Answering The Big Three Data Science Questions At Cisco

Data Science Applied In Business

In the past decade, there has been an explosion in the application of data science outside of academic realms. The use of general, statistical, predictive machine learning models has achieved high success rates across multiple occupations including finance, marketing, sales, and engineering, as well as multiple industries including entertainment, online and store front retail, transportation, service and hospitality, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing and many others. The applications of data science seem to be nearly endless in today’s modern landscape, with each company jockeying for position in the new data and insights economy. Yet, what if I told you that companies may be achieving only a third of the value they could be getting with the use of data science for their companies? I know, it sounds almost fantastical given how much success has already been achieved using data science. However, many opportunities for value generation may be getting over looked because data scientists and statisticians are not traditionally trained to answer some of the questions companies in industry care about.

Most of the technical data science analysis done today is either classification (labeling with discrete values), regression (labeling with a number), or pattern recognition. These forms of analysis answer the business questions ‘can I understand what is going on’ and ‘can I predict what will happen next’. Examples of questions are ‘can I predict which customers will churn?’, ‘can I forecast my next quarter revenue?’, ‘can I predict products customers are interested in?’, ‘are there important customer activity patterns?’, etc… These are extremely valuable questions to companies that can be answered by data science. In fact, answering these questions is what has caused the explosion in interest in applying data science in business applications. However, most companies have two other major categories of important questions that are being totally ignored. Namely, once a problem has been identified or predicted, can we determine what’s causing it? Furthermore, can we take action to resolve or prevent the problem?

I start this article discussing why most data driven companies aren’t as data driven as they think they are. I then introduce the idea of the 3 categories of questions companies care about the most (The Big 3), discuss why data scientists have been missing these opportunities. I then outline how data scientists and companies can partner to answer these questions.

Why Even Advanced Tech Companies Aren’t as Data Driven As They Think They Are.

Many companies want to become more ‘data driven’, and to generate more ‘prescriptive insights’. They want to use data to make effective decisions about their business plans, operations, products and services. The current idea of being ‘data driven’ and ‘prescriptive insights’ in the industry today seems to be defined as using trends or descriptive statistics about about data to try to make informed business decisions. This is the most basic form of being data driven. Some companies, particularly the more advanced technology companies go a step further and use predictive machine learning models and more advanced statistical inference and analysis methods to generate more advanced descriptive numbers. But that’s just it. These numbers, even those generated by predictive machine learning models, are just descriptive (those with a statistical background must forgive me for the overloaded use of the term ‘descriptive’). They may be descriptive in different ways, such as machine learning generating a predicted number about something that may happen in the future, while a descriptive statistic indicates what is happening in the present, but these methods ultimately focus on producing a number. To take action to bring about a desired change in an environment requires more than a number. It’s not enough to predict a metric of interest. Businesses want to use numbers to make decisions. In other words, businesses want causal stories. They want to know why a metric is the way it is, and how their actions can move that metric in a desired direction. The problem is that classic statistics and data science falls short in pursuit of answers to these questions.

Take the example diagram shown in figure 1 below. Figure 1 shows a very common business problem of predicting the risk of a customer churning. For this problem, a data scientist may gather many pieces of data (features) about a customer and then build a predictive model. Once a model is developed, it is deployed as a continually running insight service, and integrated into a business process. In this case, let’s say we have a renewal manager that wants to use these insights. The business process is as follows. First, the automated insight service that was deployed gathers data about the customer. It then passes that data to the predictive model. The predictive model then outputs a predicted risk of churn number. This number is then passed to the renewal manager. The renewal manager then uses their gut intuition to determine what action to take to reduce the risk of churn. This all seems straightforward enough. However, we’ve broken the chain of being data driven. How is that you ask? Well, our data driven business process stopped at the point of generating our churn risk number. We simply gave our churn risk number to a human, and they used their gut intuition to make a decision. This isn’t data driven decision making, this is gut driven decision making. It’s a subtle thing to notice, so don’t feel too bad if you didn’t see it at first. In fact, most people don’t recognize this subtlety. That’s because it’s so natural these days to think that getting a number to a human is how making ‘data driven decisions’ works. The subtlety exists because we are not using data and statistical methods to evaluate the impact of actions the human can take on the metric they care about. A human sees a number or a graph, and then *decides* to take *action*. This implies they have an idea about how their *action* will *effect* the number or graph that they see. Thus, they are making a cause and effect judgement about their decision making and their actions. Yet, they aren’t using any sort of mathematical methods for evaluating their options. They are simply using their personal judgement to make a decision. What can end up happening in this case is that a human may see a number, make a decision, and end up making that number worse.

Let’s take the churn risk example again. Let’s say the customer is 70% likely to churn and that they were likely to churn because their experience with the service was poor, but assume that the renewal manager doesn’t know this (this too is actually a cause and effect statement). Let’s also say that a renewal manager sends a specially crafted renewal email to this customer in an attempt to reduce the likelihood of churn. That seems like a reasonable action to take, right? However, this customer receives the email, and is reminded of how bad their experience was, and is now even more annoyed with our company. Suddenly the likelihood to churn increases to 90% for this customer. If we had taken no action, or possibly a different action (say connecting them with digital support resources) then we would have been better off. But without an analysis of cause and effect, and without systems that can analyze our actions and prescribe the best ones to take, we are gambling with the metrics we care about.

Figure 1

So how can we attempt to solve this problem? We need to incorporate mathematical models and measurement into the business process after the number is generated. We need to collect data on what actions are being taken, measure their relationship with the metrics we care about, and then optimize over our actions using causal inference models and AI systems. Figure 2 below shows how we can insert an AI system into the business process to help track, measure, and optimize the actions our company is taking. Using a combination of mathematical analysis methods, we can begin to optimize the entire process using data science end to end. The stages of this process can be abstracted and generalized as answering 3 categories of questions companies care about. Those 3 categories are described in the next section.

