Bringing Reality to the Cognitive Contact Center

Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Analytics, and Collaboration Create Cognitive Experiences in the Contact Center

Every interaction between your contact center agents and your customers is a reflection of your brand – positive, negative, or neutral. According to a study by PwC, in the U.S. one bad experience alone will drive 32% of your customers away – even if they love your brand. That figure increases in Latin America to 49%.

We all want our customers to love our brand. So how do we avoid those bad experiences? How do we establish customer relationships and then grow and nurture them to make the next situation a better one – a more proactive, thoughtful, intelligent, and authentic one.

Our answer is by creating cognitive customer and agent experiences. This week at Cisco Live, my team and I will be spending time with our customers and partners demonstrating our solutions, discussing our vision, and sharing our ideas on what it means to have a cognitive and collaborative contact center.

Making it Cognitive

Cognition is what allows us to function as humans. Through cognition we’re able to better understand each other along with all the complexities of communication, evaluate and make judgments, reason our way through problems, and formulate appreciation. Our vision at Cisco is to change the world’s customer and agent experiences – and bringing cognition to those experiences is one of the best ways in which we can help you do that.

Empowering Your Agents

Three weeks ago I shared my view on the myths surrounding artificial intelligence’s role in the contact center. One misconception about AI is that it will replace people or eliminate jobs altogether. AI will likely have a greater role in augmenting, vs. replacing live agent assistance.

Your agents are the front line of your business and their daily interactions with your customers are essential to building meaningful and healthy long-term relationships. As with any relationship, your agents must demonstrate interest, understanding and empathy every time they interact with customers. They’re under pressure to turn potentially bad customer experiences into great ones. So investing in your agents makes good business sense. Companies are spending 1 trillion dollars worldwide a year, trying to understand and shape the journeys of their customers. However, what’s astounding is that companies spend 1000 times less on understanding their employees. Enabling artificial intelligence to work hand-in-hand with your agents is the best combination to helping them succeed.

Let’s take a look at a medical insurance company. Customers interact mostly through the company’s web portal. When the customer engages via chat, the chat interaction is handled by a Bot which is used to provide self-service and qualify the request. When the Bot recognizes a word or phrase indicating the need for a human agent, the Bot escalates the chat to a team of agents in a team collaboration workspace. The first agent to respond “yes” gets connected to the customer chat by the Bot. The agents don’t have any medical experience; they’re not doctors. But they have enough training and skill to handle first line questions. During the chat, AI is listening, and automatically displaying for the agent relevant articles and other pertinent information such as medical term definitions in real-time. However, during the chat, the agent needs expert advice from a medical professional. Without leaving their agent experience, the agent can easily find and reach a trained professional and collaborate about the customer request, while still chatting with the customer. The agent is able to answer the customer’s question on the first contact, and the customer leaves delighted from their experience.

This is a perfect example of agent augmentation – not replacement. Background intelligence is working hand-in-hand to augment the agent’s ability to serve their customer well. The Bot offloaded the initial simple task from the agent. Then the agent received AI assistance and human assistance in order to complete the engagement with the customer.

This powerful combination of AI, APIs, data analytics, contact center, and collaboration technology is the unique value Cisco brings to our customers.

A Compelling Portfolio

One more thing. I’m excited to announce that we’ll be joining the industry-recognized Webex family by renaming our cloud-based Customer Journey Platform solution to Webex Contact Center. Webex is our native cloud collaboration brand worldwide known for its reliability, scalability, security, and innovation – exactly the characteristics of our Webex Contact Center solution. This unique portfolio provides our customers a complete unified collaboration suite with calling, messaging, meetings, team collaboration, devices, and now contact center.

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Cisco Webex – Building and Maintaining Trust with Collaboration Administrators

Collaboration Administrators have an unenviable job. Not only do they have to cater to demanding end users who want the best experience, they also have to deal with other functions in a typical IT organization – such as – legal, security and compliance. Often, requirements from those functions are at odds with providing the best user experience. Making these trade-offs is very hard. Our goal is to make sure collaboration administrators do not have to make those trade-offs.

