Computing that’s purpose-built for a more energy-efficient, AI-driven future

Just as humans use patterns as mental shortcuts for solving complex problems, AI is about recognizing patterns to distill actionable insights. Now think about how this applies to the data center, where patterns have developed over decades. You have cycles where we use software to solve problems, then hardware innovations enable new software to focus on the next problem. The pendulum swings back and forth repeatedly, with each swing representing a disruptive technology that changes and redefines how we get work done with our developers and with data center infrastructure and operations teams.

AI is clearly the latest pendulum swing and disruptive technology that requires advancements in both hardware and software. GPUs are all the rage today due to the public debut of ChatGPT – but GPUs have been around for a long time. I was a GPU user back in the 1990s because these powerful chips enabled me to play 3D games that required fast processing to calculate things like where all those polygons should be in space, updating visuals fast with each frame.

In technical terms, GPUs can process many parallel floating-point operations faster than standard CPUs and in large part that is their superpower. It’s worth noting that many AI workloads can be optimized to run on a high-performance CPU.  But unlike the CPU, GPUs are free from the responsibility of making all the other subsystems within compute work with each other. Software developers and data scientists can leverage software like CUDA and its development tools to harness the power of GPUs and use all that parallel processing capability to solve some of the world’s most complex problems.

A new way to look at your AI needs

Unlike single, heterogenous infrastructure use cases like virtualization, there are multiple patterns within AI that come with different infrastructure needs in the data center. Organizations can think about AI use cases in terms of three main buckets:

1. Build the model, for large foundational training.

2. Optimize the model, for fine-tuning a pre-trained model with specific data sets.

3. Use the model, for inferencing insights from new data.

The least demanding workloads are optimize and use the model because most of the work can be done in a single box with multiple GPUs. The most intensive, disruptive, and expensive workload is build the model. In general, if you’re looking to train these models at scale you need an environment that can support many GPUs across many servers, networking together for individual GPUs that behave as a single processing unit to solve highly complex problems, faster.

This makes the network critical for training use cases and introduces all kinds of challenges to data center infrastructure and operations, especially if the underlying facility was not built for AI from inception. And most organizations today are not looking to build new data centers.

Therefore, organizations building out their AI data center strategies will have to answer important questions like:

• What AI use cases do you need to support, and based on the business outcomes you need to deliver, where do they fall into the build the model, optimize the model, and use the model buckets?
• Where is the data you need, and where is the best location to enable these use cases to optimize outcomes and minimize the costs?
• Do you need to deliver more power? Are your facilities able to cool these types of workloads with existing methods or do you require new methods like water cooling?
• Finally, what is the impact on your organization’s sustainability goals?

The power of Cisco Compute solutions for AI

As the general manager and senior vice president for Cisco’s compute business, I’m happy to say that Cisco UCS servers are designed for demanding use cases like AI fine-tuning and inferencing, VDI, and many others. With its future-ready, highly modular architecture, Cisco UCS empowers our customers with a blend of high-performance CPUs, optional GPU acceleration, and software-defined automation. This translates to efficient resource allocation for diverse workloads and streamlined management through Cisco Intersight. You can say that with UCS, you get the muscle to power your creativity and the brains to optimize its use for groundbreaking AI use cases.

But Cisco is one player in a wide ecosystem. Technology and solution partners have long been a key to our success, and this is certainly no different in our strategy for AI. This strategy revolves around driving maximum customer value to harness the full long-term potential behind each partnership, which enables us to combine the best of compute and networking with the best tools in AI.

This is the case in our strategic partnerships with NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Red Hat, and others. One key deliverable has been the steady stream of Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) that provide pre-configured solution blueprints that simplify integrating AI workloads into existing IT infrastructure. CVDs eliminate the need for our customers to build their AI infrastructure from scratch. This translates to faster deployment times and reduced risks associated with complex infrastructure configurations and deployments.

Another key pillar of our AI computing strategy is offering customers a diversity of solution options that include standalone blade and rack-based servers, converged infrastructure, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). These options enable customers to address a variety of use cases and deployment domains throughout their hybrid multicloud environments – from centralized data centers to edge end points. Here are just a couple of examples:

• Converged infrastructures with partners like NetApp and Pure Storage offer a strong foundation for the full lifecycle of AI development from training AI models to day-to-day operations of AI workloads in production environments. For highly demanding AI use cases like scientific research or complex financial simulations, our converged infrastructures can be customized and upgraded to provide the scalability and flexibility needed to handle these computationally intensive workloads efficiently.
• We also offer an HCI option through our strategic partnership with Nutanix that is well-suited for hybrid and multi-cloud environments through the cloud-native designs of Nutanix solutions. This allows our customers to seamlessly extend their AI workloads across on-premises infrastructure and public cloud resources, for optimal performance and cost efficiency. This solution is also ideal for edge deployments, where real-time data processing is crucial.

AI Infrastructure with sustainability in mind 

Cisco’s engineering teams are focused on embedding energy management, software and hardware sustainability, and business model transformation into everything we do. Together with energy optimization, these new innovations will have the potential to help more customers accelerate their sustainability goals.

Working in tandem with engineering teams across Cisco, Denise Lee leads Cisco’s Engineering Sustainability Office with a mission to deliver more sustainable products and solutions to our customers and partners. With electricity usage from data centers, AI, and the cryptocurrency sector potentially doubling by 2026, according to a recent International Energy Agency report, we are at a pivotal moment where AI, data centers, and energy efficiency must come together. AI data center ecosystems must be designed with sustainability in mind. Denise outlined the systems design thinking that highlights the opportunities for data center energy efficiency across performance, cooling, and power in her recent blog, Reimagine Your Data Center for Responsible AI Deployments.

Recognition for Cisco’s efforts have already begun. Cisco’s UCS X-series has received the Sustainable Product of the Year by SEAL Awards and an Energy Star rating from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And Cisco continues to focus on critical features in our portfolio through agreement on product sustainability requirements to address the demands on data centers in the years ahead.

Look ahead to Cisco Live

We are just a couple of months away from Cisco Live US, our premier customer event and showcase for the many different and exciting innovations from Cisco and our technology and solution partners. We will be sharing many exciting Cisco Compute solutions for AI and other uses cases. Our Sustainability Zone will feature a virtual tour through a modernized Cisco data center where you can learn about Cisco compute technologies and their sustainability benefits. I’ll share more details in my next blog closer to the event.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

Quantum Security and Networking are Emerging as Lifelines in Our Quantum-powered Future

A metamorphosis continues to take shape with the rise of Post-Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Key Distribution, and the brave new world of Quantum Networking.

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, quantum computing stands out as a beacon of both promise and challenge. As we delve into the world of quantum networking and security, we find ourselves at the intersection of groundbreaking innovation and urgent necessity.

Cisco believes that quantum networking is not just an intriguing concept. It drives our research and investment strategy around quantum computing. We see it as a critical path forward because it holds the key to horizontally scaling systems, including quantum computing systems. Imagine a future where quantum computers collaborate seamlessly across vast distances, solving complex problems that were previously insurmountable.

