How GLP-1 Drug Success Transforms Healthcare Revenue – Is your Organization Ready?

The huge revenue opportunity stemming from recent success of GLP-1 drugs is not just for the pharmaceutical companies. Is your healthcare organization poised to capture the patient care opportunity emerging from GLP-1 pharmaceutical innovation?

Revolutionizing Healthcare with Breakthroughs in Diabetes and Obesity Treatment

The new category of Diabetes, weight loss and obesity drugs called GLP-1s is predicted to be a game-changing innovation in population health management of some chronic disease types.  These drugs have shown tremendous success in treating their target diseases of Diabetes and Obesity, and adoption by patients continues to grow. The 42nd annual J.P. Morgan healthcare conference in San Francisco this month gave considerable coverage to this topic and to the group of pharmaceutical companies at the core of this unparalleled movement in reducing population health issues around diabetes and weight. Drugs such as Wegovy, Mounjaro and Ozempic are currently the most highly in demand and many patients are having trouble finding supply as a result of the accelerating adoption and approvals for use. But innovation in pharma can create opportunity in other areas, and this one is already doing just that for hospitals, clinics and ACOs in the healthcare industry.

Analysts Forecast Massive Growth

Chris Schott, JP Morgan Sr. Analyst covering US Diversified Biopharma says the revenue opportunity for the pharma sector could be as much as $100B as we approach 2030 which would make it the largest therapeutic market they have ever seen.  He further predicts the capacity for GLP-1s to double in 2024 and increase another 50% in 2025, alleviating bottlenecks from a capacity standpoint.

Lisa Gill, JP Morgan Sr. Analyst covering Healthcare services says things to watch are policies around coverage of these drugs. They are not currently covered by Medicaid or Medicare and should that change, volumes would likely be impacted even further.

Seizing the Opportunity in GLP-1

So, what does this mean for healthcare provider organizations?  This is where accelerating healthcare’s digital transformation comes into the equation. The opportunity is huge for providers to realize significant increases in volumes of patients seeking primary care services to authorize, prescribe and manage the use of these medical treatments. These GLP-1 patients will need to be evaluated and monitored throughout their use of these medications and the current staffing levels within the US healthcare system are already strained with patients experiencing delays in appointments, long wait times for scheduling appointments and ongoing challenges in reporting daily vitals into the electronic health records without in-person visits. In addition to tracking vitals, these patients are ideally monitored for lifestyle elements such as sleep, exercise, diet, mental health and overall wellness. They benefit from coaching to help keep them on track with the lifestyle changes that go along with a successful program.

Maximizing Patient Engagement for Financial Growth and Innovation

Providers who have invested in digital-first engagement technologies such as messaging, chat, bots, voice and efficient patient orchestration processes using integrated contact centers will be best poised to handle the volumes of patients seeking care and will see the financial benefits of engaging and servicing these patient’s needs.

Healthcare providers, overwhelmingly experiencing financial challenges stemming from COVID era dips in billable visits and procedures, have been exploring ways to expand into new types of care and new sources of patients. The innovation and success of the GLP-1 category of pharmaceuticals could be one of the opportunities that provides both, and drives acceleration of new care models, digital workflow re-designs and remote patient monitoring. Providers will need to evaluate their infrastructure’s readiness for some of these new engagement models and quickly deploy technologies to capture this new business opportunity.  The good news is Cisco’s Healthcare team is already helping hospital systems deploy next generation collaboration systems including messaging, video conferencing, virtual care, and devices that are interoperable with other collaboration systems, for affordability and ease of use with existing systems and processes.

Experts predict more innovation in the pharmaceutical pipelines that will produce huge gains for other disease types too. Is your hospital system ready with a digital healthcare infrastructure that seamlessly engages patients, scales your valuable clinical resources and secures operations? The time to start is now!

Source: cisco.com

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Synchronizing Technology and Organizational Culture for Optimal Outcomes

Understanding the Challenge of Martec’s Law and Strategically Adopting Technology

Martec’s Law states that technology changes faster than organizations can adapt and poses a critical challenge to government agencies. To make the most of rapid technological advancements and maximize their impact, agencies need a well-planned approach for prioritizing, adopting, and integrating the most significant of these technologies. This is where the role of an experienced customer success-focused partner becomes crucial to guiding agencies through the maze of strategic technological change.

Effective Application of Martec’s Law to Enhance Organizational Outcomes

The strategic application of Martec’s Law can help agencies orchestrate and align their technology adoption leveraging both Moore’s Law, highlighting the rapid growth in computing power, and Metcalfe’s Law, focusing on the exponential impact and value of network connected entities. This approach encourages agencies to synchronize their tech adoption, enabling them to fully leverage the fast pace of tech advancements to boost their results. Handling this challenge successfully is key to enhancing enterprise visibility and analytics, enabling automation and orchestration across their enterprise, thereby contributing to superior government mission and business success.

