Secure Your Mobile Connections with New IP Blocking Feature

When downloading an application from the App Store, do you actually check the logistics of it? For example, how is it connecting to the internet? Or an even more relatable scenario: that game you were playing while waiting in line paused to present an advertisement, was it triggered by an IP address or a DNS request? The majority of times, users don’t check or understand those nitty gritty details. We simply see something we like, click, and begin launching the app onto our devices.

However, what if that application is connecting to a malicious IP address? And in a case that your employee is using a corporate-owned iOS device and downloads that app; this presents a security gap.

Cover All Your Bases: IP Addresses and DNS Requests

The Umbrella extension within Cisco Security Connector serves as a first line of defense against threats by protecting users from malicious domains. Umbrella delivers both DNS-layer encryption and enforcement on top of an intelligent proxy that provides URL and file inspection for risky domains. Therefore, when your employee attempts to make any connections to the internet, Cisco Security Connector is there to protect your business against suspicious app and user-initiated network requests.

But applications can also connect to malicious IP addresses. To counter that, Cisco Security Connector is continuing to innovate with a newly added IP Blocking feature as a part of Clarity. This IP Blocking feature now provides complete network protection for your corporate-owned iOS devices. With just a few clicks, adminscan simply add a suspicious IP address to their blacklist and regulate that list accordingly; giving more control to businesses. Now, whether it’s a direct IP connection or DNS request, Cisco Security Connector can secure your users end-to-end.

Image: iOS Events List

Cisco Security Connector

Cisco Security Connector allows businesses to gain deep visibility and control across all devices. With the ability to integrate with existing MDM/EMM such as Cisco Meraki Systems Manager, VMware AirWatch Cloud EMM, and MobileIron on-premises EMM, Cisco Security Connector ensures ease of deployment as well as adaptability to a business’s current environment.

With similar Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) capabilities extended to iOS devices, users can now gain insight into all application and device behaviors on all devices. Though most importantly, as part of the AMP console, admins can now have one single location to manage all their endpoints.

Unfortunately, we can’t control our employee’s actions on our network, but what we can control are the results of it. So, cover all your bases with Cisco Security Connector.

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Network Management: Don’t React – Act

The future will bring a lot of changes for telecoms, internet and cable service providers: more data, more devices and more services. Cisco’s research predicts that by 2021, annual global IP traffic will reach 3.3 zettabytes (that’s 3.3 trillion gigabytes).

There are two ways things can go for service providers. They can buckle under the pressure. Or they can find new operational approaches, that help them grow their business by creating the agile, powerful services their customers need.

Proactive Control with Cisco Crosswork

For service providers who want to maintain their competitive edge, the key will be automation: programming large, complex workflows so they can take care of themselves. Automation improves the way your network functions by reducing human error, inconsistencies, and service disruption. It allows you to stay on top of operations, with time to focus on what really matters.

Automation isn’t simple. But our engineers have spent a long time working out how it can best be supported. The result is Cisco Crosswork, a new framework for approaching network operations. With its three key pillars – mass awareness, augmented intelligence, and proactive control – it enables service providers to work with unprecedented precision and efficiency.

Cisco Crosswork gathers comprehensive data and then runs this through a sophisticated analysis, enabling actionable insights. At its heart is the Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), which uses advanced data models for intent-based networking, and is proven to work across network elements from different vendors.

This creates many benefits for service providers. It helps them protect themselves against ever-evolving security threats, maintain stringent service level agreements, and discover valuable new revenue streams.

Transforming Level 3’s* Network

One service provider that has adapted to meet new customer demands is Level 3 (*now part of CenturyLink). Level 3 realised that their customers increasingly expected instantly available services with less complexity and less overhead – and that included capacities like integrating third-party cloud services.

Powered by the Cisco NSO, the business put together a powerful set of programmable wide area networks that enabled it to automate a wide range of services in markets around the world.

This meant that Level 3 could design and deliver services more quickly, using a single modelling language and a single data store. The company was able to automate tens of thousands of tasks monthly, offer bandwidth scalability of up to 300%, and enable the management of 5,000 network devices around the world. Services could be adapted within minutes or even seconds while running, with no disruptions.

Innovation Through Automation

Results like these explain why many service providers are considering automating their networks as they look to ensure they are capable of meeting new challenges. Intelligent, end-to-end automation offers them a transformed landscape. Instead of constantly trying to play catch-up with events, they can make more informed decisions, using information about the service, the end user, and all of the multi-vendor devices in their service chain.