However, before we can realize the promise of quantum networking, we need to address the elephant in the room – security. When quantum computers become reality, our classical cryptographic methods will face an existential threat. These powerful machines will potentially break today’s encryption algorithms in seconds. Our digital fortresses are vulnerable.

This opens the question of what will happen when quantum computers enter the scene. The issue lies in key exchanges. In classical systems, we rely on public key infrastructure (PKI) to securely exchange keys. This has served us well, ensuring confidentiality and integrity. But quantum computers, with their uncanny ability to factor large numbers efficiently, disrupt this equilibrium. Suddenly, our once-secure secrets hang in the balance.

Getting to the heart of the matter, imagine a scenario that persists even in our current era – the ominous concept of “store now, decrypt later”. Picture an adversary intercepting encrypted data today. Biding their time, they await the moment when quantum supremacy becomes reality.

When that day dawns, they unleash their quantum beast upon the stored information. Our sensitive communications, financial transactions, and personal data will suddenly be laid bare, retroactively vulnerable to the quantum onslaught.

Post-Quantum Cryptography is gaining momentum

Enter Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC). Recognizing the urgency of the coming quantum moment, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been evaluating PQC proposals and is expected to release its final standards for quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms later this year. These algorithms are designed to withstand quantum attacks and while not perfect, they are intended to fill the gap until quantum-safe solutions mature.

Apple’s iMessage is a compelling proof point. Last year, Apple made a decisive move by announcing its adoption of PQC algorithms for end-to-end encryption. This strategic shift underscores the industry’s recognition of the looming quantum threat, especially around “store now, decrypt later” attacks, and the need to swiftly respond.

In the year ahead, as we move closer to the post-quantum world, PQC will continue to gain momentum as a data security solution. Cisco’s Liz Centoni shared insight in her tech predictions for 2024, highlighting the accelerating adoption of PQC as a software-based approach that works with conventional systems to protect data from future quantum attacks.

PQC will be used by browsers, operating systems, and libraries, and innovators will experiment with integrating it into protocols such as SSL/TLS 1.3, which governs classic cryptography. PQC will likely find its way into enterprises of every size and sector as they seek to safeguard their sensitive data from the threats posed by quantum computers.

Quantum Key Distribution is the holy grail

Beyond PQC lies the holy grail of quantum cryptography, which is Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Last year, we accurately predicted that QKD would become more widely used, particularly within cloud computing, data centers, autonomous vehicles, and consumer devices like smartphones.

Unlike classical key exchange methods, QKD capitalizes on the no-cloning property inherent in quantum states whereby information encoded on one qubit cannot be copied or duplicated to another because quantum states are fragile, affected by any and every action such as measuring the state. In practical terms, that means an eavesdropper can always be discovered due to a “read” causing the photon state to change.

Consider a scenario where two parties, Bank A and Bank B, want to communicate securely. They use QKD, where Bank A sends quantum states (like polarized photons) to Bank B which measures them without knowing the original state.

The measurements are then used to create a shared key, based on a randomly selected subset of the transmitted state (measurement bases) reconciled between the two parties through an authenticated and encrypted classical channel. Since the eavesdropper does not know the random subset, any attempt to measure the transmitted information will be detected due to a disturbance in the quantum states.

The beauty lies in the provably secure nature of QKD — quantum mechanics forbids perfect cloning, rendering interception futile. In this dance of particles and principles, QKD stands as a lighthouse of security, promising a future where quantum and classical work in tandem to safeguard us.

For instance, integrating QKD in 5G communication infrastructure is becoming increasingly important. With QKD, organizations will be able to better protect the privacy and authenticity of data transmitted over low-latency, high-speed networks, explicitly addressing the security demands of the 5G era.

Efforts to make QKD solutions more accessible and interoperable are accelerating in response to the demand for even more secure data transfer. This is leading to commercialization and standardization initiatives that are expected to make QKD solutions more user friendly and cost effective, ultimately driving widespread adoption across new applications and sectors.

As strides continue toward achieving quantum-secure messaging, among the first organizations to more broadly implement PQC will likely be those responsible for critical infrastructure and essential government suppliers. Large enterprises and other organizations will follow, also implementing these algorithms within the next few years.

Quantum networking on the horizon

Depending on the desired level of security and performance required, Centoni explained that QKD can be used as either an alternative or a complement to PQC and, in the future, will also leverage quantum networking. However, she acknowledges that it’s early days for quantum networks.

So far, researchers have not successfully achieved sustained quantum networking on a large scale, but major discoveries and advancements are happening. Companies like Cisco, alongside cutting-edge leaders across various industries, are pouring billions into unlocking the awesome potential of quantum networks.

“Quantum networking will see significant new research and investment by government and financial services,” said Centoni. She predicts that this will also include sectors with high demand for data security and the kinds of workloads that perform well with quantum computers.

Quantum networking relies on teleportation principles of quantum mechanics to transmit information between two or more quantum computers. This takes place by manipulating qubits whereby they “entangle” with one another and enable instantaneous transfer of quantum information across vast distances – even when there’s no physical connection between the computers.

In the not-so-distant future, perhaps 4 to 5 years or more, quantum networking will inexorably emerge as a potent force. With quantum networking, quantum computers will be able to collaborate and exchange information to tackle intricate problems that no single quantum computer could solve on its own.

By leveraging the quantum principles of teleportation and non-cloning, quantum networking protocols will facilitate fast, reliable – and perhaps even unconditional – secure information exchange. Potential applications of quantum networking go far beyond cryptography, as well, to turbocharging drug discovery, artificial intelligence (AI), and materials science.

Looking to the post-quantum future

Today, quantum computers are at a very similar stage that mainframes were in the 1960s. Back then, very few organizations could afford those machines, which could fill an entire room. While QKD is now in use as a means of provably secure communication, quantum networking remains mainly theoretical.

QKD is the next generation of quantum cryptography, a step beyond PQC which is not provably secure because of the lack of a proof of mathematical hardness for the cryptographic algorithms. Quantum networking should be thought of as first, a substrate needed for QKD, and then building out larger and larger compute islands – such as data centers and LAN, then WAN – analogous to how classical computers were connected to build distributed computing.

The big challenge now, like the past, is to create quantum computers that can be both reliably and affordably scaled up and put into the hands of corporate, government, and research entities. As such, distributed quantum computing will be the primary driver for quantum networks. We may even see the advent of the quantum cloud and the quantum internet – the metamorphic network of the future.

Quantum networking and security are not mere buzzwords. They are our lifelines in a quantum-powered future. As we race against time, we must embrace quantum technologies while fortifying our defenses. The ultimate payoff is a network that’s more secure than anything we’ve known before — a network where quantum and classical dance harmoniously, protecting our digital existence.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

GenAI will Transform B2B Interactions and Solutions in the Year Ahead with New Depth of Context and Control

Human-like interaction with B2B solutions, bespoke multimodal LLMs for better accuracy and precision, curated workflow automation via LAMs and customized B2B applications will become the norm as GenAI expands in the business sphere.