Figure 1. Technology changes vs organizations change

Leveraging Cisco’s Insights and Best Practices

Cisco, one of the world’s leading technology companies, has successfully navigated these challenges over the last several decades. The insights and best practices we have gained can greatly assist our clients in their digital transformations, thereby maximizing outcomes, and preventing major disruptions within their culture and organization.

Orchestrating Technological and Cultural Change: A Customer Success Focus

To successfully navigate digital transformation complexities, agencies can benefit from a seasoned ally to optimize their technology choices and management. Cisco’s innovative approach, which includes a customer-experience organization and Customer Success Executives (CSE), helps customers adopt technology effectively within their specific cultural and organizational environments. This collaboration helps accelerate network and infrastructure modernization, automation, and security, ensuring future-ready enterprises.

Addressing Current (and Future) Federal Mandates with an Integrated Multi-Architecture Approach

The increasing requirements of federal mandates are driving a digital transformation of our government.  A customer success executive can assist government agencies in prioritizing technologies to achieve these required outcomes and be prepared to deliver on requirements in future federal directives.  An integrated, multi-architectural viewpoint can help agencies make a dramatic leap up the technological change curve to achieve their digital transformation better and address mandate requirements.  Cisco offers focused strategy and training to clients, guiding them towards a digitally-enabled future from their analog past.

Figure 2. Adoption changes accelerate your outcomes

Conclusion: Seizing the Opportunity to Shape the Future

The time is ripe for federal agencies to take advantage of Martec’s Law. With guidance from Cisco customer success executives, agencies can maximize the value from their tech investments, modernize networks, automate processes, and enhance cross-architecture orchestration. Now is the time to accelerate your agency’s transformative journey toward technological and organizational evolution.

In a Nutshell

Federal agencies are on the cusp of a technology-driven transformation that can optimize their mission outcomes. The challenge lies in keeping pace with rapid tech advancements and aligning these with the organization’s strategic goals. Expert guidance from your Cisco Customer Success Executive can help you navigate this journey, modernize your networks, and successfully adopt digital transformation strategies. Reach out today and start your transformation.

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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Operationalizing Objectives to Outcomes

As part of our digital transformation, my Cisco colleagues and I were getting trained on business agility in our ONEx organization. Any transformation needs an effective way to measure the success at the end and throughout, and as part of our initiative, I could see there was enough awareness and emphasis given to metrics and measurements.

The training also addressed some points from the book “Measure What Matters,” which peaked my curiosity and inspired me to start reading it. It is a fantastic book with the origin of the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) concept and how companies have leveraged the framework. I wanted to share a bit here about how Cisco also embraces this framework – and more – in our organization, in a slightly customized and enhanced way, and how it can be extended further.

Finding Middle Ground between Vision, Strategy, and Execution

Although the OKR framework has generated more interest in recent decades, goals and metrics themselves have long been the foundation to any company to identify, set and succeed. As with technology, our approach to goals and metrics has also evolved over the time, namely to include a couple key concepts: MBO or Management by Objectives, and VSE or Vision, Strategy & Execution, extension of this, VSEM, to include Metrics.

Vision

The Vision has represented the true north-star of what the company wants to achieve. If we time box it, perhaps, 3 to 5 years or beyond, Vision does not change often unless the company goes through a major transformation or change of business. However, at an organization level or function level, it could change a bit but still align to the overall company vision. And, as you can imagine, there is still a healthy internal debate about whether one should have ONE single vision for all or a vision at each lower of functional levels – and different companies handle it in different ways.

Strategy

While Vision is a starting point, we need other elements to take it further. Strategy is the next level of Vision – how you plan to accomplish the vision. This could be multiple levers (or initiatives or methods or ways) to achieve the vision: A strategy, approach, or means to plan for the execution of it and, finally, deliver the desired outcome or results.

Execution

If Vision is the desired outcome, and Strategy is the big plan, then Execution is the detailed plan. The key to Execution is measurement, and thus it is often broken into smaller chunks – goals or objectives – which are easier to accomplish and show progress.

Finding Meaningful Measurements

In the process of transforming our operations I’ve found several things to be true, and helpful, during this endeavor:

1. As Peter Drucker said, “What cannot be measured, cannot be improved“, but even before improving upon a thing, identifying and establishing the right set of metrics is key for any goal. Drucker also observed, “A manager should be able to measure the performance and results against a goal.” However, truly effective organizations must not limit measurements to the management level, but instead, equip employees at every level to identify and track meaningful metrics. These metrics could be milestones or KPIs and can be annual, quarterly, or even monthly. Some of these metrics could be in multiple systems (say ERP or CRM or ITSM) or Project Portfolio Management tools. The goals and objectives can be (and in some cases should be) inherited either vertically or across the organization or cross-functionally beyond the organization for shared goals.

2. When employing new measurement metrics within a company, the ideal scenario would be to integrate, automate, and bring all of these metrics into one single dashboard. A one-stop shop for metrics viewing simplifies the process, ensuring that there is minimal manual work involved in updating these metrics periodically. Several of the SaaS solutions provide APIs that can be used to easily integrate and get the needed metric and based on a set threshold, can even provide indicators about whether metrics have been achieved, and communicate that critical information in real-time to impacted teams.