We want to help service providers bring about a shift in their approach to running networks. To move away from managing functions in separate silos, towards a world of intelligent, holistic operations. Forward-looking service providers understand that if they can transform their network in this way, they will boost their innovation and effectiveness for years to come.

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Scaling to PB within Minutes – The Road to Full Automation for Scale-Out Storage with Cisco UCS

Building Scale-Out Storage solutions can be now fully automated to reduce the overall amount of work and to easily scale software-defined storage environments within minutes. Partners and customers can begin to leverage this capability using Ansible modules and playbooks for UCS Manager.

I have to admit that working in a Business Unit can be sometimes very challenging and fast and then there is no time to reflect and see the big picture, no matter which company you are working for. But sometimes projects are crystal clear, you can’t wait to see the result. One of those projects is Automation for scale-out storage.

Big Picture

In the 1990’s, where I started working in the storage industry, we handled GB of data and managed it by doing a lot of manual steps. Initial configuration and installation took a long time, sometimes days. In the 2000’s, storage arrays and disks got larger and we handled then TB of data but with the same problems as in the 1990’s. Now in the 2010’s the situation hasn’t changed that much. We’re now talking about PB of data, even EB but the initial work in the beginning is still the same and challenging.

There are exceptions but as soon as you come to a project where you need multi-PB, you run into an issue of scaling your work of configuration and installation.

Problem #1:

People might think of traditional storage systems solving their problem but they are limited in their ability to easily and cost-effectively scale to support large amounts of unstructured data. With now about 80 percent of data being unstructured, x86 servers are proving to be more cost effective, providing storage that can be expanded as easily as your data grows. Software-defined storage is a scalable and cost-effective approach for handling large amounts of data. Sounds good?

Problem #2

When scale-out storage grows, it can get complex in configuring and installing. This is one of the major obstacles when it comes to enterprise-readiness for software-defined storage. Touching each server and configuring network ports, disk for storage, or even the install media can take a long time and is mostly error-prone. And it’s a difference to prepare 5 servers or 50 servers.

Solution

But there are two ways out of the dilemma that can help a lot and reduce the overall amount of work to a minimum. Even large environments don’t take longer than smaller environments when it comes to the configuration and installation of the scale-out storage hardware.

◈ Cisco UCS Manager: Creating policies and profiles and associating them to servers simplifies scale-out storage solutions a lot. There is no need to repeat specific configurations for each server. Just assign the previously created Service Profile and you’re done. Cisco is doing it now for almost 9 years very successful.

◈ UCS Manager Ansible Modules: Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to create everything via the UCS Manager GUI and you want to further simplify the whole process for configuring and installing servers. Then Ansible for UCS Manager is the right way to move forward. You run a complete Ansible Playbook with all variables you need and within less than 2 minutes your UCS Manager Service Profiles get associated.

There are many ways to do it but we’ve seen a very good adoption of using Ansible for automation in data centers.

We have now published all Ansible Modules for UCS Manager to configure a complete scale-out storage solution. A couple of options for you to run a scale-out storage Ansible Playbook for UCS Manager:

◈ Ansible Role: You can use the Ansible Role

◈ Playbook:You could either use a hardcoded playbook or a playbook with variables and a JSON file.

I did a quick test of configuring and installing 2 x S3260 Dual Node Chassis. You could use much more hardware – the time would be around the same as the process of association works in parallel. Take a look at the 2 minute video.

That gives us now a couple of advantages:

◈ As much as I like the simplicity of UCS Manager GUI – when it comes to scaling and automation then Ansible for UCS Manager can do it in a much shorter time.

◈ You can run the playbooks as often as you want, even if you only want to change a small thing like MTU size for the storage network.

◈ The story gets even better when you integrate the northbound Cisco Nexus switches in Ansible.

Outlook:

The project won’t stop here. Our next steps for scale-out storage automation are:

◈ The full story obviously comes with the integration of scale-out storage vendors. Stay tuned for the first end-to-end Ansible full automation in the industry, from network to compute to storage to software.

◈ The big picture for the Cisco UCS team is certainly Cisco Intersight. Mid-term, we want to integrate the scale-out automation into Cisco Intersight to make it easy for customers and partners to use from a central user interface.

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The Factory: A Living Organism for Wireless and Mobility

We live in a wireless world. We almost never plug our computers into a network. Our mobile phones and tablets provide constant connectivity. Some of us wear health tracking devices like Apple Watches, Fitbits, and Garmins. These devices count our steps, measure our heart rates, and log the number of hours we sleep. In doing so, health tracking devices create incredible volumes of data we use to monitor our personal health and improve the quality of our lives. When we don’t feel well, we can look back at hours slept and pulse rate to understand the cause and effect of our bodies’ inputs and outputs.