Comparing Machine Learning to Causal Analysis (Inference)

To get a better understanding of what machine learning does and where it falls short, we introduce figure 3 and figure 4 below. Figure 3 and Figure 4 both describe the problem space of understanding cancer. Machine learning can be used to do things like predict whether or not a patient will get cancer given characteristics that have been measured about them. Figure 3 shows this by assigning directed arrows from independent variables to the dependent variable (in this case cancer). These links are associative by their construction. The main point is that machine learning focuses on numbers and the accurate production of a number. This can in many cases be enough to gain a significant amount of value. For example, predicting the path of a hurricane has value on it’s own. There exists no confusion about what should be done given the prediction. If you are in the predicted path of the hurricane, the action is clearly to get out of the way. Sometimes however, we want to know why something is happening. Many times we want to play ‘what-if’ games. What if the patient stopped smoking? What if the patient had less peer pressure? To answer these questions, we need to perform a causal analysis.

Figure 3

Figure 4 below shows a visual example of what causal analysis provides. Causal analysis outputs stories, not just numbers. The diagram shows the directed causal links between all variables in an environment. For example, given this diagram anxiety causes smoking. Causal stories are important any time we or our business stakeholders want to take action to improve the environment. The causal story allows us to quantify cause and effect relationships, play what-if scenarios, and perform root-cause analysis. Machine learning falls short of being able to do this because these all require a modeling of cause and effect relationships.

What Are the Big 3?

Figure 5

Figure 5 above describes what ‘The Big 3’ questions companies care about are. The big 3 questions seem fairly obvious. In fact, these questions are at the foundation of most of problem solving in the real world. Yet, almost all data science in industry today revolves around answering only the first question. What most data scientists understand as supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning revolves around answering what is happening or what will happen. Even with something like a product recommendation system (which you might believe prescribes something because of the term ‘recommend’), we only know what products a customer is interested in (thus it’s only an indication of interest, not a reason for interest). We don’t know the most effective way to act on that information. Should we send an ad? Should we call them? Do certain engagements with them cause a decrease their chances of purchase? To answer what is *causing* something to happen, we need to rely on foundational work in the area of Causal Inference developed by researchers like Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, Judea Pearl, Donald B. Rubin, Paul Holland, and many others. Once we understand what is causing a metric we care about, we can at least begin to think intelligently about the actions we can take to change those metrics. This is where the third question mentioned in figure 3 above comes in. To answer this question we can rely on a wide variety of techniques that have been developed including causal inference for the cause and effect relationship between actions and the metrics they are supposed to affect, statistical decision theory, decision support systems, control systems, reinforcement learning, and game theory.

Figure 6

Figure 6 above breaks down some of the methods in a more technical way. The methodology column outlines the major methods, fields, and approaches that can be in general used each of the big 3 questions in turn. The algorithms column lists some specific algorithms that may be applied to answer each of the big 3 questions. While some of these algorithms should be familiar to the average data scientist (deep neural networks, random forests, etc.), others are maybe only known in passing (multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning, etc). Still more algorithms are likely to be totally new to some data scientists (Difference in Differences, Propensity Score Matching, etc). The main paper delves into each question and the important technical details of the methods used to answer each question. It’s very important to understand these methods, particularly for performing causal analysis and optimizing actions. These methods are highly nuanced, with many difference kinds of assumptions. Naively applying these methods without understanding their limitations and assumptions will almost certainly lead to incorrect conclusions.

Example Use Case for Renewals.

A well known question, in which we have applied the big 3 methodology, is for understanding Cisco product and service renewals. Understanding and predicting renewals is a prime example of how many companies are attempting to get value through data science. The problem is also typically referred to as predicting churn, churn risk prediction, predicting attrition. Focusing on renewals is also useful for demonstration purposes because most of the data science applied to problems of this kind fall short of providing full value. That’s because renewals is a problem where providing a number is not the goal. Simply providing likelihood of a customer to renew is not enough. The company wants to **do** something about this. The company wants to take action to cause an increase in the likelihood to renew. For this, and any other time where the goal is to **do** something, we rely on causal inference and methods for optimizing actions.

Question 1: What is happening or will happen?

As we’ve already stated, the main question that is typically posed to a team of data scientists is ‘Can we accurately predict which customers will renew and which ones won’t?’ While this is a primary question asked by the business, there are many other questions that fall into the area of prediction and pattern mining including,

1. How much revenue can we expect from renewals? What does the distribution look like?

2. What’s the upper/lower bound on the expected revenue predicted by the models?

3. What are the similar attributes among customers likely to churn versus not churn?

4. What are the descriptive statistics for customers likely to churn vs not churn collectively, in each label grouping, and in each unsupervised grouping?

Each of the above questions can be answered systematically by framing them as problems either in prediction or pattern mining, and by using the wide variety of mathematical methods found in the referenced materials in the main paper here. These are the questions and methods data scientists are most familiar, and will most commonly be answered for a business.

Question 2: Why is this happening or going to happen?

Given this first question, the immediate next question is why. Why are customers likely or not likely to churn? For each question that we can build a model for, we can also perform a causal analysis. Thus, we can already potentially double the value that a data science project returns by simply adding on a causal analysis to each predictive model built. It’s important to bring up again that this question is so important that most data scientists are either answering it incorrectly, or are misrepresenting the information from statistical associations.