With the rapid launch of new solutions powered by generative AI (GenAI), the business-to-business (B2B) landscape is being reshaped in front of our eyes. Many organizations have taken a cautious and meticulously planned approach to widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), however the Cisco AI Readiness Index reveals just how much pressure they are now feeling.

Adverse business impacts are anticipated by 61% of organizations if they have not implemented an AI strategy within the next year. In some cases, the window may even be narrower as competitors pull away, leaving very little time to properly execute plans. The clock is ticking, and the call for AI integration – especially GenAI – is now louder than ever.

In her predictions of tech trends for the new year, Chief Strategy Officer and GM of Applications, Liz Centoni said GenAI-powered Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) will become the norm for new products and services. “NLIs powered by GenAI will be expected for new products and more than half will have this by default by the end of 2024.”

NLIs allow users to interact with applications and systems using normal language and spoken commands as with AI assistants, for instance, to instigate functionality and dig for deeper understanding. This capability will become available across most business-to-consumer (B2C) applications and services in 2024, especially for question-and-answer (Q&A) type of interactions between a human and a “machine”. However, associated B2B workflows and dependencies will require additional context and control for GenAI solutions to effectively elevate the overall business.

The point-and-click approach enabled by graphic user interfaces (GUIs) effectively binds users to a limited set of capabilities, and a restricted view of data that is based on the GUI requirements set by the business at the point of design. Multi-modal prompt interfaces (mainly text and audio) are fast changing that paradigm and expanding the UI/UX potential and scope. In the coming year, we’ll see B2B organizations increasingly leverage NLIs and context to “ask” specific questions about available data, freeing them from traditional constraints and offering a faster path to insight for complex queries and interactions.

A good example of this is the contact center and its system support chatbots as a B2C interface. Their user experience will continue to be transformed by GenAI-enabled NLIs and multi-modal assistants in 2024, but the natural next step is to enrich GenAI with additional context, enabling it to augment B2B dependencies (like services) and back-end systems interactions, like application programming interfaces (APIs) to further boost accuracy and reach, minimize response time, and enhance user satisfaction.

Meanwhile, as the relevance of in-context faster paths to insights increases and the associated GenAI-enabled data flows become mainstream, large action models (LAMs) will start to be considered as a potential future step to automate some of enterprise workflows, most likely starting in the realm of IT, security, and auditing and compliance.

Additional B2B considerations with GenAI

As Centoni said, GenAI will be increasingly leveraged in B2B interactions with users demanding more contextualized, personalized, and integrated solutions. “GenAI will offer APIs, interfaces, and services to access, analyze, and visualize data and insights, becoming pervasive across areas such as project management, software quality and testing, compliance assessments, and recruitment efforts. As a result, observability for AI will grow.”

As the use of GenAI grows exponentially, this will simultaneously amplify the need for comprehensive and deeper observability. AI revolutionizes the way we analyze and process data, and observability too is fast evolving with it to offer an even more intelligent and automated approach from monitoring and triage across real-time dependencies up to troubleshooting of complex systems and the deployment of automated actions and responses.

Observability over modern applications and systems, including those that are powered by or leverage AI capabilities, will be increasingly augmented by GenAI for root-cause analysis, predictive analysis and, for example, to drill down on multi-cloud resource allocation and costs, as well as the performance and security of digital experiences.

Driven by growing demand for integrated solutions they can adapt to their specific needs, B2B providers are turning to GenAI to power services that boost productivity and accomplish tasks more efficiently than their current systems and implementations. Among these is the ability to access and analyze vast volumes of data to derive insights that can be used to develop new products, optimize dependencies, as well as design and refine the digital experiences supported by applications.

Starting in 2024, GenAI will be an integral part of business context, therefore observability will naturally need to extend to it, making the full stack observability scope a bit wider. Besides costs, GenAI-enabled B2B interactions will be particularly sensitive to both latency and jitter. This fact alone will drive significant growth in demand over the coming year for end-to-end observability – including the internet, as well as critical networks, empowering these B2B interactions to keep AI-powered applications running at peak performance.

On the other hand, as businesses recognize potential pitfalls and seek increased control and flexibility over their AI models training, data retention, and expendability processes, the demand for either bespoke or both domain-specific GenAI large language models (LLMs) will also increase significantly in 2024. As a result, organizations will pick up the pace of adapting GenAI LLM models to their specific requirements and contexts by leveraging private data and introducing up-to-date information via retrieval augmented generation (RAG), fine-tuning parameters, and scaling models appropriately.

Moving fast towards contextual understanding and reasoning

GenAI has already evolved from reliance on a single data modality to include training on text, images, video, audio, and other inputs simultaneously. Just as humans learn by taking in multiple types of data to create more complete understanding, the growing ability of GenAI to consume multiple modalities is another significant step towards greater contextual understanding.

These multi-modal capabilities are still in the early stages, although they are already being considered for business interactions. Multi-modality is also key to the future of LAMs – sometimes called AI agents – as they bring complex reasoning and provide multi-hop thinking and the ability to generate actionable outputs.

True multi-modality not only improves overall accuracy, but it also exponentially expands the possible use cases, including for B2B applications. Consider a customer sentiment model tied to a forecast trending application that can capture and interpret audio, text, and video for complete insight that includes context such as tone of voice and body language, instead of simply transcribing the audio. Recent advances allow RAG to handle both text and images. In a multi-modal setup, images can be retrieved from a vector database and passed through a large multimodal model (LMM) for generation. The RAG method thus enhances the efficiency of tasks as it can be fine-tuned, and its knowledge can be updated easily without requiring entire model retraining.

With RAG in the picture, consider now a model that identifies and analyzes commonalities and patterns in job interviews data by consuming resumes, job requisitions across the industry (from peers and competitors), online activities (from social media up to posted lectures in video) but then being augmented by also consuming the candidate-recruiter emails interactions as well the actual interview video calls.   That example shows how both RAG and responsible AI will be in high demand during 2024.

In summary, in the year ahead we will begin to see a more robust emergence of specialized, domain-specific AI models. There will be a shift towards smaller, specialized LLMs that offer higher levels of accuracy, relevancy, precision, and efficiency for individual organizations and needs, along with niche domain understanding.

RAG and specialized LLMs and LMMs complement each other. RAG ensures accuracy and context, while smaller LLMs optimize efficiency and domain-specific performance. Still in the year ahead, LAM development and relevance will grow, focusing on the automation of user workflows while aiming to cover the “actions” aspect missing from LLMs.

The next frontier of GenAI will see evolutionary change and totally new aspects in B2B solutions.  Reshaping business processes, user experience, observability, security, and automated actions, this new AI-driven era is shaping itself up as we speak and 2024 will be an inflection point in that process.   Exciting times!

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

Maximizing Operational Efficiency: Introducing our New Smart Agent Management for Cisco AppDynamics

Application performance monitoring (APM) remains a key pillar of any observability strategy. Overwhelmed IT Infra and Ops teams rely on for the powerful application and business insights they need to deliver flawless digital experiences to their end users. The challenge they face from the scale of an application’s APM deployments can be complex and difficult to maintain — costing teams time that could be better served focusing on business KPIs.