In many ways, our bodies are like machines requiring inputs like food for fueling, sleep for recovery, and exercise for maintaining optimal performance. When we take care of our bodies, we are rewarded with optimal outputs including increased awareness and productivity.

The same is true for machines on the factory floor. They require electricity for fuel and raw materials to manufacture products. Historically, machinists and engineers were the experts in operating their tooling. They learned through years of experience. Over time, sensors connected to the equipment and computers collected data used to monitor and improve visibility into operating characteristics. Sensors measure equipment performance like vibration, current draw, and lubricant temperatures assisted equipment operators in gaining maximum productivity from their equipment.

Initially many of these sensors and computers were wired and tethered. Over time, sensors became wireless and hard-wired computers morphed into wireless laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. And with wireless becoming pervasive, manufacturers gained considerable flexibility to monitor and manage the health of their factory equipment.

The shift to mobility

Previously, we described networks as being wireless. Over-time, we shifted from wireless to mobile and mobility. With mobility, we can drive the business benefits associated with the wireless features.

Building a mobile manufacturing network creates many challenges. The fundamental challenge is to ensure the wireless capabilities are built on a solid foundation. The foundation requires robust security and a common network infrastructure. Historically, the factory network operated independently of the enterprise network. However, today, it’s possible to secure and converge both the factory and enterprise networks with Cisco’s standard platform.

Once the foundation has been established, the mobile environment must be configured for the three foundational use cases.  These use cases enable data, communications, and video capabilities.

Although it sounds obvious, data drives everything.  Sensors enable access to data.  The simplest type of IoT sensors- vibration, current, particle, temperature, humidity, etc. connects wirelessly. These sensors then communicate with our networks where we secure, move, and reduce data we want to persist or keep, as well as discard the data when it’s perishable.

When we move to communication, the most tangible and relatable mobility use case, we typically think about providing workers with mobile devices like tablets and phones. Mobile communications enable workforces to do their jobs at the place of work. Wi-Fi enabled voice, makes it possible to replace licensed use of hand-held paid spectrum and cellular fees by shifting to Wi-Fi enabled communicators.

Of course, with Wi-Fi mobile communicators, everyone on the factory floor gains immediate access to factory floor personnel as well as receive real-time notifications, pages, and safety alert messages.

Wireless video has become part of our daily lives, typically through applications like Cisco WebEx, Facetime, and many others. On the shop floor or in a warehouse, the video capabilities take communications to the next level. Video on the shop floor, whether enabled by a mobile phone or tablet, immediately takes away the mystery of trying to imagine what is happening or what has happened.

The business benefits of mobility

Because every dollar spent in manufacturing is tied to a return on investment, it’s crucial to map mobility capabilities to business needs and benefits.

Ultimately, factory wireless solutions enable essential business benefits like less downtime, fewer line stoppages, improved worker efficiency, increased cycle time and higher OEE, which means better productivity, availability, and quality.

The Cisco Factory wireless platform includes our products, services, partners and solution implementation plans. Together, all of these components provide what’s necessary for customers to deploy and scale their wireless capabilities.

A manufacturing plant is like a living organism – requiring care and feeding in all areas. Every organism must be part of a connected ecosystem, sensing and sharing information across all parts to ensure not just survival, but growth as well.

While we wouldn’t attach a Fitbit to a piece of manufacturing equipment, we will deploy wireless and mobility capabilities in our factories to monitor and connect our equipment, resulting in operational benefits with improved cost, quality, and delivery.

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5 Things You Need to Know about Webex Meetings

Webex has come a long way. We recently unpacked a lot of great innovation in the new meetings experience. The great thing about Webex Meetings is that it’s a full video and content-sharing cloud solution that you can join via desktop, mobile, browser, and video devices. Webex Meetings is more powerful than ever before. Bring meetings to the way you work, not the other way around.

We recently announced a whole new level of collaboration, bringing meetings and team collaboration together on a single platform. Now, everyone who uses Webex Meetings also has access to Cisco Webex Teams (formerly Cisco Spark), helping everyone collaborate, even after the meeting ends.

We’ve integrated the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning technologies into the meetings experience to keep participants engaged. Webex Meetings can automatically detect background noise to remove distractions. The video delivers optimal views of people and content. Core functionality like start/join a meeting, attendee rosters, and more are at your fingertips no matter how you join.

Simple to join on any platform

I appreciate being able to join a scheduled meeting simply by pressing the big green button on my desktop, mobile device, or Cisco video device. Cisco is the only vendor to offer a single, consistent one-button join across devices and apps. We’ve simplified things. You don’t have to figure out how to join — the green join button comes to you.