Specifically, when a data scientist is asked the question of why a customer is likely to churn, they almost exclusively turn to feature importance and local models such as LIME, SHAP, and others. These methods for describing the reason for a prediction are almost always incorrect because there is a disconnect between what the business stakeholder is asking for and what the data scientist is providing because of two different interpretations of the term ‘why’. Technically, one can argue that feature importance measures what features are important to ‘why’ a model makes a prediction, and this would be correct. However, a business stakeholder usually wants to know ‘what is causing the metric itself’ and not ‘what is causing the metric prediction’. The business stakeholder wants to know the causal mechanisms for why a metric is a particular number. This is something that feature importance absolutely does not answer. The stakeholder wants to use the understanding of the causal mechanisms to take an action to change the prediction to be more in their favor. This requires a causal analysis. However, most data scientists simply take the features with highest measured importance and present them to the stakeholder as though they are the answer to their causal question. This is objectively wrong, yet is time and again presented to stakeholders by seasoned statisticians and data scientists.

The issue is compounded by the further confusion added by discussions around ‘interpretable models’ and by the descriptions of feature importance analysis. LIME describes it’s package as ‘explaining what machine learning classifiers (or models) are doing’. While still a technically correct statement, these methods are being used to incorrectly answer causal questions, leading stakeholders to take actions that may have the opposite effect of what they intended.

While we’ve outlined the main causal question, there are a number of questions that can also be asked, and corresponding analysis that can be performed including,

1. How are variables correlated with each other and the churn label? (A non-causal question)

2. What are the important features for prediction in a model in general? (A non-causal question)

3. What are the most important features for prediction for an individual? Do groupings of customers with locally similar relationships exist? (A non-causal question)

4. What are the possible confounding variables? (A causal question)

5. After controlling for confounding variables, how do the predictions change? (A non-causal question benefiting from causal methods)

6. What does the causal bayes net structure look like? What are all of the reasonable structures? (A causal question)

7. What are the causal effect estimates between variables? What about between variables and the class label? (A causal question).

Many of these questions can be answered in whole or in part by a thorough causal analysis using the methods we outlined in the corresponding causal inference section of the main paper here, and further multiply the value returned by a particular data science project.

Question 3: How can we take action to make the metrics improve?

The third question to answer is ‘what actions can a stakeholder take to prevent churn?’ This is ultimately the most valueable of the three questions. The first two question set the context for who to focus on and where to focus efforts. Answering this question provides stakeholders with a directed and statistically valid means to improve the metrics they care about given complex environments. While still challenging given the methods available today (and presented in the section on intelligent action), it provides one of the greatest value opportunities. Some other questions that can be answered related to intelligent action that stakeholders may be interested in include,

1. What variables are likely to reduce churn risk if our actions could influence them?

2. What actions have the strongest impact on the variables that are likely to influence churn risk, or to reduce churn risk directly?

3. What are the important pieces of contextual information relevant for taking an action?

4. What are the new actions that should be developed and tested in an attempt to influence churn risk?

5. What actions are counter-productive or negatively impact churn risk?

6. What does the diminishing marginal utility of an action look like? At what point should an action no longer be taken?

The right method to use for prescribing intelligent action depends largely on the problem and the environment. If the environment is complex, the risks high, and there is not much chance for an automated system to be implemented, then methods from causal inference, decision theory, influence diagrams, and game theory based analysis are good candidates. However, if a problem and stakeholder are open to the use of an automated agent to learn and prescribe intelligent actions, then reinforcement learning may be a good choice. While possibly the most valuable of the big three questions to answer, it also exists as one of the most challenging. There still many open research questions related to answering this question, but the value proposition means that it’s likely an area that will see increased industry investment in the coming years.

How We Are Improving CX By Using Data Science to Answer the Big 3 at Cisco.

Like many other companies, Cisco has many models for answering the first of the big 3 questions. The digital lifecycle journey data science team has many predictive models for understanding Cisco’s customers. This includes analysis of customer purchasing behavior, digital activity, telemetry, support interaction, and renewal activity using a wide variety of machine learning based algorithms. We also apply the latest and greatest forms of advanced statistical and deep learning based supervised learning methods for understanding and predicting the expected behavior of our customers, their interactions with Cisco, and their interactions with Cisco products and services. We go a step further in this area by attempting to quantify and predict metrics valuable to both Cisco and Cisco’s customers. For example, we predict metrics like how a customer is going to keep progressing through the expected engagement with their product over the next several days to next several weeks. This is just one of the many metrics we are trying to understand about the Cisco customer experience. Others include customer satisfaction, customer health, customer ROI, renewal metrics, and many others. These metrics allow us to understand where there may be issues with our journey so that we can start trying to apply data science methods to answer the ‘why’ and ‘intelligent action’ questions we’ve previously mentioned.

We are also using causality to attempt to understand the Cisco’s customer experience, and what causes a good or bad customer experience. We go a step further by trying to complete the causal chain of reasoning to quantify how a customer experience causes Cisco’s business metrics to rise and fall. For example, we’ve used causal inference methods to measure the cause and effect aspects of customer behavior, product utilization, and digital engagements on a customer’s likelihood to renew Cisco services. Using causal inference, we are gaining deeper insights into what is causing our customers and Cisco to succeed or fail, and are using that information to guide our strategy for maximizing the customer experience.

Finally, to answer the third of the big three questions, we are employing causality, statistical decision theory, intelligent agent theory, and reinforcement learning to gain visibility to the impact our activities have on helping our customers and improving Cisco’s business metrics, and to learn to prescribe optimal actions over time to maximize these metrics. We have developed intelligent action systems that we working to integrate with our digital email engagements journeys to optimize our interactions with customers to help them achieve a return on investment. We are, in general, applying this advanced intelligent agent system to quantify the impact of our digital interactions, and to prescribe the right digital customer engagements to have, with the most effective content, at the right time, in the right order, personalized to each and every individual customer.