Turn maintenance time to innovation time

Cisco continuously looks at every opportunity to use automation and intelligence to give time back to our customers, with a full commitment to helping our customers reduce the stress and inefficiency caused by the ever-growing complexity of technologists’ IT environments. I’m pleased to share a major innovation in the Cisco Full-Stack Observability portfolio: Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics, which enables simplified full-stack application instrumentation and centralized agent lifecycle management.

Simplified agent management – focus on what matters most

An average sized organization may have upward of 40,000 agents in deployment, but I’ve even spoken with some larger organizations with more than one million agents to support massively scalable applications! Keeping all those agents updated to the latest version can be complicated and time consuming and takes away critical manpower from actually managing application performance.

But the business impacts can be even greater. Security risks can occur at any time, and to keep your IT environments safe, it is critical to maintain good agent management and version compliance. Failure to do so can expose teams to unnecessary risks that may have otherwise been resolved in the latest agent releases.

Good agent management also allows you to take advantage of the latest innovations released each month.  New features can provide powerful new insights, but taking advantage of these requires environments to be updated with the latest agents. This isn’t possible unless you have a structured and automated approach to agent management!

Centralized agent visibility on Cisco AppDynamics

How we made it simple

Cisco is making it easier than ever for customers to manage their agent fleets with the introduction of Smart Agent for Cisco AppDynamics with centralized agent lifecycle management, which allows you to onboard new applications faster, quickly identify out-of-date agents, and easily conduct upgrades. What may have once taken many hours of manual instrumentation now just requires a few minutes and clicks.

Smart Agent is deployed on each host, allowing teams to remotely install and upgrade Cisco AppDynamics agents from a centralized agent management console with just a few clicks. The console flags agents that are old and outdated, and easily allows IT teams to select them and push upgrades without coding or scripts. Users can also install new agents directly from the agent management console when instrumenting new applications. There’s no need for manual intervention —teams can now focus on what matters for the business and react quickly to security events or take advantage of new agent-based functionality.

Upgrade Cisco AppDynamics agents with just a few clicks.

Our dedication to simplification

Agent lifecycle automation is just the first step in our journey toward simplification for our customers. Soon, Smart Agent will be able to automatically instrument new applications with a single-agent installation utilizing intelligent auto-detect and auto-deploy capabilities, guided by Smart Agent policies, to determine which agents are needed, and then automatically download, install, and configure only those agents needed. Smart Agent will reduce instrumentation time from hours/days to minutes.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

5 Environmental Sustainability Trends for 2024

Reflections from COP28 and looking ahead to next year.

The 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was recently held in Dubai, UAE, and brought government officials and heads of state, business leaders, young people, climate scientists, journalists and various experts together to accelerate global efforts to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Reflections from COP28

I had the opportunity to spend a full week in meetings and sessions, and am energized by the engagement – early numbers of delegates indicate this is the most attended COP ever.

A common thread pulled through discussions surrounded the criticality of public/private partnerships. When we think about climate change, this is the crisis of our lifetime. The progress we make in this decade will be critical for future generations. As we look ahead to 2024, one thing is clear: we must drive action and we must do it together.

As I reflect on the conversations I had at COP28, five trends rose to the top and should be top of mind for all of us as we move into the new year.

Environmental sustainability trends for 2024 and beyond

1. 2024 will be a year of accounting for progress on climate action.

• In 2015, the UN-brokered Paris Agreement established an international treaty on climate change. To limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030. Plans and targets were made by countries and organizations globally to achieve this.
• As we get closer to that milestone, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there is no consistent or accurate way to measure progress, both within countries and industries, and globally, to hold us accountable.
• Pressure is growing on both the public and private sector, with demands for mandatory reporting now a worldwide refrain.
• Regulatory bodies are now considering approaches that can deliver concrete outcomes, but data sources are varied in quality, reporting is fragmented, and many organizations lack the technology to generate and analyze the data they require.
• 2024 could see this come to a head with the emergence of new industry standards with a focus on GHG emissions accounting and climate impact materiality. The tech industry can play a critical role in delivering enabling technologies that will help companies monitor and assess their footprint.

2. The world’s energy delivery systems will start to show major cracks in the next three years. Governments worldwide must prioritize and incentivize smart grid development in 2024 to avoid major issues.

• Many traditional ‘power grids’ are already being stretched to their limits, and increasingly common weather phenomena will continue to add more and more stress. In the U.S., the North America Electric Reliability Corporation warned that much of the U.S. power grid is at an increased risk of failure during major storms or long cold snaps this winter.  (Source: 2023–2024 NERC Winter Reliability Assessment)
• At the same time, the growth of renewables demands a more efficient grid to allow renewables to become more viable and avoid the conversion losses all too common in today’s grids. (Source: Digitalizing Europe’s energy system to power the green energy revolution)
• Micro grids have already begun to show their viability, which may start encouraging more ideas in harnessing them.
• In order to avoid dangerous and costly failures of energy delivery systems, businesses and the public sector must begin now to address the future needs of the grid.

3. The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) creates an opportunity to use this new technology to further our sustainability goals.

• We know that AI workloads increase demand for electricity and water as they place enormous demands on data center infrastructure. (Source: The AI Boom Could Use a Shocking Amount of Electricity) But the benefits of AI for sustainability have the potential to outweigh that impact.
• Like many other areas, data will be crucial to tackling sustainability challenges. With the promise of AI to make sense of data and offer crucial insights, sustainability could benefit greatly from the application of AI.
• AI is only as good as the data it is being fed. So, the emergence of AI may also help solve another major challenge in sustainability: accurate and consistent measurement and the need for centralized and common tooling.

4. A 20-year-old technology, Power over Ethernet (PoE), will finally get its moment in 2024.

• Power over Ethernet (the coupling of connectivity and power delivery on the same cable) was first adopted as an IEEE standard in 2003. Since then, use cases for PoE have been varied, but fairly niche, as the vastly preferred method of electrical connectivity remains copper wiring.
• The need for buildings to become smarter has never been greater. Building operations and construction accounted for an estimated 37% of CO2 emissions globally in 2021. PoE will allow builders, owners and tenants to use the network to deliver power and connectivity together, enabling a true smart building.

5. Nature-based solutions to climate change will gain traction.

• Technological developments are an important part of strategies to mitigate climate change, but discussions at COP28 reinforced the critical role of nature-based solutions, like protecting forests or restoring coastal marshes.
• We must innovate and fill gaps in our understanding of nature-based solutions and when to use them. We must deliver climate mitigation, safeguard biological diversity, improve food security, and create more inclusive and resilient communities.
• Anticipate an uptick in projects that leverage nature’s capabilities, such as afforestation, reforestation, and sustainable land management.

We’re at a pivotal moment, but with bold, strategic, and collective action, I believe we can help mitigate the worst outcomes of climate change, ensuring the opportunity to build an inclusive future for all.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

The Next One Billion Lives

Cisco shared the news that we’ve achieved our ten-year goal to positively impact one billion lives through the Cisco Foundation, Social Impact grants, and Networking Academy – one year ahead of schedule.