Webex has the most comprehensive, browser-based meeting experience on the market today. If you are invited to a Webex meeting, all you need to do is click the big green button in the invitation and it takes you right in. This is especially important for first-time users. There’s nothing to install, plug in, or download to join from Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari browsers. And joining from a browser doesn’t mean you have to compromise on features. Hosts and participants get the rich video and application screen-sharing of the desktop version. You have full control and can see everyone participating.

Plays well with others

We’ve also made sure that Webex works with your preferred collaboration tools. Webex not only works across our own hardware and software but also with third-party solutions. You can join or a start a meeting from Webex or do it from  Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace by Facebook. It also works with calendars like Google Calendar. Support for Microsoft Office 365 is right around the corner. These integrations mean you do less switching between apps and have a more efficient workflow. You get the trusted, seamless, and reliable Webex features in the environment that you choose.

The best mobile meeting experience

Several enhancements make it easier be more productive and engaged – even on the road. For a long time, it was hard to see the other people in a meeting if you joined from a mobile device. Likewise, functionality like content sharing and scheduling weren’t options. We’ve turned the experience around and used the latest technologies to make significant improvements that help mobile users get an equal seat at the meeting table.

We’ve optimized the interface for better viewing. Pinch-and-zoom technology makes it easier to see who’s in the meeting and what they’re sharing. You’ll get native screen sharing and the easiest scheduling on the market. If you are an Apple user, you can now use voice commands, Touch ID, and Face ID.

Unparalleled speed and bandwidth

All Webex products use the Cisco network backbone, regardless of how attendees join. It’s a trusted, worldwide IP network built over the last 10 years with interconnects around the world. No other company can do this. Webex connects with both public cloud providers and our own data centers. Regardless of how you join, traffic hops off the Internet as soon as possible and enters the Webex backbone, minimizing latency, bandwidth, jitter, and packet-loss issues that happen so often on the public Web.

Grows with your business needs

Several options for using Webex let you mix and match between services as your business evolves. In addition to a free trial, there are several Webex Meetings subscription models for individuals, teams, departments, and, of course, companies. The offers are competitively priced and flexible so that you can choose a buying model based on your current requirements. Market-leading, secure, innovative Webex Meetings, plus team collaboration, unlimited VoIP, global PSTN audio services, technical support, customer success, and even analytics are all included so you always get the best features and services Webex has to offer.

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BMC Remedy ITSM – Cisco ACI joint solution delivers robust and agile IT operations

Introduction

As companies strive to become digital enterprises, they need to make the best use of their existing assets and infrastructure, while introducing new technology and tools that drive the business forward. ITSM is one of the key digital accelerators that deliver improved performance, higher availability, and reduced risk, all while optimizing IT costs. Modern IT operations have to function in a continuous dev-ops model, manage numerous tools, and make sense of all the noise in an environment that lack any decipherable data and analytics to deliver modern applications that have a complex web of interdependencies across a distributed environment.

At Cisco, we observed the growing customer interest in ITSM/ITOM space since the announcement of ACI and quickly forged relationships with leading ITSM vendors like ServiceNow, Cherwell and brought to market joint solutions to automate and streamline incident management, health monitoring use-cases while simultaneously building a growing pipeline of customer deployments.

Today, we are proud to add BMC Remedy solution for Cisco ACI to this significant ITSM technology partner ecosystem portfolio. This blog captures the essence of the solution and how it enables intuitive service management for the digital enterprise, on-premises or in the cloud.

Solution overview

BMC Remedy ITSM suite provides out of box ITIL service support functionality, from architecture to integration and implementation to support. BMC Remedy ITSM has fast established itself as one of the market leaders addressing IT transparency, flexible and agile services, and effective collaboration and reporting, aided by a single, central shared data model. Cisco ACI, an SDN based networking architecture, enhances business agility, reduces TCO, automates IT tasks, and accelerates data center application deployments.

Organizations are increasingly looking to cut costs and find ways to optimize their IT investments. Tight integration of the ITSM layers with underlying IT infrastructure helps organizations to not only optimize their IT infrastructure but also helps them to streamline day to day IT operations.

BMC Remedy ITSM solution for Cisco ACI is a fully-automated policy-based enterprise service management solution that provides single console visibility into your data center and delivers business-aware IT operations.

Cisco ACI’s open API seamlessly integrates with BMC Remedy’s REST API and forms the foundation for the integration. The key solution component is the BMC ITSM App for Cisco ACI.  The APIC facing interface of the App pulls necessary information from the APIC object database and passes it to BMC instance.