What makes Collaboration SaaS trustworthy

For a Collaboration SaaS platform to garner trust – it needs to be reliable, high performing, secure and compliant with laws and regulations. Further, the platform must provide simple and efficient administration, rich business insight and powerful troubleshooting tools. Administrators need to consider what the tools are being used for and how they can use it securely and within boundaries.

Why Admins Trust Webex

Reliability and Performance

At the core of trust is reliability and performance. Collaboration services are the lifeline of organizations. When these services are not available – work stops! And even when these services are available, if the quality of audio and video experience is poor, it hurts user productivity. At Webex – we understand that. Providing a highly reliable service with high quality is and will continue to be the highest priority. We make sure to make reliability and performance a focus and its no wonder why Webex products are the best choice for online collaboration. Stay tuned for more details in the upcoming blog series.

Security and Compliance

Collaboration services are used for sensitive communications – whether via Messaging or Meetings or Calling. Webex has industry-leading security features to provide IT admins peace of mind in protecting Enterprise data and best end-user experience to drive adoption and productivity.

Keeping customer data safe and confidential even while it’s in our cloud in a top priority. In order to deliver on this promise to customers, Webex Teams is the only cloud service that offers end to end encryption (using a customer-owned) key with the option for enterprises to manage their own keys on their own premises. Teams end to end encryption is not just encryption in transit or at rest but keeps data encrypted even in-use e.g. when users search for content. Every message that is sent is encrypted on the client so that any intermediary or even Webex cloud engineers cannot see clear customer content. This is delivered without compromising end user experience while also giving legal and compliance teams eDiscovery and Legal Hold capabilities.

Security You Can Trust

Cisco Webex – Building and Maintaining Trust with Collaboration Administrators
Webex Meetings also has industry leading security features as detailed here. What is important to note —Webex Meetings encrypts media by default —unlike some of our competitors. With other features such as SAML 2.0 Single Sign-On support, broad support for all Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB), Role Based Access Control, Admin audit logs to mention a few —Cisco Webex has the most well-rounded compliance features.

Compliance Certifications

Cisco Webex has wide ranging compliance certifications from SOC-1, SOC-2 Type 2, SOC-3, ISO 27001/27017, ISO 9001 and Cloud Computing Compliance Control Catalog (C5). Webex also complies with GDPR and various cross border privacy standards such as EU-US, Swiss-US and APEC. For Healthcare – Webex will participate in HIPAA compliance through a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).

Analytics and Diagnostics

One of the key functions of administrators is to ensure that they are getting their money’s worth with wide adoption and engagement across their user base. To do that, measuring service adoption and resource utilization with historical trending as well as ability to drill in to specific areas is necessary. Webex Analytics allow administrator to do exactly that. With rich trending, drill-in, drill-out, drill-down and filtering capabilities, administrators can zero in on specific issues that are potentially hindering adoption of Teams, Meetings or proper usage of Webex Devices.

When users experience quality or performance issues – administrators need a quick way to diagnose problems so they can easily address issues within their control. Providing near-real time meeting diagnostics with insight into environmental factors and rich quality of service metrics over time is key for administrators to self-diagnose problems. In the past few months, Webex has provided several key features – such as per meeting per participant quality metrics. Webex is doubling down on enhancing these capabilities by adding additional metrics in the next few months.

Ease of Administration

Today’s administrators demand consumer grade ease of use and mature APIs. Webex Control Hub is the single place for administrators to go to for administering their products. If you have been using Webex Site Admin – you can link your site to Control Hub to start using it. Another great benefit of site linking is to use Webex Common Identity platform – which is the single place to manage all identities.

Webex also provides a fantastic developer ecosystem with APIs for administrators to integrate Webex to their tools. For example, the Events APIs can be used by Compliance teams to not only integrate with their choice of CASBs but also to provide additional insights to ensure full compliance with laws and regulations.

Trusted Collaboration Service

Building and maintaining trust with administrators without compromising end user experience is a key focus area for Cisco Webex. If you are a collaboration administrator for any enterprise – large or small – our goal is to provide you with a service you can trust.

