Where is the edge in edge computing?

Edge computing has become the IT industry’s hot “new” term. Media outlets, vendors (including Cisco!), and analysts alike are all touting the value of edge computing, particularly for Internet of Things (IoT) implementations. While most agree that there are benefits to processing compute functions “at the edge,” coming to an agreement on what exactly constitutes the edge is another thing altogether.

In 2015, Dr. Karim Arabi, vice president, engineering at Qualcomm Inc., defined edge computing as, “All computing outside cloud happening at the edge of the network.”

Dr. Arabi’s definition is commonly agreed upon. However, at Cisco — the leader in networking — we see the edge a little differently. Our viewpoint is that the edge is anywhere that data is processed before it crosses the Wide Area Network (WAN). Before you start shaking your head in protest, hear me out.

The benefits of edge computing

The argument for edge computing goes something like this: By handling the heavy compute processes at the edge rather than the cloud, you reduce latency and can analyze and act on time-sensitive data in real-time — or very close to it. This one benefit — reduced latency — is huge.

Reducing latency opens up a host of new IoT use cases, most notably autonomous vehicles. If an autonomous vehicle needs to break to avoid hitting a pedestrian, the data must be processed at the edge. By the time the data gets to the cloud and instructions are sent back to the car, the pedestrian could be dead.

The other often cited benefit of edge computing is the bandwidth or cost required to send data to the cloud. To be clear, there’s plenty of bandwidth available to send data to the cloud. Bandwidth is not the issue. The issue is the cost of that bandwidth. Those costs are accrued when you hit the WAN — it doesn’t matter where the data is going. In a typical network the LAN is a very cheap and reliable link, whereas the WAN is significantly more expensive. Once it hits the WAN, you’re accruing higher costs and latency.

Defining WHERE edge computing is

If we can agree that reduced latency and reduced cost are key characteristics of edge computing, then sending data over the WAN — even if it’s to a private data center in your headquarters — is NOT edge computing. To put it another way, edge computing means that data is processed before it crosses any WAN, and therefore is NOT processed in a traditional data center, whether it be a private or public cloud data center.

The following picture illustrates the typical devices in an Industrial IoT solution and who claims to have “Edge Compute” in this topology:

As you can see, the edge is relative. The service provider’s edge is not the customer’s edge. But the most important difference between the edge compute locations depicted is the network connectivity. End devices, IoT appliances, and routers are connected via the LAN — maybe Wi-Fi or Gigabit Ethernet cable. That is usually a very reliable and cheap link. The link between the routers/gateways and cell tower, is the most critical. That’s the last mile from the service provider. It introduces the most latency and is the most expensive for the end customer. It is the 5G or 4G uplink. Once you’re on the cell tower, the provider has fiber and you’re safe from a throughput perspective, but then you’re looking at increasing costs.

As you can also infer from the graphic, end devices should be excluded from edge compute because it can be near impossible to draw the line between things, smart things and edge compute things.

What’s old is new

We can take the concept of edge computing a step further and assert that it’s not new at all. In fact, we as an IT industry have been doing edge computing for quite some time. Remember how we learned about the cyclic behavior of compute centralization and compute decentralization? Edge compute is basically the latest term for decentralized compute.

The edge can mean very different things to different organizations, depending on the network infrastructure and use case. However, if you think about the edge in terms of the benefits you want to achieve, then it becomes clear very quickly where the edge of your IT environment begins and ends.

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Partner Services Opportunities in Enterprise Networking

Customer success and technology lifecycle are top of mind topics for our partner community. How we engage with our customers and support them through their customer experience journey are as important as ever. With increasingly complex technology choices across so many different architectures, it’s not always easy to understand what types of services are the most suitable for each specific customer.

Many Cisco partners have developed practices based on their key priorities, customer base and market singularities. Specifically, in the area of Enterprise Networking, partners can capture various opportunities to expand their services practice.

Cisco services help partners enter new markets and grow their business. There are different reasons why you might consider leveraging some of them, for example:

◉ Developing a new practice for a new technology or architecture.

◉ Addressing a specific customer request outside of your area of specialization.