Why Many Data Scientists Don’t Know the Big 3, or How to Answer Them.

Those learned readers experienced with data science may be asking themselves, ‘is anything new being said here’? It’s true that no new technical algorithm, mathematical analysis, or in depth proof is being presented. I’m not presenting some new mathematical modeling method, or some novel comparison of existing methods. What is new is how I’m framing the problems for data science in industry, and the existing methodologies that can start to solve those problems. Causal inference has been used heavily in medicine for observational studies where controlled trials aren’t feasible, and for things like adverse drug effect discovery. However, Causal Inference hasn’t received wide spread application in areas outside of the medical, economic, or social science fields yet. The idea of prescribed actions is also something that isn’t totally new. Prescribed actions can be thought of as just a restatement of the field of control systems, decision analysis, and intelligent agent theory. However, the utilization of these methods for completing the end-to-end data driven methodology for business hasn’t received wide spread application in industry applications. Why is this? Why aren’t data scientists and businesses working together to frame all of their problems this way?

There could be a couple of reasons for this. The most obvious answer is that most data scientists are trained to answer the first of the big 3 questions. Most data scientists and statisticians are trained on statistical inference, classification, regression, and general unsupervised learning methods like clustering and anomaly detection. Statistical methods like causal inference aren’t widely known, and are therefore not widely taught. Register with any online course, university, or other platform for learning about data science and machine learning and you’ll be hard pressed to find discussions about identifying causal patterns in data sets. The same goes for the ideas of intelligent agents, control systems, and reinforcement learning to a lesser degree. These methods tend to be relegated to domains that have simulators and a tolerance for failure. Thankfully there is less of a gap for these methods. They typically are given their own special courses in either machine learning, electronics, and signals and systems processing curriculums.

Another possible explanation may be that many data scientists in industry tend to be enamored with the latest and greatest popular algorithm or methodology. As math and tech nerds we become enamored with the technical intricacies of how things work, particularly mathematical algorithms and methodologies. We tend to develop models and then go looking for solutions rather than the other way around, potentially blinding us to the methods in data science that can provide business value time and time again.

Yet another explanation may be that many data scientists are not well versed enough in statistics and the statistical literature. Many data scientists are asked questions about how a predictive model produced a number. For example, in our churn risk problem, renewal managers typically want to know why someone is at risk. The average data scientist hears this, and then uses methods like feature importance and more interpretable models to answer this question. However this doesn’t really answer the actual question being asked. The data scientist provides what might be important associations between model inputs and the predicted metric, but this doesn’t provide the information the renewal manager wants. They want to know about information they can act on, which requires cause and effect analysis. This is a classic case of ‘correlation is not causation’ that everyone seems to know but can still trip up even statistically minded data scientists. It’s such an issue that many companies I’ve talked with that claim to provide ‘next best actions’ are statistically invalid (mainly because they use feature importance and sensitivity analysis type methods instead of understanding basic counter factual analysis and confounding variables).

Moving forward the data science community operating in industry domains will become more aware of the big 3 questions and the analysis methods that can be performed to answer them. Companies that can quickly realize value from answering these questions using data science will be at the head of the pack in the emerging data science and insights economy. Companies that focus on answering all of the big 3 questions will have a distinct competitive advantage, and will have transformed themselves to be truly data driven.

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Cut the Hybrid Cloud Cord with Cisco’s Cloud Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) cloud first, cloud only solution

Desire to have a true multicloud environment without running your Cisco Network Fabric in a Hybrid Model?  In September 2019 Cisco Launched it Cloud ACI cloud first, cloud only for customers designing, delivering and running their application environment completely in the cloud.

Why cloud first/cloud only?

You must have heard cloud native and cloud born to describe types of applications, services and even entire businesses and companies. It is all about gaining competitive advantage while utilizing what an elastic cloud infrastructure has to offer in terms of speed, agility and efficiencies. In a similar vein, the concept behind a cloud first approach is when any new IT project, refresh or replacement is designed and developed it is done so in a cloud service providers platform vs. on-premises.  When a company chooses a philosophy of cloud only, it means that all of its IT is run in a cloud service providers platform or multiple cloud service providers.  This is a change from traditional Hybrid model and works for some company’s but not others.

Our Journey to Cloud First/Cloud Only – What is Cisco’s Cloud ACI?

Cisco Cloud ACI is a comprehensive solution for simplified operations, automated network connectivity, consistent policy management, and visibility for multiple on-premises data centers and public clouds or multicloud environments.  The solution captures business and user intents and translates them into native policy constructs for applications deployed across various cloud environments. It uses a holistic approach to enable application availability and segmentation for bare-metal, virtualized, containerized, or microservices-based applications deployed across multiple cloud domains.  The common policy and operating model drastically reduce the cost and complexity in managing multicloud deployments. It provides a single management console to configure, monitor, and operate multiple disjoint environments spread across multiple clouds. It provides a controller that is natively constructed in the cloud service providers platform, the Cisco Cloud Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).  At the time of writing, Cloud ACI was available on AWS and Microsoft Azure with plans for Google Cloud.

AWS and Azure

Cloud ACI provides a common policy abstraction and consumes AWS and Microsoft Azure public APIs to deliver policy consistency and segmentation. As such, Cloud ACI is not confined to bare-metal instances in AWS or Microsoft Azure and does not require deployment of agents in cloud workloads to achieve segmentation.

With Cisco Cloud ACI, customers can carry all their network and security policies across data centers, colocations, and clouds. Cisco ACI automates cross-domain service chaining of application traffic across physical and virtual L4-L7 devices to scale, and seamlessly integrates bare-metal servers, virtual machines, and containers under a single policy framework.