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Beyond Segmentation: A Practical Approach to Securing OT Systems

As an oil and gas operator, you function in a target-rich environment for cyberattack. But are your fears over unseen threats preventing you from leveraging the full power of Digital and the Internet of Things (IoT) in your facility? Or hampering your development of a sound security strategy?

It’s true that cyberattacks against energy infrastructure are becoming more common. And at the same time, attackers are evolving their strategies to cause more damage. But the cost to the energy sector is also evolving.

No longer is it just limited to production being taken offline. We are now finding that cyberthreats can impact other areas important to your operations, including the health and safety of your employees and intellectual property theft.  And as IoT based systems and devices increase, the issue will increase in complexity. Plus, add in the costs to fix it all (and any fines involved from failing compliance), and the damage to your reputation could be severe.

Moving beyond segmentation

The cyber threats facing operational environments are evolving faster than ever before, and a security strategy that depends solely on segmentation can’t defend against things like malware and advanced persistent threats (APT).  Your strategy must include cyber security capabilities beyond just segmentation in order to keep up with cyber adversaries.

That’s why it’s critical for energy leaders like yourself to implement a rock-solid strategy that addresses the industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems found in your OT networks. But be sure it is one based on end-to-end protection that empowers tools for rapid incident response, plus these two key capabilities:

■ Enabling deeper visibility into operations.
■ Securing touchpoints at points of ICS/SCADA interaction.

You’ll also need to make sure that your OT security strategy aligns with any industry standards (like IEC 62443 and NIST 800-82). Oh, and remember to do it all in a way that will help your eventual OT shift to the cloud.

I imagine you’re thinking that all sounds like a tall order. Well, you’re right. Developing a sound OT security strategy isn’t easy for any industry, especially energy. But, in a strange way, that’s where the easy part starts: partnering with an industry leader. This does a few things for your organization. First, it takes a lot of the stress off. Secondly, it empowers innovative solutions and support. Both are critical if you are short of staff or expertise and can serve as rocket fuel for your security strategy.

Deeper visibility for OT cybersecurity compliance

At Cisco, we start by enabling deeper visibility and better detection of anomalies. Just as in everyday life, the greater your awareness, the more information you have; and the better your decisions and outcomes are.

It’s the same in cybersecurity. That’s why enabling deeper visibility into your ICS and SCADA networks is so critical. This is the starting point that can give your team the data they need to create a baseline of operations including OT devices, applications, users, and associated traffic flows. It enables faster identification of suspicious behavior and can be done using:

■ Cisco Firepower® Threat Defense (NGFW)
■ Cisco 3000 Series Industrial Security Appliances (ISA)
■ Cisco Stealthwatch® analytics
■ Industrial Ethernet (IE) switches with NetFlow
■ Deep packet inspection for Modbus, Ethernet/IP, and DNP3.

Secure touchpoints for better OT security management

We then move on to the second critical step in developing a sound OT security strategy: protecting vulnerable touchpoints. Specifically, those where people and their devices interact with your ICS/SCADA systems. This helps reduce cyberthreats that can enter your network from online malware, email or USB devices. Plus, it can improve your time to detect (TTD) and your time to respond (TTR), working as a beachhead against an attacker by reducing their time in the system to do damage.

Threats emerging via endpoints can be reduced using advanced malware detection and prevention. That’s why we developed:

■ Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints and AMP for Networks
■ Cisco Talos™ global threat intelligence.

Wrapping it up

As your OT cybersecurity strategy unfolds, making sure it aligns with industry standards is also easier with the help of a partner like Cisco. Since we deal with such issues on a regular basis, we’re very familiar with industry compliance issues, giving that due consideration in our solutions. And as software for OEM, third-party data analytics and machine maintenance move to the cloud, having an industry-leading partner can help your team be ready as well via tools like Cisco Umbrella™, Cisco Cloudlock™ and Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud.

By partnering with Cisco, energy producers around the world are already enjoying this level of end-to-end cybersecurity as part of their OT security strategy and protecting their critical industrial systems. Now it’s your turn. If you happen to be at Cisco Live in San Diego the week of June 10th we welcome you to stop by our Oil and Gas area in the Industrial Showcase and let us know your thoughts on securing your OT environment.