◉ Covering for experienced engineering resources unavailability.

Cisco DNA Center is the network management and command center for Cisco DNA, your intent-based network for the enterprise. Deploying it, can provide many service opportunities. For example, configuring it for the first time.

To get started, ask yourself a few questions to determine which services are best suited for your needs.

The first question is whether or not you have successfully deployed Cisco DNA Center in the past? If the answer is yes, then the next question is to check if you have experienced engineering resources available to address your customer’s expectations? If the answer is also yes, you can deploy Cisco DNA Center using your own resources and you can rely on our existing Support Services for any escalations.

However, if the answer to either of those questions is no, then you have to ask yourself if you want to build your own Cisco DNA Center practice. If you do, then you should consider leveraging Cisco’s Mentored Installed Networking Training (MINT) program, which provides an expert on-site all along the way deploying the solution together and learning at the same time so that you can start building your own expertise and eventually have a Cisco DNA Center practice.

On the other hand, if it is not your intention to build this practice, because your area of expertise, market opportunity or business model doesn’t require it; or simply because you do not have the engineering resources available when you need them, you should consider our Enterprise Networking Quick Start Services. These services provide a quick fix to accelerate deployment and adoption of Cisco DNA Center with a predefined scope and prescriptive design that provides the fastest way to test the value of Cisco DNA Center. You do not have to worry about deploying the solution. You procure the services from us and we do it for you.

In addition to these two examples, we also have Ask-The-Expert (ATX) and Accelerators (ACC) which are designed to help you accelerate your implementation of new technology through targeted sessions with Cisco experts, either through one-on-one remote coaching or one-to-many interactive webinars.

If you would like to find out more about all these services options, please check out our Partner Success Sales Webinar for CX Enterprise Networking, where you can find a deeper overview on each of them.

The most important thing is for our partners to be able to provide the best possible experience to customers, while also growing their own services business market share. We all know it can be difficult sometimes to know when and where to leverage all the resources available, but make no mistake, we are all on this journey together and we want you to succeed.

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Why multicloud means it’s time to invest in network transformation

In the age of multicloud, network transformation is on many CxOs’ minds. Public clouds, private clouds, SaaS providers—they’re coming together to help enterprise organizations accomplish amazing things.

They’re also placing game-changing demands on existing networks.

Legacy infrastructure lacks the modern technologies required to support the demands of multiple links to cloud providers, increased traffic, distributed data, complicated security and compliance needs, and other necessities for effective multicloud IT.

Network transformation isn’t just needed: it’s inevitable. But the capital outlay required for a network overhaul causes many organizations to think it’s impossible. Instead, they incrementally add infrastructure—resulting in increased complexity across controls, rules and operations.

However, based on our experience with enterprise clients and our own internal network delivery, we find that continuing to operate on outdated technologies actually costs organizations more in the long term than it would to dramatically reinvent their network infrastructure.

The longer you wait, the less you gain

Delaying inevitable projects, such as the provisioning of secure, high-speed direct cloud access to a business-critical application, means your business waits longer to realize the value of the initiative, and that value shrinks in the interim.

On large-scale transformation projects, we’ve seen the business impact of a six-month infrastructure modernization delay cost organizations between $5 and $7 million per year. This doesn’t take into account impact to revenue and risk.

Caring for aging infrastructure is costly

The term technical debt refers to the hidden cost of choosing less-costly solutions to IT problems, such as stop-gap measures to keep operating infrastructure that’s past its time.

As your organization continues to use a legacy network, it becomes increasingly more complex and difficult to manage, particularly as it grows with multicloud requirements. You exert more time and money to stay in fighting shape—and end up spending more in the long run than you would on a wholesale evolution.

For example, piecemeal implementation of Wi-Fi in the campus results in the continued need for existing fixed and wired ports, plus cabling, maintenance and project costs to keep it up to date, as well as the costs of adding wireless—increasing costs, complexity and impacting the end-user experience.

We’ve seen organizations reduce their infrastructure by over 20 percent as a result of switching to new architectures.

It all comes down to this: The longer you wait to transform your network, the more you spend in the long run.