In addition, Cloud ACI on AWS will be integrated with the AWS Ingress Routing solution, AWS Transit Gateway and with AWS Outposts.

As the industry’s most deployed, open SDN platform, Cisco delivers advanced capabilities on AWS and Microsoft Azure that simplify multicloud deployments.

Endless possibilities with Cloud First, Cloud Only

With cloud first/only, we are helping you to shatter the traditional constraints of on-prem vs cloud comparison as in one or the other and we provide this unprecedented choice for any devops, cloudops or netops teams to choose from. allowing you to seamlessly use the all familiar IaaS cloud service provider dashboards and platforms. When you choose a philosophy of cloud only, it means that all of your IT is run in your cloud service providers platform or with multiple cloud service providers, without on-premises workloads.  This is a change from traditional Hybrid model and works for some company’s but not others. This also means that when business requirements or dynamics change and when you need to bring some workloads to on-prem into your data center, you can do so by extending your Cloud ACI cloud first security, policy and management constructs into on-prem ACI fabric environment from single pane of glass

Cisco’s Cloud ACI Cloud First solution

The Cloud First uncouples the solution from the on-premises data center and allows you to securely connect and segment workloads not only in the public cloud, but also across public clouds.  Thus, the solution is no longer locked into the traditional Hybrid model that requires a controller on-premises and in the cloud service provider platform offering our industry leading Cisco Cloud ACI multicloud networking to customers that are moving to a cloud first or a cloud only approach.

Benefits of Cisco Cloud ACI Cloud First/Only

◉ Ultimate flexibility for your needs regardless of your cloud strategy initiation point e.g. on-prem to cloud or cloud to on-prem

◉ Seamlessly bridge the connectivity, security and services gap between your on-prem and cloud environments

◉ Constant Elasticity – As your workload move from cloud to cloud for efficiencies your policies follow giving you true multicloud capabilities.

◉ Reach that elusive Business Continuity and Disaster Recover in the cloud.

If you are considering move to a cloud first or cloud only approach, or if you have already implemented one, think about how you will manage the fabric and all your policies between clouds.  Download this Solution Overview of Cloud ACI to get a better understanding of our vision of the cloud.

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No shame, no stigma: Ending the mental health taboo

We want everyone to know that it’s okay to not be okay. Cisco is changing the conversation about mental health issues within our company.

Over the past year, Cisco has made it a priority to not only end the taboo against talking about mental health, but encourage people to ask for help. It all started with an email. In 2018, in the face of growing concerns about mental health in society, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins sent an email to all Cisco employees. In it, he expressed Cisco’s concern for those who are struggling, sharing that no one needs to go it alone. The response was overwhelming. Robbins received more than 100 replies from employees saying thanks and sharing stories of themselves and their loved ones. Since then, even more people have courageously spoken about personal struggles in company blog posts and the Cisco Beat. This response has awakened us to an issue that wasn’t being addressed.

Consider the statistics: about one in five U.S. adults lives with a mental health condition. Yet many people are still uncomfortable talking about these issues. Cisco is breaking the silence. We want everyone to know that it’s okay to not be okay. By decreasing the stigma and broadening the resources we offer, we hope to encourage people to get the help they need. And change the conversation about mental health across our industry.

Here are some ways we’re increasing awareness:

• The Safe to Talk community on Cisco’s intranet includes videos, links to internal and external resources, and employee stories

• On Leader Day, we trained leaders across Cisco on how to recognize signs of mental illness and support their teams

• Our CEO has written, spoken, and tweeted publicly about the importance of this issue

• In the U.K., mental health “first aiders” help fellow employees access resources

Mental health initiatives:

• Improving access to care in our largest U.S. medical plans. Employees will now pay the same coinsurance, whether they go in or out of network for mental health treatment

• Offering confidential 24/7 visits with counselors as part of our global Employee Assistance Program, and in-person visits in our LifeConnections health centers. We increased the number of free visits to 10 in the U.S. to align with what we offer globally

• Continuing our support as founder of Connected North, which uses Cisco collaboration technology to deliver mental wellness programming to remote, underserved communities in Canada

Plans for every family

Cisco’s global benefits are designed to support employees and their loved ones through all stages of life. Our comprehensive benefits package includes medical, dental, and vision plans; disability coverage; and life insurance to help employees stay healthy and secure their families’ well-being.

Caring for one’s health can also mean having someone to talk to who can offer advice and support. Our global Expert Medical Opinion program offers peace of mind in the face of a major medical diagnosis or treatment decision, including those related to mental health. A simple phone call connects employees and eligible family members, including parents and in-laws, to a leading physician in the specialty they need for an expert second opinion at no cost to them.

Similarly, our global Employee Assistance Program helps employees and families better manage family issues, relationship struggles, financial issues, anxiety, stress, and more. Visits are free and confidential. As of October 2019, we increased the number of covered visits in the U.S. from eight to 10 sessions per concern, in alignment with what is available globally. Employees pay the same coinsurance for in- or out-of-network mental health treatment, should they need additional care, through our largest medical plans.

Mental health is health and Cisco aims to treat it that way.

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The Digital Readiness Index: transforming economies through technology

Advances in data and technology have the potential to create a new kind of economic divide, one separating those with digital capabilities from those without. Cisco wants to help more countries and states get ahead. We’re doing so with our Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program, which acts upon research insights from our Digital Readiness Index. Through CDA, we partner with governments, industry, and academia to create jobs and innovate with technology. To date, we have 370 projects active or completed in the areas of transportation, smart cities, healthcare, cybersecurity, and education. We begin a partnership by meeting with a country or state leader and finding where Cisco’s capabilities and a population’s needs align. Then, we provide technology, and just as important, knowledge. We help communities educate the next generation of tech professionals through:

◉ Cisco Networking Academy. Equipping students with real-world skills and career connections in fast-growing IT fields.