As the leaders of these organizations, we’ve never been prouder of the extraordinary work of our teams and our global nonprofit partners, and the contributions of leaders and employees across our company in innovating to help solve the world’s greatest challenges.

Expanding our impact

Now, we’re exploring what’s next.  How will we continue to expand our approach – and accelerate our progress? What inspired, ambitious goals will we set? And how will we impact the next one billion lives?

These are questions worthy of the same thoughtful consideration, passion, and drive as the original ambitious goal.  Now that we’ve achieved it, we can stand on the shoulders of what we’ve learned along the way in connecting longstanding challenges with new possibilities to overcome them – pushing beyond limits – and deepening our understanding of how to create meaningful impact.

What we believed nine years ago continues to be Cisco’s guiding principle: Our ability to impact billions of lives lies in our ability to scale. We’re now expanding our areas of focus and aligning on impacting entire communities – and countries – through our Social Impact, Networking Academy, and Country Digital Acceleration programs. And we’re focusing on addressing the systemic causes of inequity and driving innovation to create lasting, generational change.

Anchoring the workforce of the future

Cisco’s Networking Academy, which now operates in 190 countries has trained more than 20.5 million students in networking and cybersecurity skills over the past 26 years.  In training thousands of learners every year, we not only empower individuals to start a rewarding new career, but also create millions of next-generation jobs and that will anchor the workforce of the future.  We know, however, that connecting the unconnected isn’t just a moral imperative; it’s economically prudent. According to a 2022 World Bank Report, raising internet connectivity to 75 percent of the population in all developing countries (from the current level of approximately 35 percent) would add up to US$2 trillion to their collective gross domestic product (GDP) and create more than 140 million jobs around the world.

By continuing to scale our impact, we’re changing the economic trajectory of communities around the world, increasing economic productivity, and fulfilling our purpose to power an inclusive future for all.

Scaling tech-enabled social impact solutions

Within our global Social Impact Grant programs, our focus on promising nonprofits and NGOs with tech-enabled solutions that we can scale is continuing to create lasting change across communities. When we bring the full measure of Cisco’s strengths to support our nonprofit partners in developing their solutions – and give them the time, space, and flexibility to test their ideas – the impact they create can be astonishing. Like the women of Living Goods, which combines game-changing technology, quality products, and vital health services to empower community health workers to deliver on-call care to their neighbors’ doorsteps. And they earn a livelihood while doing it.

Cisco was an early supporter of Living Goods’ work to leverage technology to deliver healthcare products and services at scale, in a cost-effective manner.  We were proud to partner with them to help them reach their goal of providing quality healthcare to more than 25 million people via 34,000 digitally empowered community health workers by 2021.

Sharing what we’ve learned on the journey to one billion lives

As we contemplate our next inspired goal, we’re committed to sharing more about what we’ve learned in positively impacting one billion lives and to understanding more about the challenges faced by communities around the world.  The most important words of Cisco’s purpose statement – to power an inclusive future for all may be the final two.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

Enabling a new generation of AI with Ethernet

Few transformational technologies have generated the kind of buzz as Artificial Intelligence. Organizations around the world are finding exciting new ways to collaborate, manage applications, enhance their digital security, and reimagine customer experiences. Cisco already harnesses AI-powered capabilities across our product and customer service portfolio. We are also leading innovation that enables AI infrastructure. Our vision for AI Network fabrics offers unparalleled programmability, performance, flexibility, and efficiency. And we enable these fabrics with a familiar technology that has broad ecosystem support — Ethernet.

At the foundation of every AI generated product capability will be ground-breaking infrastructure. GPUs and massively scalable data stores and compute will be deployed in AI/ML platforms of unprecedented scale and performance. This massive movement and processing of data will need a network fabric that meets the considerable demands of these platforms. These networks need to enable AI with economical, flexible, and innovative connectivity. An economical and flexible platform enables you to invest early and evolve in a way that fits your unique business model. Innovation offers you a fabric that is high throughput, low-latency and lossless — without sacrificing flexibility. As a result of Cisco’s considerable investments, that AI fabric is already here. And we believe that this fabric needs to be built on Ethernet.

AI Fabrics will be Ethernet-based

Ethernet offers advantages of economy and scale. As transformational technologies approach maturity, customers tend to move away from sole-source components towards multi-source components, to improve purchasing power. In the case of AI/ML infrastructure, this means a move away from single-source connectors, fabric, and GPUs. Moving towards multi-source components typically means using a broadly adopted standard, and it is difficult to find a more broadly deployed data center network technology than Ethernet. This increases the ability to find the right ROI with interoperability within component types, as well as between component types. Additionally, familiar and consistent technology for all data center fabrics produces efficiencies in training, procurement, and support. Lastly, Ethernet is well-placed to support the massive scale that the world’s largest AI network fabrics require, with a broad base of suppliers.

Every organization’s AI journey is unique and requires agile technology and the ability to scale on your terms. Whether you are retraining models, deploying model inference, or building your own large language model, you need infrastructure that keeps pace with your demands. Moving quickly means leveraging the skills that you have and deploying familiar technology. Ethernet is the most deployed infrastructure and has the broadest architectural support. You can find your choice of partners, suppliers, and architects to help your unique organizational goals.

AI/ML infrastructure will need to be set up for innovation that drives greater capabilities and performance. Ethernet has a proven history of disruptive innovation. In the approximately 20-year period following 1998, Ethernet standard speeds grew from 1Gbps to 400Gbps, with 800G options available in systems such as the Cisco 8111-EH and the Cisco Nexus 9232E switch. Ethernet’s versatility has been proven in data center networks through protocols such as iSCSI and RoCE; along with several innovations that reduce the need for separate types of network connectivity.

This impressive rate of growth, combined with flexibility, has made it possible to connect several generations of front-end and back-end components. Storage networks that once required specialized back-end fabrics can now connect resources with Ethernet through advances in IP based storage solutions. Similarly, resources requiring InfiniBand connectivity can be deployed with RoCE. This means that back-end networks for advanced compute or GPUs can now be consolidated with a single network fabric.

Cisco’s unique value for Ethernet fabrics

Cisco expands the value that you can achieve from Ethernet by advancing the economics, agility, choice and innovation even further. We make it possible to standardize switching and routing with a single silicon architecture — Cisco Silicon One. This gives you the option of reducing the complexity of your network architectures by managing one experience across the entire network, across all network functions. To maximize economic benefits, Cisco produces a full range of silicon, systems and optics in a way that transfers economies of scale to the end user. We build silicon with Customer Owned Tooling (COT), rather than using traditional ASIC models, or off shelf components, so that we can eliminate the premiums introduced when adding additional vendors to a value chain — and drive end to end innovations.

Cisco offers you the choice of procuring components, white boxes, or fully built systems in your AI Network fabric. Does your business model drive value by building systems and software on top of silicon components? Or do you want ease of deployment by having fully built systems arrive ready for use? Alternatively, you may be in the middle — needing a white box shipped to you with the option to customize software that is unique to your own platform. Whichever model you need, you can partner with Cisco.