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MCE: Enabling Customer Success in an Increasingly Connected World

Organizations need to be agile, flexible, and visionary. Now with My Cisco Entitlements (MCE), you have a platform that can help you achieve this.

I am proud to share Cisco’s official introduction of My Cisco Entitlements (MCE) for our customers and partners. MCE is a comprehensive lifecycle management platform that is robust, unified, and secure. Based on Smart Accounts and ISO Compliant Application Programming Interfaces, MCE provides customers and partners the flexibility to self-manage all Cisco IT purchases. We anticipate that MCE will rapidly lead the way in how our customers and partners manage their post-sale Cisco IT assets and entitlements.

Helps Organizations Maximize their ROI and Minimize Risk

This innovative new platform empowers organizations to maximize their return on investment, reduce risk and protect investments. It provides real-time insights into all Cisco services, subscriptions, licenses, and devices throughout their lifecycle. With a comprehensive view, IT and network administrators have the visibility and control they need to make well-informed, cost-effective,­ and compliant decisions.

IT Teams Drive Improved Business Operations

By generating MCE’s dynamic analysis and reports, IT teams have access to valuable information to drive improved business operations. For example, the last day of support (LDoS), renewals, and subscriptions are effortlessly identified by using sort and filter features.  As a result, cost is optimized and risk is reduced as they proactively plan usage and renewal of products and services.

Customers Manage Investments With Cisco More Effectively

Customers can also maximize the return on their investment by leveraging products and services usage insights. This customer-based platform simplifies how end customers manage their investments with Cisco effectively. In the future, Cisco partners can build and monetize asset and entitlement management practices for their customer base.

Taking Smart Accounts to the Next Level – One Unified Platform

As you may recall, Cisco introduced Smart Licensing and Smart Accounts to simplify and streamline software purchases, transfers, and activations for our customers. Built on the foundation of Smart Accounts, MCE takes this same concept to the next level with the integration and management of all licenses, devices, services, and subscriptions on one unified platform. MCE offers customers crucial insight into what they own and how to manage their assets even more effectively. Even better, it provides secure and consolidated user access.

The unified platform has been in pilot for the last five months, with more than 400 customers participating in beta testing. Since we began the pilot program in February, based on customers’ feedback, we’ve been able to uplevel MCE’s capabilities to better serve end users needs. Now, MCE is available to anyone who signs-up via this survey and has a Smart Account with Cisco.

Customer feedback from our pilot users has been incredibly positive. The most common feedback is that they love the one-view dashboard, sort, and filter features, and how key information, such as the last day of support and service coverage, is consolidated into one view. MCE simplifies the way information is managed.

We continue to integrate future release features and capabilities to enable our customers to be successful in an increasingly connected world – with security as a top priority. We can expect the increased use of telemetry in the coming year will provide proactive device health information and drive automation to workflows as needed to avoid delay and overhead.

My Cisco Entitlements connects your Smart Account, licensing, asset management, entitlement management and services to drive your digital business. As customers continue to find new ways to maximize ROI, reduce risk, and protect investments, MCE is poised to lead the way in the digital transformation era.

In the coming years, it’s imperative that every leader in every industry and organization is lock-step with the quickly shifting landscape of technologies to be competitive, increase revenue streams, and meet the needs of their customers. MCE is our solution to help meet these needs as technologies become even more and more complex. This solution offers our customers and partners a new way to protect their valued investments and minimize risk.

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Collaboration: A Key Driver for Digital Transformation and the Cisco Story

As I walk around the conference floor here at Cisco Live talking to customers and partners, I’m reminded how exciting it is to work with innovative solutions that are driving real, impactful change in businesses. For my team and me, collaboration platforms and solutions have reached that pivotal stage. Seamlessly connecting people to people, people to systems, systems to systems, ultimately connecting information and accelerating the velocity of quality decision making at organizations. We see this transformation at Cisco, and I also hear it from customers that are working to leverage collaboration platforms to solve their biggest challenges — attracting top talent, improving their team’s ability to collaborate easily, providing a consistent experience anywhere, anytime, and connecting platforms to be able to access the data for decision making while making sure appropriate security and privacy concerns are addressed.