◉ Innovation Centers. Spaces where local innovation ecosystems can flourish and innovators can exchange ideas.

◉ University Investments. Sponsorships that allow Cisco to not only foster innovation, but also get access to new ideas.

How the program promotes environmental sustainability

As countries grow and develop, they generally pollute more. By applying digitization and IoT solutions to cities, Cisco, along with partners, can begin to break this cycle. For example:

◉ Smart parking solutions in Paris have reduced congestion by 30 percent

◉ Las Vegas is exploring the use of sensors to route autonomous shuttles to public transit stops based on demand

◉ Bucharest, Romania, achieved 75 percent energy savings with smart lighting, including LEDs and motion sensors

Socioeconomic research

A key input to our social investment strategy is Cisco’s original research. This is conducted in partnership with leading research and advisory companies and world-renowned academic institutions. We believe that our research can contribute to the dialogue about technology’s future impact. We want to understand: what will the digital revolution bring? And how can Cisco make strategic investments to help individuals thrive?

Our research also ensures the relevance of our investment focus areas, such as Cisco Networking Academy, critical human needs, educational opportunity, and economic empowerment. Our research helps heads of state, universities, educators, and nonprofit leaders set the direction for social investments and program development. For example, our research is designed to help states and nations:

◉ Predict the digital skills needed and the most effective ways to address skills gaps and job displacement

◉ Pinpoint the supply and demand of skilled labor in specific regions

◉ Assess their digital readiness and understand key interventions needed to improve

◉ Rethink education systems and partnerships to deliver graduates with the skills necessary for the jobs of the future

◉ Realize the benefits of digitization for all socioeconomic groups

We have presented our findings at the World Economic Forum (WEF), International Society for Technology in Education, Cisco Live, Networking Academy partner conference, and other venues.

Recent research

Our current research examines what it means to be digitally ready and how best to help individuals and countries thrive in the digital world. To uncover key insights and build our understanding of what it means for a country to be digitally ready, we created a holistic framework and measurement model. In 2019, we refreshed and expanded this model – first developed in 2017 — to include additional countries.

The model measures digital readiness on the basis of seven components: technology infrastructure, technology adoption, human capital, basic needs, ease of doing business, business and government investment and environment for startups.

Understanding a country’s digital readiness helps give insight to what specific investments or interventions could help a country move up in their digital journey. Overall, the 2019 findings remain consistent with the 2017 results, with digital readiness scores broadly mirroring developed and emerging economies. Three stages of digital readiness emerged based on the findings. “Activate” is the lowest stage of digital readiness, “Accelerate” is the middle stage, and “Amplify” is the highest. To better understand country needs, the Accelerate stage was further divided into two sub-stages. Here’s the map of countries identified by digital readiness:

Countries with higher digital readiness have higher levels of GDP per capita and tend to be more productive and prosperous, as measured against the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Index. Countries with higher digital readiness also tend to have a healthier natural environment and vital ecosystem as measured against Yale’s Environmental Performance Index.

Cisco Global Digital Readiness Index Digital Readiness scores reveal which countries are most digitally ready and which are less so, presenting opportunities for local government, industry, educational institutions, and community organizations to work together to help create an inclusive digital economy. The framework to measure digital readiness can also be applied to examine the level of digital readiness of states, territories, regions, and/or provinces within a country. In February 2018, the framework was applied to Australian states and territories. Key government and policymakers used the results to inform investment across the states. The findings were shared to help maximize digital inclusion and show how Australia can move further toward becoming a more digitally inclusive society.

We also made progress in FY19 on research to better understand the landscape of job opportunities resulting from digitization. In 2014, in partnership with Gartner, we studied job digitization and sought to understand the skills and competencies needed. The most recent study takes a broader view by expanding to roles driving digital transformation.

As a larger proportion of businesses transform digitally, the number of roles driving digital transformation will become a larger proportion of total workers. Technologies such as AI, cloud, and IoT are enabling digital change and impacting the future of business, which in turn is transitioning all organizations into digital and technology companies. The research identified 28 digital-related job roles, which align to five general job functions that are critical for driving digital business. The skills and competencies necessary to be successful in these 28 job roles were also identified. They include broad skills such as networking, security and privacy, business orientation, and analytical skills. Specialized skills in the areas of networking, software development, analytics/IoT, and security will also be crucial. The research found that a combination of critical workforce competencies, broad skills, and technical skills are needed to build a well-rounded employee in the age of digital transformation.

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Do I really need additional email security when using Office 365?

This is probably the most common question I get asked today!

What customers are really asking is “Can I rely on the built-in security capabilities in Office 365 or do I still need to run a 3rd party email security solution such as a Secure Email Gateway?” And the answer — well that depends; every customer’s environment is different.

Do I have to go to the Cloud?

But first, let’s get the most common misconception out of the way. While it is more efficient to run your email security gateway in the cloud, close to your Office 365 tenancy, there is actually no technical reason why you can’t continue using your current on-premise email security appliances to also protect Office 365, during the migration and even afterwards. After all, it is just a matter of MX record addressing and routing, or in other words ensuring you have all the connections between your on-premise email security gateway which would be responsible for receiving all incoming email and Office 365 which would be hosting your users inboxes set correctly. Sure, this isn’t the most efficient method as you are tromboning or hair-pining traffic up and down and most organizations would only run in this mode for the time frame of the migration. If you already own the solution and have staff trained to support and manage it, it makes sense to see what value it adds to Office 365 first before you consider migrating to a cloud email platform, don’t change too much at the same time, let the Office 365 migration settle in first.