3. Although Goals & Results could be separately reviewed from employee performance review discussions, the ideal would be to review them together.

4. WHAT was achieved should be equally evaluated with HOW it was achieved. Equally important to the Vision are the types of behaviors that were exhibited to accomplish these results, and they should be reviewed to ensure that we understand and agree with the methods and the values represented in the achievement.

5. It’s critical that metrics and measurements are looked at holistically and together. Operationalization of the entire framework, process, or activity makes it efficient for the organization, but defining and setting meaningful metrics cannot be a one-time activity. Putting a structure and defining these annually is a good start but this is just the beginning – goals need to be measured, reviewed, revisited, and adjusted as needed.

Operationalization of the OKR framework can include various elements:

1. Conducting reviews at Initiative, Program, and Project level – leveraging metrics from the Portfolio Management and other IT Systems/Tools

2. Organizational health metrics from various sources

3. Ongoing operational reviews (RtB or Run your Business) – both IT (ideal to do weekly, monthly, and quarterly) and Business Reviews (ideal is Quarterly)

Among all of these observations I’ve made through this process, one of the most critical ones is that the information about meaningful metrics cannot be created and kept safe somewhere secretly. Instead, it needs to be published centrally, so that anyone can check on the goals of their colleagues and leaders at any point in time. This not only brings transparency and trust but also avoids duplication when found.

We are still in the process of creating a more mature, sophisticated practice around our internal OKRs, and in parallel, my colleagues across Cisco are also applying metrics to inform smarter, more efficient operations within our customer organizations.

For those who want to dig into the topic even more deeply, click here to learn more about how Cisco’s IoT practice is using metrics as a powerful tool in our customers’ digital transformation.

On that note, how is your team doing it? What can you share about what it takes to set and achieve measurable goals in your organization’s digital transformation? 

Source: cisco.com

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Perspectives on the Future of Service Provider Networking: Evolved Connectivity

The digital transformation in this decade is demanding more from the network. Multi-cloud, edge, telework, 5G, and IoT are creating an evolved connectivity ecosystem characterized by highly distributed elements needing to communicate with one another in a complex, multi-domain, many-to-many fashion. The world of north-south, east-west traffic flows is quickly disappearing. The evolved connectivity demand is for more connections from more locations, to and from more applications, with tighter Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and involving many, many more endpoints.

Further, enterprises are moving data closer to the sources consuming it and are distributing their applications to drive optimized user experiences. All these new digital assets connect and interact across multiple clouds (private, hybrid, public, and edge).

• 70-80% of large enterprises are working toward executing a multi-cloud strategy

• The number of devices requiring communications will continue to grow

- IoT devices will account for 50% (14.7 billion) of all global networked devices by 2023

- Mobile subscribers will grow from 66% of the global population to 71% of the global population by 2023

• More applications and data requiring network connectivity in new places

- More than 50% of all workloads run outside the enterprise data center

- 90% of all applications support microservices architectures, enabling distributed deployments

• STL Partners’ forecast of the capacity of network edge computing estimates around 1,600 network edge data centers and 200,000 edge servers in 55 telco networks by 2025

Today’s service provider transport network finds itself on a collision course with this evolved connectivity ecosystem. The network is highly heterogeneous, spanning access, metro, WAN, and data center technologies. Stitching these silos together leads to an explosion of complexity and policy state in the network that exists simply to make the domains interoperate. The resulting architecture is burdened with a built-in complexity tax on operations, which hampers operator agility and innovation. As application and endpoint connectivity requirements become increasingly decentralized with their functionality and data deployed across multiple domains, the underlying network is proving too rigid to adapt quickly enough. The status quo has become a complex connectivity mélange with application experience entrusted to network overlays running over best-effort IP, and innovation moves out of the network domain.

Our position: the network should operate like the cloud

As network providers, it’s time we started thinking like cloud providers. From the cloud provider’s perspective, their data centers are simply giant resource pools for their customers’ applications to dynamically consume to perform computing and storage work. Like the cloud, we should instead think of the network as a resource pool for on-demand connectivity services like segmentation, security, or SLA. This resource pool should be built on three key principles:

1. Minimize the capital and operational cost per forwarded Gb

2. Maximize the value the network provides per forwarded Gb (the value from the perspective of the application itself)

3. Eliminate friction or other barriers to applications consuming network services

The cloud operators simplify their resource pool as much as possible and ruthlessly standardize everything from data center facilities down through hardware, programmable interfaces, and infrastructure like hypervisors and container orchestration systems. All the simplification and standardization mean less cost to build, automate, and operate the infrastructure (Principle 1). More importantly, simplification means more resources to invest in innovation (Principle 2). The entire infrastructure can then be abstracted as a resource pool and presented as a catalog of services and APIs for customers’ applications to consume (Principle 3).