Why further investment in piecemeal infrastructure fails

Money invested in piecemeal infrastructure rarely delivers discernable benefits. The example of adding wireless is a perfect illustration of why.

Addressing technical debt with multiyear piecemeal upgrades can’t enable the new capabilities of automated, software-defined networks—because the network constantly remains in an incomplete state. In some cases, we even see the technical debt continue to increase, as the level of investment being made can’t keep up with technology reaching end of life.

You don’t have to build your network transformation business case alone

We’re dedicated to helping our customers overcome the financial challenges of network transformation—and ensuring they can move on from costly legacy architectures.

To do so, we’ve collaborated with our enterprise customers to develop a framework called Cisco Performance IT.

It’s designed to help you accurately assess the financial realities of network transformation and identify a highly cost-effective path forward.

After going through the process, many of our customers find that their network transformation can actually pay for itself over a five-year period.

We’re ready to help you build a transformation and economic road map.

Read more: Cisco Performance IT makes multicloud possible for your digital transformation

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What’s New in Security and Compliance for Webex

Three New Security Features in Control Hub

Security and compliance are top of mind for large customers when deploying collaboration solutions. In today’s modern and digital workplaces, collaboration spans organizational and functional boundaries and employees inevitably share sensitive data and intellectual property. Hence, building and maintaining trust with IT administrators and security professionals to keep user data safe within their organization or even when collaborating externally is a key focus area for Cisco Webex.

While Cisco Webex offers frictionless end-user experiences through modern collaboration, our 360 approach to security provides unmatched control, privacy, and compliance to meet the requirements of IT and security teams.

At Cisco Webex, we continuously listen to our customers’ critical security and compliance concerns and work hard to rapidly deliver new security controls to provide peace of mind to them. In September 2019, we announced a new Collaboration Flex plan add-on offer – the Cisco Webex Control Hub Extended Security Pack (ESP) – a Cisco-on-Cisco best of breed and easy-to-deploy package that strengthens data security and compliance and ensures seamless collaboration for businesses.

Now, we are introducing three new security features that can be configured and customized by administrators via Control Hub to meet your organization’s specific requirements.

1. Anti-Malware Protection: Protect users from Trojans, viruses, and ransomware – even when files are shared by external users by directly enabling Anti-Malware Scan from Control Hub. An Extended Security Pack subscription is required.

2. Block External Communication: Empower administrators to whitelist approved domains via Control Hub to allow communication with users from authorized domains or organizations.

3. Bot Management: Empowers administrators to control and contain the proliferation of bots within an organization with global access policies and local whitelist overwrites directly from Control Hub.

Anti-Malware Protection

The Extended Security Pack already includes the full set of functionalities from Cisco Cloudlock® for data loss prevention (DLP) by providing full visibility and control over sensitive data stored in Webex Teams.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Anti-Malware Protection capability in Webex Teams, included in the Extended Security Pack. The native, high-performance anti-malware engine, powered by Cisco Talos ClamAV in Webex Cloud, scans and remediates all files in spaces, even if they are uploaded by external users. End users will not be able to download infected files on both corporate-managed and personally-managed devices, as shown in figure 1. In addition, administrators have the option to enable or disable anti-malware scanning and access scan history report in the Control Hub, as shown in figure 2.

Figure 1. Blocking an infected file

Figure 2. Administrator control for Anti-Malware Scan

Block External Communication

In today’s workplace, collaboration transcends organizational boundaries. For instance, your organization has embarked on a new initiative such as a joint product offer with a partner. Such an effort typically involves multiple personnel, discussions, and approvals. With a closed platform, your options are limited when it comes to managing communications with a network of partners with whom information exchange is extremely asymmetric. Sending out long emails or waiting for weekly recurring calls to clarify key items can be expensive and frustrating. Not anymore, thanks to Webex Teams!

We understand your needs when it comes to external collaboration and has been working hard to enhance the Block External Communication feature. You can extend your communication footprint with users outside your organization without compromising security and compliance. Unlike other communication platforms and tools that introduce administrative overhead and end-user friction, we deliver on the vision that external collaboration should be an intuitive and seamless experience.