This year, the research firm IDC predicted that “by 2021, 65% of G2000 companies will offer coworking and remote-work options that leverage pervasive access to enterprise and collaboration applications.” That is a meaningful milestone in the Digital Transformation paradigm because it represents three critical changes that are in motion: how technology has changed our expectations in our day-to-day lives; how the workplace environment has unfolded; and how technology has evolved to break down barriers that have historically challenged that progress.

Technology Enabling Workplace Transformation

At Cisco, my team and I are responsible for providing core technology solutions to a workforce of over 140,000 across the globe — employees and contractors. In recent years, collaboration has proven to be a valued tool in our daily work. However, it’s only in the past two to three years that we see just how impactful it can be, including helping to bolster the bottom line by digitizing our business, increasing productivity, attracting and retaining top talent, and reducing the business risk in areas like security and data privacy. The results are significant and measurable and articulate how technology is an enabler of the transformation.

Webex as the Workstream / Webex in the Workstream

The center of our strategy has been Webex, including Webex Meetings and Webex Teams. It functions as the technology hub driving how we share and distribute information and how we meet with one another. It is pervasive across all our devices and buildings around the world. Our primary goal in IT is to create and support a consistent user experience, no matter where and how the technology is used.

More significantly, it’s engineered and integrated with other technologies throughout the workstream to help bind the experience. So, as a user moves from application to application (e.g., Salesforce, GitHub, ServiceNow), the Webex experience breaks down the traditional silos and acts as the common thread, connecting data and information. Plus, its integration with the productivity applications that we use helps our users by simplifying tasks. We’ve integrated Microsoft Office 365 to help simplify everyday tasks like scheduling, correspondence, and content storage.

Managing Change with Data and Insight

One of the key questions I often hear from customers is how Cisco IT plans for and makes decisions about technology rollout and life cycles. I’ve made it a key point in most of my talks here at Cisco Live.

My team and I have molded and follow an outcome-based, data-driven strategy. At the center of that, we work to understand business and workforce needs, and extract and analyze data coming from our systems to understand usage and adoption. We’ve opened up visibility into every detail to help inform our decision making, including more information around how people work, device usage in physical spaces, the number of video calls, and which integrations are critical and which solutions may be laggers.

Through this analysis, our teams can better plan for technology acquisition, rollout, and implementation. However, more essentially, it informs our teams on how to train our workforce in using the technology to improve its adoption — and better understand where the technology may not be the best fit. This approach has helped us drive adoption and usage to the higher percentile of usage of collaboration technology among our workforce.

Finally, through a close partnership we have with our business and product units, our teams are testing, piloting, and implementing Cisco products while they’re still in development. Through this “Customer Zero” program, we’re able to co-create, deploy, and drive needed changes in the Cisco solutions to improve the enterprise readiness and operational manageability.

What Should IT and Business Leaders Watch Out For?

As the backdrop to our planning and strategy in Cisco IT’s Business Collaboration and Software Platforms group, we have identified seven key pillars that help drive our thinking, planning, and analysis:

◈ Scale: Can the solution easily and effectively scale to accommodate our needs across usage, cost, and footprint, not just now but also in the future?

◈ Performance: Does the solution provide the performance capabilities we need with needed quality throughout the infrastructure, whether we’re concerned with our data centers, campus, remote, or the cloud?

◈ Ease of Use: Is the solution easy to use? What type of training is required? Moreover, what are the barriers to our users’ adopting it effectively?

◈ Analytics: Does the solution provide the data and analytics we’d like to see to help inform our decision making and understanding the solution’s effectiveness?

◈ API-Enabled: Does the solution provide the needed APIs to allow systems to connect programmatically, integrate easily with other platforms, and enhance our ability to digitize our business?

◈ Localization: Can the solution effectively address localization issues across our population that must be addressed? For example, can it be calibrated to comply with regional compliance standards like GDPR

◈ Security: Does the solution have in place security capabilities to respond to security threats proactively, and provide data privacy and governance needed?