Our colleague Emerson Moura’s post later in this series focuses specifically on network simplification, however, we want to spend some time on the subject through the evolved connectivity and cloud provider lens. With connectivity spanning across domains, the most fundamental thing we can do is to standardize end-to-end on a common data plane to minimize the stitching points between edge, data center, cloud, and transport networks. We refer to this as the Unified Forwarding Paradigm (UFP).

A common forwarding architecture allows us to simplify elsewhere such as IPAM, DNS, and first-hop security. Consistent network connectivity means fewer moving parts for operations as all traffic transiting edge, data center, and cloud would follow common forwarding behaviors and be subject to common policies and tools for filtering and service chaining. And there’s a bonus in common telemetry metrics as well!

Our UFP recommendation is to adopt SRv6 wherever possible and ultimately IPv6 end-to-end. This common forwarding architecture provides a foundation for unified, service-aware forwarding across all network domains and includes familiar services like VPNs (EVPN, etc.) and traffic steering. More importantly, connectivity services may become software-defined. Moving to a UFP will lead to a massive reduction in friction and the network can make a true transition from configuration-centric to programmable, elastic, and on-demand. Imagine network connectivity services like pipes into the cloud or some edge environment moving to a demand-driven consumption model. Businesses no longer need to wait for operators to provision the network service. Operators would expose services via APIs for applications and users to consume in the same manner we consume VMs in the cloud: “I need an LSP/VPN to edge-zone X and I need it for two hours.” And as user and application behaviors change and require updates to the services they’re subscribed to, the change is executed via software and the network responds almost immediately.

The relationship between network overlay and underlay will also benefit from standardizing on SRv6/IPv6 and SDN. Today the overlay network is only as good as the underlay serving it. With a unified forwarding architecture and on-demand segment routing services, an SD-WAN system could directly access and consume underlay services for improved quality of experience. For flows that are latency-sensitive, the overlay network would subscribe to an underlay behavior that ensures traffic is delivered as fast as possible without delays. For the overlay networks, the SRv6 underlay that is SDN controlled provides a richer connectivity experience.

Conclusion: from ‘reachability’ to ‘rich connectivity’

Rich connectivity means the network is responsive to the user or application experience and does so in a frictionless manner. It means network overlays can subscribe to underlay services and exert granular control over how their traffic traverses the network. Rich connectivity means applications can dynamically consume low latency or lossless network services, or access security services to enable a zero-trust relationship with other elements they may need to interact with.

We believe service providers who adopt the Unified Forwarding Paradigm and embrace SDN-driven operations and consumption-based rich connectivity service models will transform themselves into platforms for innovation.

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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Cisco and Intel: Next-Gen Wireless Client Visibility with Intel Connectivity Analytics!

Introducing Intel Connectivity Analytics

Cisco and Intel present a new analytics solution, Intel Connectivity Analytics, that gives granular driver-level wireless client insights for any client using the latest Intel driver and wireless chipsets while connected to a supported Cisco wireless network (visit Intel Connectivity Analytics FAQ for the SW/HW compatibility matrix). This feature significantly impacts the enterprise PC vertical, where Intel Wi-Fi 6/6E chipsets make up the majority of the market share. With the Intel Connectivity Analytics capability built directly into the Intel wireless drivers, it eliminates the need to install any client-side agent, enabling this feature to be leveraged in even non-corporate settings.

More than just telemetry, Intel Connectivity Analytics provides intelligent reports that allow network administrators to understand what to do next for any problem and ensure a great user experience in even the most complex wireless deployments by addressing the use cases in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Intel Connectivity Analytics Use Cases

Six Intelligent Reports to Solve All Your Problems

Intel Connectivity Analytics generates six reports (Figure 2) in real-time based on information forwarded by wireless clients to the AP and then Cisco Catalyst controller or Meraki Dashboard that directly addresses the use cases depicted in Figure 1.

Note: Station information, Neighboring AP, and Failed AP reports are generated at client association, while others are triggered when the situation arises.

Figure 2. Intel Connectivity Analytics Reports Details

Identifying out-of-date Driver, Validating New Drivers, and Identifying Hardware issues:

The Station Information report provides network administrators with driver-level client information that would not have been available in typical telemetry. This additional information allows network administrators to pinpoint the specifications such as software driver or hardware model that clients experiencing poor Wi-Fi are on and target just them.

Figure 3. Identifying Hardware Issues with Intel Connectivity Analytics

Figure 4. Station information or Device Classifier WebUI Output on the Catalyst 9800 Controller

Outdated wireless drivers can also be a common culprit for a poor wireless experience. The station information report gives network administrators peace of mind when rolling out software updates knowing they have complete visibility on the Catalyst or Meraki controller.

Figure 5. Identifying Out of Date Drivers (Left) & Validating New Drivers (Right) with Client Connectivity Analytics

Troubleshooting Roaming:

When a client roams, it’s entirely a wireless client’s decision to do so, and the network has little to no visibility into the reason. Thanks to Intel Connectivity Analytics, we have reports that will share these insights with reason codes such as Low RSSI, 11v Recommendations, Missed Beacons, and Better AP. Based on these insights, a network administrator can determine whether the suspicious client roam was for a legitimate reason or not.