What Does This Mean For IT Administrators

With this new enhancement to Block External Communication, administrators can now create a Whitelist of approved domains via Control Hub (See Figure 1, preventing unauthorized communication with users from other domains/organizations. Block External Communication works by restricting Webex Teams space membership to users who belong to domains that are part of the administrator-approved Whitelist only. The policy is enforced in a forward-looking manner after it is enabled in your organization’s Control Hub setting. Retrospective scanning of existing spaces for membership violations is not performed. Administrators can be assured that users from their organization are collaborating only with external users who belong to trusted domains.

Customers in regulated verticals such as finance and healthcare trust Webex Teams to protect their valuable data and provide a secure platform. This is yet another step in the direction of our promise to deliver the most open yet secure platform. The new Block External Communication feature is currently in early field trials. Stay tuned for more updates as we target General Availability of this feature.

Figure 1: Control Hub configuration for creation of a domain Whitelist

Bot Management

Webex Teams is an open platform. A platform that your and external developers can customize and integrate into your business processes with the goal of enhanced interoperability with external data systems and enhanced productivity to your users. In fact, Webex Teams sports a slew of bots and applications developed by freelance developers – to market-leading ISV’s – curated and hosted on apphub.webex.com. You can find commercial integrations like a Salesforce bot, to crowd-pleasers like the Noora spa finder bot. And if you have a new solution in mind you can execute your creative juices by heading over to developer.webex.com and use the published well documented and fresh REST API’s as your entry point to your developer fame. Remember every Webex Teams login is also the entry key to the developer program – automatically.

Managing Bots From an IT Perspective

On to managing these bots from an IT perspective: We saw and heard the need to control the proliferation of these apps (bots and integrations), while we wanted to maintain the spirit of the open platform. The result is our new Bot Management capability. Similar to integrations management, Control Hub admins will find a new tab in the admin console which allows them to limit access to bots by their users. Customers without access to Pro Pack can still globally blacklist all bots, which will prevent the addition of bots to spaces going forward (See Figure 1). Pro Pack subscribers, in addition, can whitelist individual bots that your IT and Infosec departments deem safe and useful (See Figure 2). Bots in the allowed list can be added by anyone from your organization to space or invoked in direct conversations. Disallowed bots will result in an error message when trying to talk to them or adding them to a group space. This new feature is not retroactive and only works at the membership level, i.e., bots that were previously added to spaces will continue to work. The new bot management is currently in early field trials and expected to be generally available soon.

Figure 1. Globally Bot Management

Figure 2: Individually whitelisted bots

This feature is currently in early field trials. Stay tuned for more updates as we target General Availability of this feature.

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Cisco Performance IT makes multicloud possible for your digital transformation

Modern enterprise organizations rely on a diverse and flexible cloud approach, incorporating both public and private solutions, to accomplish their mission.

In fact, 40% of enterprise CxOs say they’re embracing a cloud-first strategy. Doing so, they realize benefits like enhanced agility, efficiency, and scalability.

However, the combination of increased traffic from SaaS providers, on-premises applications, and public clouds like AWS or Microsoft Azure is placing a tremendous strain on enterprise networks in terms of operations, security, performance, and cost.

And oftentimes, it’s creating a negative impact on the business, as the user experience is frequently impacted when a multicloud strategy is supported by legacy networks.

Introducing Cisco Performance IT

To address multicloud challenges, we started working with customers to build a model for network transformation. Our goal was to make it financially feasible to deliver networks that provide high performance and superior user experiences. All while being operated more efficiently, and at lower costs. We call this model Cisco Performance IT.

It’s a framework that helps clearly illuminate the benefits of evolving networks to match multicloud realities. Ultimately, it shows you how transforming your network represents significant financial and operational benefits.

Cisco Performance IT helps you chart a long-term course for your network and your business—and shows how the right investments can pay for themselves.

Why transformation is critical

Many enterprise networks are built on legacy technology that’s not ready for the demands of multicloud. Today’s world is dynamic, and infrastructure built on manual processes and static configurations can’t keep up.