Our development of silicon offers differentiated capabilities for Ethernet that truly unlock the power of AI Network fabrics. With one architecture, you can build three deployment models that offer increasing degrees of efficiency for precious system resources through multipathing. You may choose to use standard Ethernet for the widest interoperability solution, or an advanced scheduled Ethernet that halves the Job Completion Time (JCT) compared to standard Ethernet, or the middle ground with enhanced Ethernet taking the best from standard and scheduled Ethernet. Because of the innovation and power of Cisco Silicon One, you can confidently use the same network for high throughput, lossless training fabrics, and ultra-low latency inference fabrics.

Conclusion

Ethernet is ready for the next technology transformation. Whether you are fine-tuning your own models, running off-the-shelf models for inference, or building your own large language models, you can be assured that you have a fabric that meets your needs. Cisco will partner with you so that you can build your AI infrastructure in a way that matches your business model.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

Tech Trends and Predictions That Will Shape 2023

There are thousands of stories of invention, innovation, and discovery playing out across the technology industry at this exact moment. They are real but largely unseen until an event – a data breach, a cloud outage, a social movement – brings them to our attention.

The cloud and AI are no longer frontiers. The digital economy is the new tech green space. Nearly 8 out of every ten companies have experienced at least one cloud data breach. The transition to net-zero will be as disruptive as the industrial revolution.

Businesses need to separate the trends from the hype to capture competitive value. That’s what drives my annual ritual of making tech predictions for our next orbit around the sun. The future is beginning to take shape, and here are my predictions for tech trends coming in the year ahead.

Trend #1

An Accelerating Attack Surface Will Demand More and Future-Proof Security Innovations

In the billion-dollar race to protect, detect, and respond to an expanding attack surface, we will see risk management melding with business innovation capabilities. Compromised credentials, misconfigurations, and malicious and inadvertent misuse of resources have been at the center of security discussions.

We see the conversation broadening to applications and their dependencies, as well as shadow IT which goes far beyond mismanaged devices. Exposure for businesses could exponentially increase due to unvetted development projects and as organizations innovate to meet the demand for always-on, digital access to products and services.

◉ Application and API Security (CNAPP)

As modern cloud-native applications are becoming drivers of business, protecting the underlying application environment is critical. In 2023, developers will get more and more support from various tools that help speed up development cycles and allow them to better manage and secure distributed application architectures with an emphasis on delivering exceptional, secure digital experiences. We will also see continued movement toward tools that allow developers, site reliability engineers and security experts to collaborate more seamlessly on these outcomes.

◉ Quantum Cryptography

Transmitting keys poses a fundamental risk to security, as keys can be harvested and decrypted later. While Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is a potential stop-gap solution, it’s unclear if PQC schemes could be broken in the future. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is poised to be particularly impactful because it avoids distribution of the keys over an insecure channel. In 2023, in preparation for a post-quantum world, we will see a macrotrend emerge with adoption of QKD in datacenters, IoT, autonomous systems, and 6G.

Trend #2

Experience Economy Solutions Will Deliver Actionable Business Insights and Performance

The digital experience of customers and end users is now a primary driver of business success, and “experience” will emerge as a key new KPI in the months ahead. This will change the playing field dramatically.

To survive and thrive, companies need to be able to tie data insights derived from normal IT operations directly to business outcomes or risk being overtaken by more innovative competitors. Distributed tracing will soon become a currency of business performance, and every technology investment will need to be set against observability standards and practices – from cloud, to core, to edge.

◉ Full-Stack Observability Tied to Business Outcomes

A significant problem with monitoring has always been too much data with too little context and business correlation. The evolution of application monitoring toward full stack observability will increasingly provide a view relative to business context. When applied systematically, this can dramatically speed up response and optimize business operations in real time. In 2023, business context will become widely recognized as an integral part of monitoring and visibility outcomes.

◉ Traces and OpenTelemetry

In the year ahead, there will be a significant shift toward the open-source ability to grab information from multiple domains that were previously siloed and then develop modern applications that rely on distributed tracing embedded in the actual experience. OpenTelemetry will become the leading open-source standard behind how IT teams consume data to enable observability over the IT stack from the network and infrastructure to applications and the internet.

◉ Edge Native Application Development Frameworks

As edge devices become smarter, and process, manage, and drive insights closer to the user, there is growing need for edge-native application ecosystems. In 2023, we will see growing adoption of application development frameworks for the edge replete with new data management, compliance and security APIs coupled with novel AI/ML toolchains. This is the beginning of a world where the edge will be operated by horizontal software platforms – groups of small, generic computers scaled to deployment needs and consumed as a service.

Trend #3

The New Phase of Digital Transformation Will Be Led by Smart Connectivity and Networks

Resilient and agile supply chains can be a weak link or great competitive advantage. Predictive technologies move us away from using isolated data analysis to real-time decision making. Multicloud models are designed to be elastic and scalable to complex regulatory and service-level requirements.

Smart connectivity and networks are at the center of it all. They’re not just about optimizing resources – they can potentially help organizations anticipate and respond to global trade issues, workforce changes, and other unexpected events. Next year, 2023, will be a turning point in the deployment of game-changing networking and connectivity solutions on which future engineering marvels will be built.

◉ IoT/Supply Chain Resiliency

Enterprises and logistics providers will increasingly utilize IoT to bring greater visibility into their supply chains in 2023. IoT and other technologies will not only play a larger role in bringing better resiliency and efficiency into supply chains but can also help to improve IT/OT network management. As a result, organizations will start to reconfigure supply chains around predictive and prescriptive models including smart contracts and distributed ledgers. This is a major transition toward more sustainable business practices and circular supply chains.

◉ Predictive Networks

In the year ahead, the network will become more experience-centric with increasing capabilities to predict end user experience issues and provide problem-solving options. Companies will increasingly access predictive technologies in integrated, easy-to-use SaaS offers. This represents an important step toward a future where connectivity is powered by self-healing networks that can learn, predict, and plan. Predictive networks will be powered by the same predictive analytics that are gathered from myriad telemetry sources.

◉ Multicloud Realignment

As deglobalization and issues around data sovereignty accelerate, in the year ahead we will see a discernible shift in how companies leverage multicloud architectures. While 89% of enterprises are adopting a multicloud strategy for a variety of reasons (geopolitical, technical, provider diversification), the benefits also come with additional complexity in connecting, securing, and observing a multicloud environment. We will see continued movement toward new multicloud frameworks such as Sovereign Clouds, Local Zone Clouds, Zero-Carbon Clouds, and other novel cloud offerings. This will create a path toward more private and edge cloud applications and services ushering in a new multicloud operating model.

Trend #4

Responsible Innovation Will Move Fast Toward Building a Better, More Inclusive Future for All

Organizations are expected to put their good intentions into action – being purpose-driven is now a corporate requirement. Trust in our institutions and in companies has been tested over the last few years. This has brought us to an inflection point, and we are on the edge of generational change that will become evident through technology in 2023.