How to Answer the Question – For Your Environment

What a customer needs to do, whether its related to the Cisco Email Security solution or any other 3rd party solution, is to consider all the areas of Office 365 where these 3rd party solutions can supplement the base capabilities of Office 365. Don’t just ‘tick-box compare’ features. Look at all features and understand how they work. Can the Office 365 features do everything I need today and what I might need it to do tomorrow? Consider how you can address any gaps and what it means for your organization.

One example of how 3rd party email security gateways can add value to Office 365 is to consider spam quarantine management. In Office 365 there are essentially two ways that a user can get access to and manage quarantined email that have been classified as false positives. The most common method is via the Junk folder in their Outlook client, it can be difficult to search but generally works well. The second method is a web-based end-user quarantine system. Confusing, but the main issue is that there are very few categories of spam in Office 365. Either an email is categorized as spam or its not and this causes an issue on providing end-user spam management. There are very few controls about what end-users have access to and what they do not. Ideally, you’d likely rather not want your end-users making decisions around whether to release potentially malicious or inappropriate/pornographic content, you have to ensure you are providing a safe working environment for all employees.

Clearly security is the most important area of capability where we can supplement the core capabilities in Office 365. We have had many customers decide to just rely on Office 365 for email security only to come back several months later. What we have seen as a very common theme across these customers is that the first impact they see is at the help-desk which was not expected. The issue is that they have changed out one of the core security technologies that the organization had probably been using for years and become accustomed to, the spam detection engine. Most of the leading email security providers do a pretty good job today, I couldn’t tell you the last time I had a spam message in my inbox. Suddenly the new spam detection engine is letting through some spam, users can’t remember what to do with spam, so they call the help-desk, all at once! Then after that initial rush, end-users start to notice some email possibly missing and now the help-desk are doing (learning in a hurry) message tracking looking for false positives.

A perfect example of a misstep many organizations make by doing a ‘tick-box’ comparison is that a feature like a spam detection engine can have significantly different capabilities depending on the vendor. Cisco Email Security has been innovating our email security solution for over 20 years. Our world class threat intelligence is supplied by the largest non-government threat research organization in the world, Talos.

There are many other areas in email security to consider; known malware recognition, unknown or suspect attachment handling, embedded URL handling, support for external threat intelligence and active content disarm and reconstruction. All these functions make meaningful differences in keeping the bad stuff out and your inboxes safe.

Also consider how easy your system is to manage. What reports have you come to rely on in your old systems, what are your managers expecting to see? Have you tested Office 365 to see what it’s like to do message tracking? Have you created email policies?

How confident are you in the capability of the policy engine? Are you even confident that you can recreate all your current email policy in Office 365? What policies will you need in the future? In our experience, in addition to reporting, this is the other area often not tested extensively enough in initial evaluations. With the growing amount of regulatory compliance regulations, having an advanced policy engine with plenty of policy conditions and actions coupled with significant flexibility is more likely to support your efforts. While the Cisco policy engine currently has 24 conditions and 26 actions within its content filtering policy engine, it’s what those options are that make the difference. For example, full control over adding/editing header information and the ability to reroute email based on policy are a couple of options that we see organizations using for a variety of business enablement projects. Our customers are getting real business value out of their email security solution, and the options themselves; another example of how dangerous it is to box tick!

Suggested Decision Process

So now that we have some understanding of what we should be looking at, what’s the best way to go about this analysis? Below are a series of steps to consider to help you make an informed decision:

1. Your current email policy: This is a great opportunity to assess all the policies and settings that you are relying on now. Are they all needed going forward? What have you seen or tested for yourself that is supported by Microsoft?

2. Email security capabilities: How these technologies work on your email flow is what is important. There are many ways of validating this by either running different solutions in a monitoring only mode or Bcc’ing/copying email to the solution under test for analysis and then deletion. Is Office 365 by itself blocking everything you need? If it is missing some email, is that critical for your organisation? What sort of impact could result in certain types of email getting through to end-users? (Missed spam, malicious attachments, inappropriate content, malicious URL’s, advanced phishing attacks etc?).

3. Advancing Phishing detection: Phishing has been a scourge for years because it is constantly evolving. The latest iteration, BEC or Business Email Compromise, has financially impacted many organisations large and small all around the world. BEC is difficult to detect, includes no attachments or embedded URL’s and is sent in low numbers and in a very targeted way. Has your company had issues? Do you know someone who has? What could the impact be for you? Does your current solution have any specialist support for BEC? Have you measured how much that is catching and are you sure that Office 365 would be able to detect and block these even using the advanced phishing capabilities in Microsoft’s ATP optional add-on? This in particular is a great area to potentially leverage a specialist solution such as Cisco’s Advanced Phishing Protection module which can work in any email environment.

4. Management: How easy is the solution to use? Can you track a message all the way through the scanning process? Can the search engine easily find and release quarantined email? Are you using end-user spam management now? Do you want to continue to use it? Will the capability offered in Office 365 meet your HR driven employee policies and requirements?

5. Reporting: Do you have any automatic scheduled reports being sent within your organization; perhaps to senior management? Can these be replicated within just Office 365? What reporting, or compliance auditing requirements can you see being required in the short term? Are these reports supported?

6. External Domain Protection: Becoming a more common inclusion for corporate messaging teams, organizations are using DMARC and related standards to monitor which organizations are sending email using your domain. Is your brand being negatively affected by being used in phishing attacks? While Office 365 does not offer any capability here, this is another area that can be addressed or supplemented using standalone products or solutions such as Cisco Domain Protection.