Your Collaboration Journey

In a conversation I had with an IT leader at a large enterprise firm yesterday here in San Diego, we were sharing our experiences with addressing the challenges of deploying collaboration solutions that will be adopted by users, while striving to foster the company’s growth. Although we come from different industries, we found ourselves in agreement on what we believe to be essential advice about collaboration we’d give to other IT leaders. It also reflects what I’ve included in my talks.

◈ Understand the business needs and how work gets done across the organization.

◈ Focus on simple, easy-to-integrate platforms that are cloud-enabled.

◈ Leverage the intelligence in your solutions to manage the entire ecosystem, adjusting for capacity and performance. 

◈ And finally, keep security top of mind. 

This is an exciting time for collaboration. It’s more powerful than ever and is having a bigger effect on our organization.

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Webex: Create Smarter and More Personalized Meeting Experiences

We unveiled some new, innovative features that automate and simplify steps in the meeting process, so you can make the most of your meeting time. We want to improve the meeting experience for everyone — from the host, to your attendees, and even IT. Our goal is to help make meetings smarter, more productive, and more personalized. Through Cognitive Collaboration, you can gain greater insights and build deeper connections for team collaboration.

Get Profiles About Who You’re Meeting

One way we are making meeting smarter is with People Insights which helps you quickly learn about anyone in the meeting. We announced People Insights in March and it is generally available to customers this month for the desktop app, mobile app and web page. I like this feature because it saves me from having to spend hours doing Google searches and scouring the Web for other sources of information. It works by creating a rich, dynamic profile of everyone who joins your meeting and displays that information in the Webex Meetings participant panel. Meeting participants can edit the information that’s displayed about them through the settings page. Things like photos, bios, news articles, social links, and directory data (if you are in the same company) are aggregated and available for quick viewing.

Put a Name to Every Face in the Meeting

Another way we are making your meeting smarter is with the use of facial recognition. When you use a Webex device for your meeting, the system scans the faces of anyone showing up on the video and is able to not only calculate also but identifies participants by name. It starts with a profile picture that meeting participants submit on the settings page. The Webex device then logs the picture and gives it an identifying number, which represents the participant. When you’re in a meeting, the system will scan the faces of meeting participants and use the same algorithm to calculate an identifying number for the participants. The information is encrypted and then matched against the numbers stored.

Never Miss an Action Item From the Meeting

Transcription in Webex Meetings is another feature. I use it when I need to recap what was said in the meeting or follow up on critical action items. It works by using natural language processing to deliver high-quality transcripts of your Webex Meeting recording. When you record a Webex Meeting, a transcription is saved and will appear during recording playback. You can search for text in the transcript to verify what was said, and when. All I have to do is search the recording for keywords – like my name, for example – and I can quickly review any actions assigned to me or my team.

Deeper Integrations and Interop with Your Collaboration Workflow Tools

At Cisco, we are always looking for ways to build bridges between Cisco and other collaboration solutions you may choose to use every day. That’s why we’ve upped the ante on interop too, by offering more integrated and intelligent experiences with 3rd party tools, from Microsoft, Google, Jira, and Zapier in this latest release.

For example, we improved sharing content in Webex Meetings from within Microsoft Office apps. And starting Personal Meeting Room (PMR) and recording notifications within Microsoft Teams has never been easier. The Microsoft O365 add-on recognizes meetings scheduled from Exchange for automatically synching schedule changes.

We’ve also added improvements for G-Suite users in phase two of our integration work with Google. Important features like scheduling your PMR and ad-hoc meetings, as well as advanced settings like templates, alternate hosts, audio type, and call-in details are available in the add-ons framework. Check them out soon in the Webex meeting settings, inside the Google Calendar interface. In addition, we are now integrated with Google home devices so now you can ask, “Google, what’s my meeting schedule today” or “please play my recording.”

Improve User Management for IT

And we can’t forget IT, an important persona in improving workplace experiences. We’ve made some additional improvements to Webex to help IT manager and make the most of the Webex management experience.