Figure 6. Troubleshooting Roaming with Client Connectivity Analytics

Figure 7. Roaming Scenario Report WebUI Output on the Catalyst 9800 Controller

Identifying Poor Connectivity:

When a wireless client’s RSSI falls below a certain threshold, a Low RSSI report will be generated to alert network administrators about possible coverage holes. These issues can then be proactively addressed by increasing the Tx power on an AP, deploying additional APs, and monitoring if more Low RSSI reports are generated.

Figure 8. Identifying Poor Connectivity with Client Connectivity Analytics

Identifying Misbehaving APs:

Intel Connectivity Analytics supported clients will report if an AP is broadcasting invalid IEs in their beacons, probes, and association responses that would cause connectivity and security concerns. In fact, failed AP reports will even go deeper at the packet level and highlight problematic authentication frames, association frames, or missing response frames.

Intel Connectivity Analytics can even detect rogue AP behavior with the Unknown AP report, which is used to identify and flag rogue BSSID’s (BSSIDs that are not part of an earlier neighbor report)

Figure 9. Identifying Misbehaving APs with Client Connectivity Analytics

Figure 10. Unknown AP Report CLI Output on the Catalyst 9800 Controller

How Does It Work?

Intel Connectivity Analytics uses a Cisco Catalyst 9800 series controller and Catalyst 9100 access point topology from the Cisco Enterprise Network side. The controller enables the features by default on a per WLAN basis. Intel Connectivity Analytics supported client sends the driver-level telemetry back to the access point, which is then processed and presents users with intelligent reports and insights.

Figure 11. Intel Connectivity Analytics Topology

For a technical understanding, refer to the following points:

1. All Intel Connectivity Analytics packet exchanges are protected using PMF for security purposes.

2. Cisco network running IOS XE 17.6.1 or later with the feature enabled will advertise Intel Connectivity Analytics feature support in the Beacon frames.

3. Supported Intel clients will detect and begin forwarding telemetry periodically via a protected Action frame.

As you can see, Intel Connectivity Analytics provides network administrators with granular client-side telemetry in an agentless package at a level never seen in the past. With its wide range of use cases, minimum day 0 requirements, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t leverage such a powerful wireless analytics solution! Take the wireless experience of your network to the next level with Intel Connectivity Analytics today!

Source: cisco.com

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Under Pressure to Secure Your Enterprise? Predict More to Prevent More

Cybersecurity is a top priority for any organization conducting business over the Internet. Protecting your assets encompasses an ever-expanding digital landscape. Any data breach can have a devastating impact on the finances and brand equity of an organization. It’s why cybersecurity is treated as a business risk, rather than merely an IT issue. The importance of security is nothing new, but the global pandemic has made it even more critical.

Rise in Remote Access Authentication

Many of the new security challenges stem from the rapid increase in remote work that occurred almost overnight last year with the global rollout of stay-at-home orders. According to data from Cisco DUO, more organizations across all industries have enabled their employees to work from home, and there’s every indication this could continue for an extended time. Between February and April of 2020, we saw a 60% increase in remote access authentication — a percentage that has held remarkably steady ever since.

For IT Ops, a key challenge was ensuring their business employees could securely access the tools and resources they needed to do their jobs, seamlessly and with no additional friction. At the same time, organizations have had to protect critical information and minimize risk, all while accommodating myriad types of users and devices using unsecured networks. In order to accomplish the above, having visibility and insights into remote work patterns is a must, allowing SecOps and NetOps teams to authenticate and secure enterprise traffic through zero-trust solutions and multi-factor authentication.

Identifying Cyberthreat Patterns

In addition to the expansion of the attack surface due to the shift to remote work, cyber-criminals evolved their attacks to feed on people’s fears around the pandemic. DNS traffic analysis by Cisco Umbrella revealed some startling findings for the first nine months of 2020. For example, among our Umbrella DNS customers:

◉ 91% saw a domain linked to malware

◉ 68% saw a domain linked to cryptomining

◉ 85% saw a domain linked to phishing

◉ 63% saw a domain linked to trojans

In fact, since 2019, trojans and phishing have traded spots in threat ranking. In 2019, trojans were the number two threat at 59%, while phishing was number four with 46% impacted. Over the past year, phishing has risen by nearly 40% in large part due to malicious actors preying on people’s fears about the virus.

If IT teams are to scale and stay ahead of the bad actors in this evolving landscape of cyberthreats, they must be able to proactively monitor and identify malicious traffic and its patterns. It is vastly better to predict and prevent cyberattacks than to try to undo the damage caused by data breaches after the fact.

Threat Targets by Industry

Shifts in the distribution of threat traffic across different business markets since 2019 offer further insight into how to secure your enterprise. In particular, managed service providers (MSPs) have now surpassed financial services as the most impacted markets. In fact, U.S. government agencies have issued recent warnings about the heightened risk of attacks by state actors on MSPs.