Take a look at these network challenges created by the multicloud shift, based on our real-world projects:

◉ Connecting to SaaS provider isn’t as simple as it seems. West Coast SaaS traffic routed to a U.S. East Coast legacy data center where security is hosted—creating a massive performance bottleneck that slows application performance and impacts the user experience.

◉ Dedicated circuits slowing deployment. Access to public/private connectivity requires dedicated circuits for connection to the cloud provider. This often results in provisioning times exceeding 60 days, delaying the ability to deploy new revenue services for the business.

◉ High costs. Increasing demand for access to SaaS solutions requires dedicated links that come with expensive, multi-year commitments. Our enterprise customers are seeing circuit costs increase year-over-year as a result of SaaS connectivity growth.

◉ Overwhelming complexity. When every new cloud provider requires manual configurations of rules and policies, the operational workload skyrockets. Combined with flat or declining operational budgets, this creates delays as workloads increase.

Overcome the budget challenges of network transformation

Given the issues caused by aging networks supporting multicloud strategies, it’s obvious that significant network overhauls are necessary. But transforming networks in the traditional way is manual, costly, time-consuming, and difficult.

The capital outlay required for network transformation is a barrier for many organizations. They see the need, and even know the technologies they would require to make everything work—but they can’t build the financial case to justify it.

However, early adopters of the Cisco Performance IT approach are seeing incredible results: such as self-funded network transformation, the ability to deliver new services in much shorter timeframes, and sustainably reduced operational costs with simplified and comprehensive security.

While navigating transformation in the multicloud era is difficult, Cisco Performance IT can help you find the most cost-effective and savvy path forward.

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Service Providers: Join Cisco at MWC 2020

It’s February again that means Mobile World Congress 2020 in Barcelona is just a few weeks away.  I know everyone at Cisco is looking forward to seeing all of you at what is arguably the biggest and most impactful technology event of the year (well, maybe tied with Cisco Live!).  We look forward to you visiting us at our awarding winning booth in Hall3 3E30 – same as the past few years. We have dozens of demonstrations in the works to show how you can leverage the 5G era to accelerate profitability and open new opportunities.

Cisco will have our executive leadership team, Product Teams, and many subject matter experts on hand to share information and discuss your opportunities, challenges and how Cisco can be your most valuable partner to pursue excellence and success.

So, please read on as I share with you some of what we are preparing just for you – our Mobile World Congress guests.

Our theme for MWC20 is “Between unlocking the potential of 5G and the Internet for the Future”. This builds on our “Bridge to Possible” theme which we introduced last year.  Through this we aim to share how together we can work for the betterment of the people that you serve.  This begins with establishing a strong and trusted foundation that delivers success.  We want to show you how by working together you can grow revenue, save money, and mitigate risk – for you and your customers.

Grow Revenue – Save Money – Mitigate Risk

A remarkable 5G experience for consumers and enterprise customers begins with Cisco software-defined architecture for the 5G era.  Cisco builds trustworthy 5G networks with the industry’s most advanced automated infrastructure for profitability and competitive advantage. Cisco’s intent-based, software-defined architecture is the foundation for the Internet for the Future. New 5G experiences for consumers, businesses, and IoT can be deployed by existing or greenfield network providers as well as enterprises. Total cost of ownership can be reduced on average by 35% and the time to instantiate functions and introduce new services greatly accelerated.

The industry has shown that it appreciates what we have to offer as we have won dozens of 5G deals and collected 3 awards for our innovations in 2019 and have been shortlisted for the GSMA Global Mobile “5G Leadership” award at this year’s MWC event.

Demonstrations

You are invited to tour our “Mobile Transformations for Industry” demonstrations that are open to all.  Once inside our booth, you might wish to start your demo tour with our Big Picture demo that offers quick, high-level views of eight areas including architectures for service providers, enterprises, supporting mega-trends like Cloud, IoT, and the Internet for the Future, and key network attributes – Automation/Orchestration, and Secured and Trusted networks.  From here we can guide you to deeper dives to specific solutions and products to some of our newest innovations – including Silicon One and the Cisco 8000.  We also have innovations in seamless convergence and momentum in Open vRAN.