Figure: Architecture and Use Cases of BMC Remedy ITSM – ACI solution

Major use cases covered as part of the ACI-BMC Remedy joint solution include CMDB enrichment, health and fault monitoring, and proactive incident management. With these ACI-BMC ITSM solution use cases, customers get unprecedented automation, visibility, and efficiency in their IT service management.

The solution brings a lot of value to the customer, including:

Single console visibility: The solution keeps track of the entire ACI fabric and passes that information periodically to BMC Remedy CMDB thus providing an accurate and up to date picture of the underlying infrastructure. This in-depth visibility allows admins to make more informed decisions and manage the data center infrastructure efficiently.

Healthy Data Center: Faults and dip in health scores in the ACI fabric triggers automatic ticketing workflows in BMC Remedy and further provides admins with the all the relevant information needed for troubleshooting. With all the workflows happening in near real-time, IT teams can quickly identify the root-cause and remedial solutions leading to a drastically reduced MTTR.

Proactive Incident Management: With Cisco ACI keeping an up-to-date view of service-aware infrastructure and informing BMC Remedy ITSM suite about any disruptions and outages, IT operations teams respond more proactively to incidents. Further, the user can use BMC Remedy Problem management workflows and record recurring problems and associated solutions in the Known Error DB (KEDB) building a rich repository of past incidents and actions thus creating a proactive incident management system.

As customer adoption of ACI-BMC Remedy ITSM suite becomes widespread, we will continue to explore newer use-cases to address IT operational pain-points.

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Cisco Stealthwatch and DNA Center bridge the SecOps – NetOps divide

By sheer necessity, there is an increasingly interdependent role between NetOps and SecOps in many enterprises. Cisco has been monitoring three trends:

1. Networks are connecting ever more devices, locations and users. The complexity of managing them is creating openings for new threats.

2. As advanced threats multiply, organizations need to control the cost of containment by automating and extending visibility across different functions.

3. And as threats become more advanced, they are becoming an inhibitor to network assurance. For example, instead of breaking in, attackers simply hide in encrypted traffic to gain access to the network.

In short, SecOps needs immediate access to security telemetry to get visibility from all the new endpoints being added to the network, and NetOps needs to know about threats that could impact uptime, particularly encrypted threats.

These are some of the challenges that led to the integration of Cisco DNA Center and Cisco Stealthwatch.

Better IT workflow for faster threat resolution

Cisco Stealthwatch extends threat detection and containment to the DNA Center, the one-stop NetOps management for distributed enterprises.  DNA Center now automates enabling threat telemetry, including enhanced telemetry from encrypted traffic (Encrypted Traffic Analytics or ETA), to be sent to Stealthwatch. The critical threats from Stealthwatch, in turn, can now be monitored from the DNA Center, which provides a platform for custom resolution services such as opening a ticket for automated threat containment.

In the past, these workflows have never been integrated seamlessly. But now we have the ability to streamline them with the new, open DNA Center Platform. Highlighting the power of the DNA Center open platform approach, combined with the expertise of Cisco Advanced Services engineers – the application development and integration required for this workflow was completed in just 3 weeks

Step 0

Automatically find and turn-on threat telemetry from your network devices, including Encrypted Traffic Analytics. Today, customers can take weeks to months to identify and turn on necessary telemetry for security visibility.  We can do it in minutes.

Step 1

Stealthwatch applies advanced security analytics in the form of behavioral modeling, machine learning and global threat intelligence to pinpoint critical threats with high confidence, including where they are originating from. This info now appears in the 360 dashboard for every client on the network.

Step 2

DNA Center instantly communicates with the ITSM (IT Service Management) to generate a ticket related to this incident. And also communicates the incident to customer-specific Security Operations app (developed by Cisco Advanced Services) used by SecOps team to contain the threat.

Step 3

SecOps informs DNA Center to quarantine the user using the Security Operations App, and DNA Center isolates the user.

Step 4

DNA Center confirms containment and informs  SecOps that the user has been quarantined.

Step 5

SecOps uses the Security Operations app to update the ticket in the ITSM.

This workflow can be simpler or more complex depending on the type of threat, but the key is that it is seamless and intuitive between NetOps and SecOps.

Security is everyone’s problem now and containing threats quickly while maintaining network performance requires cooperation, automation, and visibility across IT, Network and Security Operations.

If you are attending Cisco Live Orlando this week, come and see the solution in action at the DNA Center Platform demo stand in the World of Solutions!

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