Why this jump in MSP threat traffic? MSPs are attractive targets because, unless an MSP has effectively secured its own environment, it is vulnerable to attack by malicious actors who can then hijack remote monitoring management to go after the MSP’s clients. These customers are then at higher risk than the MSP itself. (By contrast, higher education traffic has dropped considerably in the ranking of impacted markets over the past year — from the top spot to the number six spot — most likely due to students being unable to attend classes in person.)

The rise in malware using sophisticated hiding and evasion techniques has made cyber defense teams’ jobs that much harder. In order to secure your data and your enterprise, manual monitoring and intervention is no longer a viable solution. Today’s cyber defenders must have visibility across applications, networks, and devices, along with the ability to leverage machine speed and predictive intelligence to deliver scalable, adaptable protection.

Source: cisco.com

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How Agility Has Become The Ultimate Superpower For IT

Many CIOs and IT professionals are feeling between a rock and hard place right now, battling the disruption caused by the global pandemic while facing immense pressure to accelerate their digital journeys.

Yet out of the crucible of these opposing forces, remarkable opportunities have emerged, along with new learnings and new innovations.

I recently had the pleasure of moderating a roundtable discussion with the CIOs of three large customers. I also spoke with two of my colleagues — Jeetu Patel, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Security and Applications business, and Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking and Cloud business.

The disruption our CIOs faced was unprecedented. In the early days of the pandemic, one of them — a large health care system in northeastern United States — sent 1,000 back-office employees home within the space of a week. Many had never worked remotely before. Even today, only about 25 staff members are allowed back on site at any given time. And with 75 percent of workers set to remain remote, there appears to be no going back to the old ways.

Another, from a federal government department in Australia with responsibilities including immigration and customs border policy kicked off 2020 with the triple-whammy of massive wildfires, freak hailstorms, and the pandemic. With travel plummeting, the agency faced steep declines in revenue, even as the number of people accessing its network remotely soared from 500 to 20,000. This CIO’s team was asked to do more with less — and quicker.

Our third CIO — from a multinational technology company — said business continuity shot to the No.1 priority as markets went into lockdown. In India, that meant 200,000 people going remote almost overnight. This meant beefing up the network and VPN to keep mission-critical processes up and running.

Todd Nightingale said much of his focus is on ensuring our customers’ infrastructure is ready for these types of massive transitions. That means pushing critical resources, systems and functions to the cloud — such as Cisco’s Webex collaboration platform — and making them available everywhere, whether people are working from home, at critical sites or walking down the street.

“There’s this real need for everything we could have done from an office to now be doable from anywhere,” Todd said. “It’s an amazing transformation and it’s driving a ton of what we do.”

Jeetu Patel, who oversees our Webex collaboration platform, said that a major focus is providing digital experiences that are 10 times better than in-person interactions. For example, the new noise reduction feature in Webex, courtesy of Cisco’s BabbleLabs acquisition, eliminates the need for phrases like “Can you put yourself on mute?” or “Can you stop typing, please?”

Advice for becoming future-ready

Our CIOs stressed the importance of thinking outside the box, as well as upgrading talent to be ready for the huge opportunities they see emerging post-pandemic. For example, contact tracing is an opportunity to bring IoT (Internet of Things) to life. Given the vast amounts of data that will be collected, it’s also a time to think about security differently — not just as a function, but as a mindset.

They also cited four success factors for achieving greater resilience: agility, scalability, speed, and innovation. Among their recommendations: embracing the concept of the MVP (minimum viable product), rapid innovation, flattening organizational structures, and creating task forces.

Cisco’s Todd Nightingale said that the pandemic showed organizations how fast they can move if they need to, calling agility “the ultimate superpower for IT.” Agility is the core value driving Cisco’s focus on providing a “cloud onramp” through our platforms strategy.

Equally vital to agility, said Todd, is Cisco’s cloud automation strategy, which helps organizations transform their infrastructure “with a few clicks.” He also stressed the importance of monitoring network and application performance in order to ensure the best user experience. Cisco’s recent acquisition of ThousandEyes is critical to this, as it extends our end-to-end visibility capability into networks our users don’t necessarily own.

My closing message for the roundtable was this: Disruption is here to stay. Acceleration of digitalization is inevitable — we have to do it. And in many ways, the technology is the easy part. The hard part is breaking down the barriers to be able to respond with the required speed and agility. In that sense, the pandemic has actually helped organizations move faster, innovate more quickly and face into disruptions. The opportunities are here — it’s up to us to seize them.

Source: cisco.com

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For Banks – The Contact Center is Your Best Friend

For years, the album that sold the most units was Carole King’s “Tapestry”. Estimates are that this record has sold more than 25 million copies. Rife with well-known songs, an interesting comment made by one of the initial reviewers in 1971 called the song “You’ve Got a Friend” the “core” of and “essence” of the album. It didn’t hurt that James Taylor’s version also became a monster hit. For banks, they too have a friend – in their contact centers.