Seamless Convergence

Perhaps this is the Zen of mobile wireless – a seamless open converged radio network environment, providing the best user experience anywhere and everywhere.

5G and Wi-fi 6 together – Cisco has long promoted the right tool for the right job, and that includes wireless access.  Be it 4G/LTE, 5G (NSA, SA, mmWave), CBRS, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6 or any of the assorted “machine-oriented” wireless access types.  The key is a trusted seamless roaming experience.  Cisco is the leader in ‘AnyAccess” and open seamless convergence.  You can enjoy the secured Open Roaming throughout the Fira Barcelona Gran Via as Cisco is the official wireless provider.  Additionally, we have a fantastic demonstration of Service Provider and Enterprise converged seamless network solutions.  See how Service Providers can extend their enterprise customer’s domains across their secured WAN and put the tools Enterprise IT wants into their hands.

Open vRAN Gains Momentum

2019 was a great momentum building year for Open vRAN with Etisalat, Vodafone, O2, Viettel and others announcing their intent to deploy Open vRAN and of course the industry pioneer, Rakuten going commercial with a 100% Open vRAN network.  The industry is seeing proof that not only does an open environment work, but it simplifies, reduces costs and eliminate vendor lock-in.  Cisco is proud to be a leader in this movement of opening the last proprietary segment of the mobile network.  Cisco is demonstrating our multi-vendor 4G/5G Open vRAN solution at MWC and welcome you to stop by, see the live demo for yourself and speak with our experts.

Events and Speakers

Cisco will be hosting events in our Booth for VIPs, Analysts, and more – these are sure to be entertaining and informative.

We will also have speakers throughout the week at GSMA sessions including Global Director, Bob Everson for “Security in the Tech Industry X Era” and VP for Global SP Marketing, Marci Hanlon for “Women 4 Tech” Diversity panel session.

Travel safe and we are looking forward to seeing you there!

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The Evolving Cloud-Native Infrastructure

Over the last few years, we have been participating in a radical transformation of how modern applications are built, deployed and operated. Monolithic applications are being broken down into microservices and serverless functions to exponentially ease development, lifecycle management, increase the velocity of features, and improve the availability of the services offered.

More and more mission-critical workloads have become containerized. Anywhere between 35%-50% of an enterprise’s application sprawl is now containerized based on various Gartner and IDC estimates. And it’s not just the app front ends, or the dashboards, but mission critical workloads such as revenue generating data analytics pipelines, middleware, and core business logic.

This transition is putting pressure on the processes, data flows and organizational structures to evolve dramatically within the enterprise. As customers continue to invest in digital capabilities to transform their business, build new products and compete aggressively against new competition, with applications as the new currency, Cisco is helping them achieve their business KPIs and stay nimble through 4 technology pillars –

1. Delivering evolvable application platforms

2. Driving new cloud-native networking and security

3. Building AI/ML systems for your data science and ML-Ops needs

4. Nurturing developer-friendly communities for adoption

Evolvable Application Platforms

It is predicted that over the course of the next few years, the absolute number of apps within an Enterprise will continue to rise. In fact, a recent study from IDC predicts a 50 percent increase in the number of applications over next two years.

There are various drivers for this, but primarily, the “software eats the world” mentality means that everything is being solved (and should be solved) by software. This is Digital Transformation at work.

As this app explosion takes place, the percentage of modern cloud-native applications within an enterprise will only continue to grow. Most of this growth will stem from newer applications taking over the old in performing similar capabilities with much better velocity, availability and efficiency KPIs. These newer apps (shown with Green arrow) will most definitely be born cloud-native, as either microservices or serverless apps. The existing apps and capabilities will slowly migrate to being re-architected as cloud-native, dropping the percentage of monolithic bare-metal and virtual machines apps steadily over the next few years.

Cisco’s approach is to provide organizations with software and hardware building blocks that allow you – the enterprise Application Developer, Platform Engineer, Cloud Architect or IT Engineer – to evolve seamlessly along with the technology trends that drive your business. Whether you need a data-hungry on-premises bare metal monolithic app, a cloud-native insights pipeline, or a securely-governed extension of your compute capabilities to your preferred public cloud, the same application platform architecture should power your entire development and software portfolio.