We expanded global audio coverage so more people can dial into Cisco Webex Meetings seamlessly through the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Your users now have access to the broadest global PSTN coverage of any other web conferencing provider, covering nearly 200 countries across all audio plans. This global coverage expansion allows you and your meeting participants to join with PSTN audio from more countries than ever. This increase represents 11 new countries included in our base Webex Flex Meetings offer at no additional cost, and the remaining countries were added to our usage audio offer for additional toll and toll-free coverage.

Last but not least, Webex Control Hub is a single pane of glass that give IT not just diagnostics, but also the ability to manage users and services. You can drill down on analytics at the individual participant level for detailed, continuous analytics on how an end user’s device is behaving or look at usage to determine whether or not certain services are
valuable or need further investment. In this management portal, you can also provision, administer, and manage Cisco Webex services and Webex Hybrid Services, such as Hybrid Call Service, Hybrid Calendar Service, Hybrid Directory Service, and Video Mesh.

These are just some of the ways we are improving the meeting’s experience.

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Cisco AI Network Analytics: Making Networks Smarter and Simpler to Manage

Enterprise networks generate a lot of data. A lot. Imagine a network with 6000+ access points, 10 wireless controllers, a data center, dozens of branch offices, and over 10,000 roaming wireless devices covering an area the size of a small city. Every AP collects telemetry on its operating environment, radio performance, interference statistics, and the identities of devices that are connecting to them. The SD-WAN fabric connects distributed branch offices and remote workers to cloud applications and data center resources, managing thousands of connections and traffic flows over the course of a work day.

Trying to manually analyze and troubleshoot the traffic flowing through thousands of APs, switches, and routers is a near impossible task, even for the most sophisticated NetOps team. In a wireless environment, onboarding and interference errors can crop up randomly and intermittently, making it even more difficult to determine probable causes. How long does it take for devices to onboard as they are carried from segment to segment? Is taking 5 seconds to connect to an AP satisfactory or unacceptable performance? Is onboarding time consistent regardless of device density or does it vary unpredictably? How do you measure and compare application performance from SaaS providers to distributed branch offices and remote workers?

The irony of having mountains of telemetry and activity logs awaiting analysis by overworked IT teams is that there is too much noise from too much data for humans to deal with in a timely manner. Machine learning (ML) and applied artificial intelligence (AI) automates the analysis of trillions of bytes of telemetry, radio fingerprints, and network access points to uncover patterns in the chaos, and turn the findings into actionable insights or automated mitigation actions. Where is the nexus of AI/ML for enterprise network analytics? In the Cisco DNA Center and the Cloud.

Cisco AI Network Analytics in the Cloud

For years now, Cisco has been integrating AI/ML into many operational and security components, with Cisco DNA Center the focal point for insights and actions. Now we are adding new capabilities with Cisco AI Network Analytics in the Cloud. AI Network Analytics collects massive amounts of network data from Cisco DNA Centers at participating customer sites, encrypts and anonymizes the data to ensure privacy, and collates all of it into the Cisco Worldwide Data Platform. In this cloud, the aggregated data is analyzed with deep machine learning to reveal patterns and anomalies such as:

◈ Highly personalized network baselines with multiple levels of granularity that define “normal” for a given network, site, building, and SSID

◈ Sudden changes in onboarding times for Wi-Fi devices, by individual APs, floor, building, campus, and branch

◈ Simultaneous connectivity failures with numerous clients at a specific location

◈ Changes in SaaS and Cloud application performance via SD-WAN direct internet connections or Cloud OnRamps

The Worldwide Data Platform leverages a growing knowledgebase of over 35 years of Cisco engineering problem resolutions and AI-derived insights. As patterns are discovered and anomalies uncovered in the diverse ocean of data, alerts with correlated information—such as physical locations, histories, possible causes, and potential remedies—are sent to the corresponding Cisco DNA Centers for evaluation and action by NetOps.