The malls emptied, and the contact centers filled up

The last twelve months have initiated a renaissance in contact center operations. While the modernization of contact centers had been on a steady march, the realities of 2020 suddenly presented a giant forcing function changing the customer engagement landscape in a dramatic fashion. In one fell swoop, 36 months of planned investment in modernizing contact centers accelerated into a single 12-month period. As the physical world was shut down, the digital world ramped up dramatically. Banks saw branch visits slow to a crawl, and digital and contact center interactions increased by orders of magnitude. In addition, up to 90% of contact center agents were sent home to work, with estimates that a majority of them will stay there over time as indicated by this Saddletree Research analysis:

Prior planning prevented poor performance

Fortunately, banks and credit unions were one of the key vertical markets that were relatively prepared for 2020 and were able to lean into the challenges presented, though this was not to say things went perfectly. What was behind this preparation and what were these organizations doing prior and during the crisis? And what should they do in the years ahead?

The “Digital Pivot” paid huge dividends

At their core, banks and credit unions collect deposits and loan them out at (hopefully) a profit. With money viewed as a commodity, financial services firms were one of the first industries to understand the only two sustainable differentiators they possessed were the customer experience they delivered, and their people. It is interesting that these are the main two ingredients which comprise a contact center!

For many banks prior to 2010, the biggest challenge for contact center operations consisted of navigating mergers and acquisitions when combining operations. Normalizing operations during mergers often manifested itself in a giant IVR farms meant to absorb large amounts of voice traffic. Prior form factors for self-service were not know as “low-effort” propositions, and customer experience scores suffered for years. Banks as an aggregate industry dropped below all industry averages for customer experience, after leading for years.

The mobile revolution presented a giant reset for banking customer experience. Financial institutions by and large have done an excellent job of adopting mobile applications to the delight of their customers. In response, customer experience scores in banking have steadily risen the past 10 years, and banks are near the top quartile again, only trailing consumer electronics firms and various retailers.

Banks are more like a contact center than you think

Banks and contact centers have very common characteristics. Both wrap themselves in consumer-friendly self-service applications which automate formerly manual processes that required human assistance. These include popular customer engagement platforms such as mobile applications and ATMs. In the contact center this dynamic involves speech recognition, voice biometrics, and intelligent messaging.

As self-service has become increasingly popular, live interactions that are left over for both the branch and the contact center have become more complex, difficult to solve on the first try, and requiring collaborative, cross business resolution by the individual servicing the customer. These types of interactions are known as “outliers”. In this situation the contact center becomes in essence, a “digital backstop” where the consumer interacts with self service first and then and only then seeks live assistance.

Prior planning prevents poor performance part II

The digital tsunami started in 2010 via the mass adoption of mobile applications by banks, giving this industry in particular a significant head start on the “outlier” dynamic. Therefore in 2020 when the shopping malls emptied out and contact centers filled up, banks had already been operating tacitly in the “outlier” model for a number of years and were in a better position to succeed. Applications such as intelligent call back, integrated consumer messaging, work at home agents, voice biometrics, A.I. driven intelligent chat bots, and seamless channel shift from mobile applications to the contact center were already in place to some extent for leading financial institutions.

Thinking ahead

With much of the focus on contact center, automation in banking has been able to extend A.I. into the initial stages of customer contact. The road ahead will include wrapping A.I. driven intelligence to surround contact center resources during an interaction, essentially creating a new category of resources known as “Super Agents”. In this environment, all agents in theory can perform as the best agents because learnings from the best performers are automatically applied throughout the workforce. In addition, Intelligent Virtual Assistants, or IVAs, will act as “digital twins” for contact center agents – automatically looking for preemptive answers to customers questions, and automating both contact transcripts and after call work documentation and follow up.

Yes, if you’re a bank, you have a friend in your contact center

Banks made the pivot to delivering better customer experience in their contact centers during the “Digital Pivot” in the early 2010s. From there, banks made steady progress to reclaim their CX leadership and delivering excellent customer experiences. The realities of 2020 accelerated contact center investment by at least 36 months into a 12-month window. Banks which had established leadership utilized this forcing function to accelerate a next generation of customer differentiators, firmly entrenched in themselves as category leaders in the financial services industry. Other institutions can utilize these unique times to play rapid catch-up. Who benefits? Their customers.

Source: cisco.com

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A Mindset Shift for Digitizing Software Development and Delivery

At Cisco, my teams—which are part of the Intent-Based Networking Group—focus on the core network layers that are used by enterprise, data center, and service provider network engineering. We develop tools and processes that digitize and automate the Cisco Software Development Lifecycle (CSDL). We have been travelling the digitization journey for over two years now and are seeing significant benefits. This post will explain why we are working diligently and creatively to digitize software development across the spectrum of Cisco solutions, some of our innovations, and where we are headed next.

Why Cisco Customers Should Care About Digitization of Software Development and Delivery

Cisco customers should consider what digitization of software development means to them. Because many of our customers are also software developers—whether they are creating applications to sell or for internal digital transformation projects—the same principles we are applying to Cisco development can be of use to a broader audience.