Ultimately, organizations will have to define a purpose that goes beyond profitability. While there have arguably been benefactors of the collapse of trust, the new scope of innovation is bending fast toward public good – with responsibility, sustainability, equity and inclusion as guiding themes.

◉ Hybrid Work Equity and Inclusion

Fostering a culture of accessibility-first thinking and embedding universal design principles with assistive technologies will emerge in 2023 as defining principles for development of collaboration products and features. This is the next phase of hybrid work where prioritizing equitable, inclusive experiences can help drive happier and more productive workforces. In 2023, we will also see the use of natural language processing (NLP) and AI/ML in new and innovative ways to deliver these solutions.

◉ Sustainability and the Journey to Net Zero

Net zero will drive common standards to meet sustainability goals with advancements in Power Over Ethernet (PoE) design and hardware to transform data centers for a more sustainable future. Networking and APIs will become more advanced within data center platform management to monitor, track, and change the use of energy. IT vendors and equipment partners will be more transparent in their reuse of hardware (circularity) to move the needle with the sustainability processes.

◉ Responsible AI

In 2023, the ability of rogue individuals and organizations to use artificial intelligence for unethical or socially destructive objectives will continue to grow. Industry, governments, academia, and NGOs will come together to begin hammering out a framework for governing AI in an ethical and responsible manner to mitigate potential harm. This framework will be based on principles such as transparency, fairness, accountability, privacy, security, and reliability and will be applied in contexts such as model creation and the selection of training data for AI systems.

As we look to the year ahead, we see a transformation in how applications, connectivity, and security are delivered and consumed. We see an immersive future that is “sustainable by default,” requiring new technologies built with new processes and in service to new business models. We see exceptional, reliable digital experiences as the gold standard of business success.

No matter how extensive or complex the advances, there’s no greater risk than standing still. The winners in 2023 will be those armed with the right tools – and the courage – to break down organizational silos across domains and disciplines and work together without limits to affect real and lasting change.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

Cisco stands on guard with our customers in Ukraine

Summary

◉ As the Russia-led invasion intensifies, Ukraine is being attacked by bombs and bytes. Cisco is working around the clock on a global, company-wide effort to protect our customers there and ensure that nothing goes dark.

◉ Cisco Talos has taken the extraordinary step of directly operating security products 24/7 for critical customers in Ukraine while over 500 employees across Cisco have come together to assist in collecting open-source (public) intelligence.

◉ In critical Ukrainian networks, we are taking advantage of advanced product features to create Ukraine-specific protections based on intelligence we have received.

◉ We are closely monitoring telemetry and aggressively convicting threats to protect both our Ukrainian and global customers.

◉ Customers with a mature security model should design their intelligence programs to drive changes in the organization’s defensive posture based on their findings.

◉ We have been successful in our work in Ukraine up to this point and will continue to support our partners there

Introduction

You may not have noticed, but Cisco has been a different place in the past month. The unjust invasion of Ukraine, and the sense of helplessness we all have felt, has created a motivated collection of Cisco employees working to make life just a little safer and easier in a part of the world many have never been. Teams have set aside their normal tasks and now watch over Ukranian networks, some have focused on caring for and protecting refugees and others have turned their obsession with social media into a critical component of our open-source intelligence work. The plans have been creative and, while many would have been unthinkable just a week ago, approvals have come fast and everyone has been stretching far beyond their normal workload.

In today’s situation in Ukraine, lives and livelihoods depend on the up-time of systems. Trains need to run, people need to buy gas and groceries, the government needs to get messages out to civilians for morale and for safety. Cybersecurity can be invisible behind all of this. In this blog we talk about a small part of Cisco’s response to this crisis. It is just one of many stories about how the people that make Cisco what it is have responded to an unprecedented crisis. There are lessons here for the defender as well, on what a world-class intelligence team can do when handed a network to defend and a capable set of security tools. But mostly this is a story about the people – from the cubicle to the C-Suite – who would do what little they could.

Calm Before the Storm

This effort has extended through all parts of Cisco and started with Talos – Cisco’s threat intelligence arm – more than a month ago, when we initiated an internal process to manage large-scale events. We began by increasing monitoring in Ukraine as the Russian troop buildup continued. Telemetry from Ukraine customers was closely scrutinized by intelligence analysts and our SecureX Hunting team. At that point, we were not working with customers directly, just quietly watching over them.

As it became clear that there was a real possibility that Russia would invade, our intelligence team began its quiet work. We do not talk about this a lot, but speaking broadly, any major event will have many small groups of researchers who have grown to trust each other cooperating and sharing information that is not publicly available. Most of these groups are informal, but one of the newer ones, the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC), which works out of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), has been public that it is serving as a platform for collaboration between public and private sector partners. Whether organized or informal, public or private, all these groups have been eager to work together to protect Ukraine and the world from Russian aggression online.

When both the website defacements and the first WhisperGate malware deployments occurred in mid-January, we were contacted by three Ukrainian government agencies we have worked with in the past. From that point on, we have continued to support the State Special Communications Service of Ukraine (SSSCIP), the Cyberpolice Department of the National Police of Ukraine and the National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity (NCCC at the NSDC of Ukraine). This support has largely taken the form of incident response, and we have turned the lessons learned in those responses into protections for all our customers.

Our investigations with our government partners in Ukraine led to additional protections for our customers globally as well as a blog post to inform the world of the threats we were aware of and our perspective on those threats. This is a common cycle that has been repeated both before and after the WhisperGate deployments: Ukraine experiences an event, we help investigate, we publish new protections based on what we learned and share our understanding of what happened.

A Growing Threat

As the invasion approached, there were other minor events, but none that had any appreciable impact. These were distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) or unsuccessful wiper attacks and an unconfirmed manipulation of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing. Our assessment is that the best of Russia’s cyber capability was focused elsewhere, likely in espionage activities trying to understand the global response to Russia’s invasion. Regardless of the reason, there were no major cyber incidents against Ukraine in the days leading up to the invasion.

Once the invasion began, things moved very quickly. The amount of information to be processed about what was happening in Ukraine exploded. Talos would like to thank the over 500 Cisco employees from a variety of backgrounds and with many different skillsets who have joined a space dedicated to sharing open-source intelligence about Ukraine to ensure that the intelligence team didn’t miss anything.

Early on, we deployed Secure Endpoint in some new environments under a demo license that was set to expire. When we went to the business to extend it, the decision was made to extend all security licenses for all Cisco customers in Ukraine. During this chaotic period, no customer would lose protection because they were dealing with more important matters than license renewals.

Defending Critical Networks

Additionally, we extended a new offer to critical organizations in Ukraine: Talos would monitor their Secure Endpoint configurations, modify them based on our intelligence and aggressively hunt in their environments for threats at no cost. For each organization that accepted this offer, we assigned a set of engineers to manage the protections and configurations and two hunters from Talos to work with that specific data set.