AI Analytics Provides Visibility, Insight, and Action

The AI processes in the cloud perform the logical troubleshooting steps that a network engineer executes to resolve problems, but much faster and against a much larger data set than humans’ can handle. In large campus networks and remote branch offices, the number of alerts and false-positives for minor to major issues can come fast and furious at times, making triage the first step for NetOps teams. The AI processing helps triage issues by categorizing them according to severity, location, number of affected devices, and the ability to automatically remedy a subset of issues. As a result, NetOps can focus on high-priority alerts instead of hunting through a blizzard of data for disruptive problems. Cisco AI Network Analytics and DNA Assurance provides visibility, insight, and action for resolving network issues and improving performance.

Visibility into Personalized Baseline Behavior

Using machine learning to determine a baseline range for network activity—error rates, onboarding times, application performance, for example—helps spotlight relevant deviations in behavior that impact network availability. Once a personalized baseline is established, NetOps can measure performance over periods of time to determine the effects of network design changes, adding devices, changing segmentation, and adding SaaS application connections to distributed branches. A baseline enables NetOps to focus on significant anomalies rather than the noise of minute-to-minute deviations, saving time and resources for IT projects that add value.

Insights Gathered From Around the World

With a baseline of normal network operations established, Cisco AI Network Analytics examines abnormal behaviors to pinpoint specific issues and their root causes. A knowledgebase of engineering experience—accumulated by Cisco over decades of network monitoring and troubleshooting—works with the patterns and anomalies uncovered by ML in the Worldwide Data Platform to prescribe actions to fix issues. Workers in a remote branch office that are taking longer than the normal baseline to onboard, for example, trigger an alert in Cisco DNA Assurance, along with potential remedies, enabling NetOps to take proactive remediation steps before the delays impact productivity and customer experience.

In IP networks, a problematic event is often preceded by a benign event or series of events. Using the Proactive Exploration features of AI Network Analytics, NetOps can, for example, be forewarned of increases in Wi-Fi interference, network congestion, and office traffic loads. By learning how a series of events are correlated to one another, system-generated insights can help foresee future events before they happen and alert IT staff with suggestions for corrective actions. These insights can recommend changes to Wi-Fi, switch, or application configurations that will improve system performance and user experience, improve issue relevancy, and accurately identify trends and root causes.

AI Network Analytics can also compare activity and patterns among, for example, branch offices, to determine “normal” activity and pinpoint performance issues pertaining to individual sites. Since all the data in Worldwide Data Platform is anonymized, Cisco AI Network Analytics can securely compare a campus network’s performance against other sites of similar size and configuration, helping to identify opportunities for network upgrades while optimizing IT spending.

Action and Guided Remediation from Expert Knowledgebase

Insights lead to action with guided remediation suggestions resulting from the fusion of machine pattern recognition and AI-derived workflows from the engineering knowledgebase. Events similar to those that have occurred in other enterprise sites provide possible solutions that have previously resolved analogous issues. This demonstrates the value of leveraging the Worldwide Data Platform and ML to capture issues that crop up sporadically in networks all over the world and resolve them quickly and efficiently.

Note that participating in the Worldwide Data Platform is optional when using Cisco DNA Center, but will result in more limited capabilities. Even though all data received from customer DNA Centers is anonymized, and each customer has a unique private key for decryption, not participating in the Worldwide Data Platform is an option for organizations that have privacy and compliance issues that limit data sharing.In

Intent-based Networking is Smarter and Simpler to Manage with AI Network Analytics

Cisco AI Network Analytics, within Cisco DNA Center, adds another layer of intelligence to Intent-Based Networking, making networks even smarter, simpler to manage, and more secure. Integrating decades of Cisco network engineering experience into the AI Network Analytics platform to continuously analyze network operations and deviations leads to faster problem resolution and thus greater IT efficiency. By identifying the most relevant optimization opportunities for each customer’s unique configuration and usage patterns, IT resources can be allocated to high priority projects providing the most benefit instead of chasing minor fluctuations in network performance.

Cisco will continue to add AI and machine learning to bring simplicity and security to enterprise networks of all sizes and shades of complexity. The more telemetry, operational statistics, and security threat indicators flow into the Cisco Worldwide Data Platform, the more value enterprises using Cisco DNA Center will gain.

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