The Cloud-Native Network

As we have seen, a modern application is not a monolithic, siloed, single-compute application. Cloud-native is a synonym for scaled-out distributed applications. And a well-behaved distributed system relies upon a capable, well-abstracted, highly available and secure Network. You cannot develop a successful cloud-native application without paying attention to the characteristics of the network.

As cloud-native architectures are becoming more pervasive, applications components are becoming thinner and thinner (microservices, functions), and geographically diverse (cloud regions, on-premises, across the globe). The connectivity problem for even a single application is becoming much, much worse.

There is ‘more network’ in every flow than ever before.

A quick look at the service dependency graph of a cloud-native application (e.g., the Monzo banking app) will give us a sense of the networking and security problem needing to be solved. Each node of a typical application graph such as the one shown below is an API or service endpoint, and in theory, could be anywhere in the world and on any kind of infrastructure – owned or rented.

The Microservice Dependency Graph of the Monzo Banking Application

At Cisco, we have been thinking through what connectivity looks like to the application developer and platform engineer. The cloud-native Network would connect all such service endpoints, and only those endpoints, wherever they happen to be and in whatever form – as modern cloud-native, or traditional monolithic systems. This Network is built for the application developer. It has narrow and deep context and is less worried about all the rest of the traffic flowing through the network below. It follows the principles of simplified connectivity, relevant context, and follows the same activation models that are used in application development.

AI/ML systems for Data Science and ML-Ops

The necessity of real-time insights on an exploding data universe is driving the need for AI/ML in every industry. A modern and agile enterprise is using AI/ML pipelines for streamlining its operational needs (ML-Ops) as well as for driving critical business insights through its various data science and business insights organizations.

Because of the ubiquitous availability of AI toolchains – both on-premises and in public clouds via pipelines such as Kubeflow – new use cases for AI-Applications in deriving insights in industry verticals, systems design, and solving complex closed-loop operational problems are only going to blossom.

An MIT Review study looking at more than 16,000 papers on AI over the past 15 years already pointed to this trend.

Cisco is building AI/ML hardware and software systems to help enterprises and communities solve their data insights and operational needs. Whether it is helping a large optics manufacturer find defects in their manufacturing process or helping solve the difficult data problems of less-understood genetic disorders.

We are also focusing these systems back into solving the problems we understand best – whether it is helping our customers manage the complexity of networking and computing nodes in their environment, helping them fine tune the performance of their hybrid apps, or alerting them on potential security threats and provide remediation measures before it hits them.

Developer and Community Adoption

The application-centric nature of all business going forwards implies working closely with developers and fostering communities. Driving code and projects into open source and fostering forums and bodies that enable sharing of knowledge, data sets, processes and use cases are just some of the ways that Cisco has been nurturing open communities.

We have been Platinum members of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and part of their Governing Board since its inception in 2015. We have contributed to the Kubernetes (K8s),  compute and networking projects for a few years now, helped create the Network Service Mesh project (currently in Sandbox), and utilize our presence at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to evangelize adoption of these cloud-native technologies.

In the AI/ML landscape, Cisco has joined forces with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Stanford, MIT and others in forming the MLPerf (mlperf.org) effort to standardize on AI/ML performance and systems evaluation. We have published our AI/ML research in academic avenues such as NIPS and SysML, and have contributed significant code to the Kubeflow project.

On the networking side, we have assisted in the formation of the Linux Foundation for Networking (LFN) and have been Platinum members since its inception, contributing quite significantly to various projects such as OpenDaylight and FD.io. We have published a significant amount of our research findings in various IEEE and ACM conferences and papers.

This would all be moot if we don’t walk the walk together with our customers and help them evolve as well. The Cisco DevNet group was created for that very mission, and just recently, DevNet has released curriculum and certification to help our customers in their skill-set journey.

Finally, and most importantly, we run some of the world’s largest SaaS offers in a cloud-native way. Meraki, Umbrella and WebEx are just some cloud-native SaaS production stacks that influence our software and hardware product design and operational paradigm shifts.

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