Digitization of development improves total customer experience by moving beyond just the technical aspects of development and thinking in terms of complete solutions that include accurate and timely documentation, implementation examples, and analytics that recommend which release is best for a particular organization’s network. Digitization of development:

◉ Leads to improvements in the quality, serviceability, and security of solutions in the field.

◉ Delivers predictive analytics to assist customers to understand, for example, the impact an upgrade, security patches, or new functionality will have on existing systems, with increased assurance about how the network will perform after changes are applied. 

◉ Automates the documentation of each handoff along the development lifecycle to improve traceability from concept and design to coding and testing.

These capabilities will be increasingly important as we continue to focus on developing solutions for software subscriptions, which shift the emphasis from long cycles creating feature-filled releases to shorter development cycles delivering new functionality and customer-requested innovations in accelerated timeframes.

Software Developers Thrive with Digital Development Workflows

For professionals who build software solutions, the digitization of software development focuses on improving productivity, consistency, and efficiency. It democratizes team-based development—that is, everyone is a developer: solution architects, designers, coders, and testers. Teams are configured to bring the appropriate expertise to every stage of solution development. Test developers, for example, should not only develop test plans and specific tests, but also provide functional specifications and code reviews, build test automation frameworks, and represent customer views for validating solutions at every stage of development. Case in point, when customer-specific uses cases are incorporated early into the architecture and design phases, then the functionality of the intended features are built into test suites as code is being written.

A primary focus of digitization of development is creating new toolsets for measuring progress and eliminating friction points. Our home-grown Qualex (Quality Index) platform provides an automated method of measuring and interpreting quality metrics for digitized processes. The goal is to eliminate human bias by using data-driven techniques and self-learning mechanisms. In the past 2 years, Qualex has standardized most of our internal development practices and is saving the engineering organization a considerable amount of time and expense for software management.

­Labs as a Service (LaaS) is another example of applying digitization to transform the development cycle that also helps to efficiently manage CAPEX. Within Cisco, LaaS is a ready-to-use environment for sharing networking hardware, spinning up virtual routers, and providing on-demand testbed provisioning. Developers can quickly and cost effectively design and setup hardware and software environments to simulate various customer use cases, including public and private cloud implementations.

Digitization Reduces Development Workflow Frictions

A major goal of the digitization of software development is to reduce the friction points during solution development. We are accomplishing this by applying AI and machine learning against extensive data lakes of code, documentation, customer requests, bug reports, and previous test cycle results. The resulting contextual analytics will be available via a dashboard at every stage of the development process, reducing the friction of multi-phase development processes. This will make it possible for every developer to have a scorecard that tracks technical debt, security holes, serviceability, and quality. The real-time feedback increases performance and augments skillsets, leading to greater developer satisfaction. 

Workflow friction points inhibit both creativity and productivity. Using analytics to pinpoint aberrations in code as it is being developed reduces the back and forth cycles of pinpointing flaws and reproducing them for remediation. Imagine a developer writing new code for a solution which includes historical code. The developer is not initially familiar with the process or the tests that the inherited code went through. With contextual analytics presenting relevant historical data, the developer can quickly come up to speed and avoid previous mistakes in the coding process. We call this defect foreshadowing. The result is cleaner code produced in less time, reduced testing cycles, and better integration of new features with existing code base.

Digitizing Development Influences Training and Hiring

Enabling a solution view of a project—rather than narrow silos of tasks—also expands creativity and enhances opportunities to learn and upskill, opening career paths. The cross-pollination of expertise makes everyone involved in solution development more knowledgeable and more responsive to changes in customer requirements. In turn everyone gains a more satisfying work experience and a chance to expand their career.

◉ Training becomes continuous learning by breaking down the silos of the development lifecycle so that individuals can work across phases and be exposed to all aspects of the development process.

◉ Automating tracking and analysis of development progress and mistakes enables teams to pinpoint areas in which people need retraining or upskilling.

◉ Enhancing the ability to hire the right talent gets a boost from digitization as data is continuously gathered and analyzed to pinpoint the skillsets that contribute the most to the successful completion of projects, thus refining the focus on the search for talent.

Join Our Journey to Transform Software Development

At Cisco we have the responsibility of carrying the massive technical debt created since the Internet was born while continuously adding new functionality for distributed data centers, multi-cloud connectivity, software-defined WANs, ubiquitous wireless connectivity, and security. To manage this workload, we are fundamentally changing how Cisco builds and tests software to develop products at web-scale speeds. These tools, which shape our work as we shape them, provide the ability to make newly-trained and veteran engineers capable of consistently producing extraordinary results.

Cisco is transforming the solution conception to development to consumption journey. We have made significant progress, but there is still much to accomplish. We invite you to join us on this exciting transformation. As a Cisco Network Engineer, you have the opportunity to create innovative solutions using transformative toolsets that make work exciting and rewarding as you help build the future of the internet. As a Cisco DevX Engineer, you can choose to focus on enhancing the evolving toolset with development analytics and hyper-efficient workflows that enable your co-developers to do their very best work. Whichever path you choose, you’ll be an integral member of an exclusive team dedicated to customer success.

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