Licensing & Recommendations

For the majority of our customers, the ideal combination is Office 365 E3 with Cisco Cloud Email Security. This combination includes all the core Office 365 products supplemented with an enterprise class email security solution. The ATP features for Safe Links and Safe Attachments are easily met and exceeded in Cisco’s Cloud Email Security, this is the combination that Cisco itself runs.

Moving up to the E5 licensing tier is a difficult decision, you need to look at all the inclusions you get, which are substantial and determine what value your organisation would get out of these. From an email security & management viewpoint everything is pretty much covered with the combination recommended above except for the advanced email archiving capability if you need that over the basic option in E3.

There are also of course all the collaboration/telephony services which Cisco has great solutions for as well!

Options for Proving the Value

So how can you prove the decision you are making is the right one, or at least if you have already deployed Office 365 by itself, test to see how it is performing from a security viewpoint at least?

Cisco has an analysis tool called “Threat Analyzer for Office 365” and it works by accessing a selection on your user’s inboxes (you define which ones) via the Microsoft Graph API built into Office 365. Threat Analyzer scans these inboxes using the same email security engines that we have in our commercial offerings, looking for any email that we would have detected as Spam, Gray-mail, Malicious Email (with attachment or embedded URL) or inappropriate spam. Threat Analyzer does not do anything to this email or the inbox, it just records what the Cisco email security engines would have detected and then produces a report showing these results. From this report you can get an idea of the extra value you would get from running Cisco email security together with Office 365. However, it needs to be remembered that not all the security engines can be used (Connection filtering for example) with a configuration such as this, so your final experience would be even better than the report would suggest.

There are also other options, the recommended option would be to have Cisco email security running in front of Office 365 so it is the internet facing email server for your email domains, this way 100% of the Cisco security capability can be brought to bear. You can test this by using the default policy which would detect/block & quarantine within Cisco email security, or you simply tag email for it to be then processed by Office 365 and see the combined results. We have also seen other organizations creating a BCC rule within Office 365 to copy all email that is to be delivered to end-users also copied to Cisco email security to see what would have been blocked as well, although this also limits the security engines that can be used as it is also not internet facing, the same limitation that Threat Analyzer for Office 365 has.

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Corporate Knights and CDP Announce Global Sustainability Leaders

Earlier this week, both CDP and Corporate Knights announced the results of their 2020 assessment of thousands of global companies in the areas of climate change (CDP) and the broader topic of sustainability (Corporate Knights). At the 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos Switzerland Corporate Knights released their 2020 Global 100 ranking. This same week CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project) announced its 2019 A-List companies.

CDP A-List

Cisco’s most material environmental sustainability issue is energy and greenhouse gas emissions. As such, we’ve invested in energy efficiency and low-carbon electricity to reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We use CDP’s annual carbon questionnaire as a litmus test to gauge the effectiveness of our strategy, initiatives, and performance.

For 2019, Cisco again made CDP’s “A-List,” along with 179 other global companies out of more than 8,400 that reported climate change related carbon data. Cisco has reported to CDP every year of its existence, receiving more awards from CDP for our climate change submissions than any other North American company. We’ve included a table in our 2019 CSR Report (p. 33) summarizing our results.

Growth in companies disclosing to CDP since 2003

To drive emissions reduction, we’ve established a series of energy- and GHG-related goals that address various aspects of our business:

◉ 2019, was the second year of our third, 5-year Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions reduction goal, reducing our worldwide GHG emissions from operations by 60 percent absolute by FY22 (FY07 baseline).

◉ We continue to invest in low-carbon electricity with a goal of 85 percent renewables by FY22. In FY19 83% of our electricity use was from renewable sources. It is a significant challenge for us to get this percentage much higher because renewables aren’t yet available everywhere in the world that Cisco has owned or leased operations. Since FY16, 100 percent of our electricity use in the United States has been from renewable sources.

◉ 2019 was the second year of our 5-year product-efficiency goal to improve large rack-mounted-equipment system power efficiency—as measured from the input power from the facility to the board-mounted ASICs, memory, and other chip devices—from 77 to 87 percent by FY22 (FY16 baseline). In FY19, our average system power efficiency for large rack-mounted-equipment was 85 percent (Table 17 of our 2019 CSR Report).

◉ In 2019 we announced a new goal to reduce Cisco-related supply chain GHG emissions by 30 percent absolute by FY30 (FY19 base year).

Corporate Knights Global 100

Corporate Knights gathers environment, employee, innovation, supply chain, and financial data for their ranking. This year, Cisco was ranked #4 by Corporate Knights, the fourth year in a row Cisco has ranked in the Top 15 out of about 7,500 companies evaluated by Corporate Knights.

The Global 100 methodology now puts a greater emphasis on a “clean revenue” metric. Based on feedback from Corporate Knights, Cisco improved how we classified our revenue from all product, software and service offerings.

In the Communications Equipment industry classification, the “clean revenue” metric counts for 50 percent of the overall score, reflecting the environmental benefit companies can contribute through the products and services they sell. Our products and solutions can help our customers be more sustainable and reduce operations expenses through building energy management, remote collaboration to reduce business travel, teleworking to reduce employee commuting (and increase office consolidation), data center equipment that enables energy-efficient cloud services, and IoT and low-power network technologies for improved asset tracking and management.

About rankings and ratings

Cisco relies on the following rankings/ratings to measure our progress on sustainability:

1. S&P Global Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (World and North America), formerly RobecoSAM0

2. CDP Climate

3. Corporate Knights Global 100

4. Barron’s Most Sustainable U.S. Companies

5. WSJ Management Top 250

6. FTSE4Good

These rankings are a valuable resource to confirm our strengths and identify areas for improvement in performance and transparent report

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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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