaluate

Once a use case is developed, you’ll need to determine what will trigger a review or reevaluation of its function.   This will help avoid the “set it and forget it” approach that often leads to security operations teams losing sight of the need for this critical part of the lifecycle.

The better approach is to define clear notification criteria, so SecOps teams can ensure each use case stays relevant. This way, when thresholds are met – or when there is a change or update to the available context data – use cases can be reevaluated.

For example, age/duration, changes in compliance, threats, and data security can require a reevaluation of threat definitions, monitoring tools, contexts, validation metrics, and performance – or they could make a use case redundant entirely. Having a clear set of metrics that trigger reviews ensures necessary evaluations are not overlooked.

Deploy

The deployment phase involves the following practical tasks:

◉ Training security operations teams to respond to new alerts with clear actions

◉ Updating and publishing runbooks, ops guides, and process documents

◉ Promoting code through testing, staging, and production environments

◉ Reporting threat validation metrics

Once deployed, use cases must be continuously incorporated into the evaluation and enhancement workflows.

Enhance

Unlike the evaluation phase, fine-tuning a use case is not driven by network or business changes. Rather, it is driven by the evolution of threat tactics, techniques, and procedures, as well as changes in data and context. The purpose of this phase is to provide clear actions and remove any uncertainty.

Like other phases in this lifecycle, a defined process will allow teams to successfully address the rapidly expanding threat landscape.

Elements that could justify a reevaluation include:

◉ Event generation settings, thresholds and metrics

◉ Outputs, such as impact and urgency

◉ Environments leveraging automation

◉ Additional response options

Similar to the previous phase, you need to address operational processes, update runbooks, and provide training to Security Operations Center analysts.

Overlooking these activities or handing them over to operations analysts is a recipe for losing ground in the fast-paced threat landscape. It can lead to analysts being unable to effectively manage the overwhelming number of alerts, and increase the risk of human error, which in turn prolong investigations and increase workloads.

Taking a disciplined approach to structuring responsibilities and expectations for your teams will ensure continuity, while supporting the continued growth and maturity of your security operations program.

Learn from the experts

If you don’t have the resources to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape and manage security operations comprehensively, consider a solution like Cisco’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Our team of security investigators and responders utilize the unmatched threat research of Talos, and proven playbooks to guard your organization’s IT around the clock.

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6 Essential Elements of Your Managed Detection and Response Lifecycle – Part 1

We’ve seen a sharp increase in the number of organizations growing their remote workforces over the last decade. In fact, at the start of 2020, the number of remote workers in the U.S. stood at 4.7 million, which represents 3.4% of the population.

The advent of cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud architectures has made it possible for businesses to rapidly adapt to changing workforces and working styles. However, these changes have also introduced new challenges in managing security operations.

The key reasons for this include:

◉ Workers are accessing organizations’ servers and applications remotely, which opens up new entry points for cyber attacks

◉ Employees are relying increasingly on cloud-hosted services to work and collaborate

◉ Remote workers are being targeted by more and more malware sites

◉ Employees fail to consistently practice good cyber hygiene

As the remote workforce grows and cyber threats stack up, its important organizations have the capability to manage risks and uncertainty to keep critical assets secure. Where risks are known, actions are clear. But with unknown risks, there needs to be a focus on disciplined research and investigation. This helps generate intelligence to develop detailed use cases, providing Security Operations (SecOps) teams with a guide to respond to threats.

By defining known and unknown risk scenarios in your security operations lifecycle, you can meet the demands of remote workers using cloud and network services, while ensuring you remain protected.

Let’s explore how to establish a six-phase threat detection and response methodology that addresses uncertainty.

Managing uncertainty with disciplined security operations

Identify

Establishing a clear methodology for security operations teams to follow is a critical element of effective and efficient threat detection and response.

This methodology starts with identifying uses cases.  Uses cases are the definition and analysis of an attack method.  In addition to the type of attack, use cases include step-by-step detail on how an attack unfolds, e.g. exfiltration of data from an organization or compromised privileged login, as well as possible control points for use in mitigation. Establishing a methodology that SecOps then leverages to identify and create new use cases is crucial to ensuring the organization maintains a strong security posture.

Building a disciplined approach to use case identification and analysis is the foundation of your detection and response process; providing insights on use case relevancy and organizational asset protection effectiveness.

Without these insights you will lack the visibility needed to truly maximize the value of follow on process steps such as developing, evaluating, and enhancing.

Organizations that follow a defined methodology to discover, collect, refine, validate, and apply changes to use cases address a critical weakness in “set it and forget it” programs. These programs assume the security policies and use cases developed at the time of implementing advanced operations tools remain static – an assumption that can create broad gaps in your threat visibility.

Prioritize

Prioritizing use case development is very important given it directly impacts how fast your organization is ready to respond to specific threats.  It is often debated which use cases to do first, which are most important, and how to assess the lifecycle for additional use cases. While prioritization could be based on importance, you’re likely to be more effective balancing importance with feasibility (e.g. how complex and risky is the use case to implement) and the speed at which a particular business operates.

Establishing a model to prioritize use cases will help you manage this balance. One approach is to create relative categories. For example:

◉ ‘Control’ based use cases relate to a regulatory objective, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

◉ ‘Threat’ based use cases leverage threat intelligence related to Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)

◉ ‘Data or Asset’ based use cases relate to specific datasets or assets that represent additional risk to the business

Reviewing new use cases in each of these categories with a balance between importance and feasibility provides a great strategy for new use case prioritization.

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