One of our frequent recommendations to mature organizations is to have an intelligence operation that drives material protections into their defensive tools. Here is an example of why we make this recommendation: In reviewing several pieces of malware, we found multiple command and control (C2) servers in a certain network. Typically, we would block those IPs and move on. But within the context of a nation under an existential threat, for Secure Endpoint installations we control we blocked the entire network so that if additional C2s opened, they were already blocked. This isn’t appropriate globally – we have no idea what the connectivity needs are for all our customers – but when tasked only with making decisions for Ukranian critical infrastructure, it’s an easy call.

Another example is the case of HermeticWiper. As part of its activity, the malware drops one of several drivers to support its wiper actions. In Ukraine, for networks we’re actively protecting, we chose to block all of these drivers. Again, globally, we can’t do that – some of our customers may well be using the software that those drivers were stolen from. But when we are looking only from Ukraine’s perspective, we can check the network quickly to confirm those hashes aren’t in use and block them.

In both cases, we are building our defense in depth. Ideally, we block HermeticWiper or a variant when it drops – but if we don’t, then the drivers are blocked. Hopefully, we block any trojan that uses the network we described above when it is dropped by a loader, but if we don’t, then the C2 communications themselves will be blocked. We are always looking for ways to layer defenses so if the adversary out-maneuvers us in one area, we have protections waiting for them.

So far, this activity has been successful in protecting our customers, including blocking what we assess to be wiper attacks very early in the attack chain. The work of our intelligence group – and let me be clear that this includes our cooperation with organizations and individuals outside of Cisco – has allowed us to have insight into several different attack chains. While we can’t publish this information because of information-sharing restrictions (mainly to protect operational security), we can leverage that information in specific networks, blocking certain things or writing advanced content signatures that look for certain patterns. This intelligence work has led directly to successful defense in Ukraine. For that, we thank all the unnamed partners – corporations and individuals – who have quietly worked with us.

Guidance for Customers

Now is not the time to tell every story, but we shared these examples because of the risk that this conflict will extend beyond the borders of Ukraine. Organizations globally should look at their intelligence teams and work to ensure they are directly driving the defensive posture of the organization. Organizations should consider how their tolerance for false positives has changed given the current threat environment and allow their teams to move more aggressively if possible.

The world right now is more dangerous than it has been in decades, and organizations need to be creative in how they restructure their defenses. We often say that in the end, humans are the most critical part of your defense. This is the kind of threat we have in mind when we make that statement.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading

Cisco IT accelerates its transformation with CX Cloud

As any CIO with a digital transformation agenda can attest, success relies upon establishing clearly defined objectives for each step of the journey – with visibility into the entire IT infrastructure. Also critical is the ability to receive the right information at the right time to help achieve desired outcomes faster. This was especially true during the pandemic when, for example, Cisco enabled – within 10 days – 140,000 employees and partners to work from home.

In Cisco IT, we’re meeting these goals with CX Cloud – a one-stop destination that combines Cisco expertise and best practices with telemetry, AI-/ML-driven insights, use cases, and contextual learning. This cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) portal is smoothing the bumps in our digital journey by removing complexity, filling skills gaps, and ultimately accelerating technology adoption.

It accomplishes this by providing:

◉ Full visibility into all of our network assets and contracts

◉ Automated risk detection and mitigation

◉ Actionable data and insights

◉ Ready access to targeted learning resources and expertise, and much more

Let’s take a closer look at how we’re leveraging these and other CX Cloud capabilities to benefit our business.

‘Single source of truth’ with 360-degree insights

CX Cloud provides a secure, single source of truth that enables full visibility of our 100,000-plus IT assets (see Figure 1). CX Cloud’s telemetry ensures we always have the latest information pertaining to purchased and connected assets, security advisories, support cases, and individual success tracks.

Because we now have all of our asset information and security advisories in one place, our engineers no longer need to build reports manually or reconcile across platforms. As a result, they expect to boost their efficiency and improve their operational scale by 50 to 60 percent, allowing them to spend more time on innovation. The bottom line: We’re accomplishing much more with the same number of people.

CX Cloud also lets us keep track of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure across multiple deployments — with tools to search, filter, and see a 360-degree view of an asset’s hardware and software details. We can access contract and coverage details with key support milestones, while also receiving on-demand diagnostic scans and updated advisories.

Figure 1. CX Cloud provides a “single plane of glass” for viewing 100,000+ Cisco IT assets.

Timely expertise with quick resolution and enhanced security

CX Cloud leverages machine learning to analyze our network and generate a prioritized listing of security advisories (alerts), field notices, and priority bugs (see Figure 2). Each security advisory shows the vulnerabilities, the number of affected assets, IP addresses, and actionable data – ultimately helping us drive faster resolution and enhanced security.

Before we had this tool, our engineers would spend as many as three hours analyzing each potentially impacted device. CX Cloud is dramatically reducing the majority of the time it takes to gather the information from multiple sources, giving our engineers opportunities to focus on higher-value activities.

Figure 2. CX Cloud’s advisories help to eliminate security vulnerabilities

With CX Cloud, we can access use-case-guided expertise and lifecycle resources to help us deploy, manage, and optimize our technology while reducing risks. We can leverage a guided adoption journey to help us deploy and optimize specific use cases, with expert advice tailored to our specific progress (see Figure 3).

CX Cloud enables us to gauge our deployment progress using a combination of telemetry insights and manual actions. We can engage with Cisco and partner expert resources such as best-practices webinars and 1-to-1 coaching. We also enjoy access to extensive eLearning catalog and remote practice labs (Level 2), as well as product documentation and communities.

We’ve found the lifecycle section of CX Cloud to be especially useful when we onboard new people. This feature helps keep us moving forward in our transformation journey, without having to backtrack.

Figure 3. CX Cloud’s lifecycle resources provide expert advice, when and where it’s needed

Speedy resolution and simplified case management

With CX Cloud, we can see all open support cases in a handy list view (provided that each viewer on our team is eligible to review those cases). This easy access is available regardless of whether a viewer is the case owner or not. This built-in support is akin to always having a high-touch operations manager at our fingertips, accelerating collaboration and issue resolution.

Figure 4. CX Cloud makes case management easy

Minimize risks with tailored recommendations and insights

CX Cloud delivers deep intelligence and insights into our network and security posture, allowing us to reduce our operational risk. We can view targeted insights and suggestions that help us optimize our business and solve problems before they happen.

For our Catalyst 9500 switches, we receive software recommendations tailored to our assets and configuration – by risk profile. Combined with Cisco DNA Center software image management (SWIM), this helps us automate software upgrades and ensure all the assets are on the same Golden Image.  Our engineering leaders can also see potential crash risks based on known contributing factors, along with tailored recommendations to minimize risks. With Integrated Secure Operations, we also have visibility into license consumption information and features used.

CX Cloud even lets us quickly identify devices with regulatory compliance (e.g., HIPAA, PCI) violations and view recommended fixes.

Figure 5. CX Cloud’s deep insights help solve problems – before they happen

Ultimately, CX Cloud’s comprehensive suite of use-case-driven solutions work together to help us drive business value across architectures. CX Cloud digitally connects us to the right expertise at the right time, with the right level of engagement to achieve our goals – faster.

Source: cisco.com

Continue reading