Essential workplace skills: where to begin

I was always keen on STEM subjects at school. I loved maths. It was my strongest subject and I was the kind of student who thought you can achieve anything in the world if you put the work in. School involved a very different style of learning. For example, maths lessons would consist of being shown a problem and being given exact steps to follow in order to get the answer. Regardless of what numbers came up in that problem, you follow the same step-by-step plan and you’d always get the right outcome. This worked great for me in school, but I quickly learned that while this technique was efficient for the short-term,  for passing exams, it was  not helpful for applying that knowledge anywhere else.

For those of you reading this, you may be wondering how any of this applies to you. I aim to share some life academic, professional and technical lessons that I carry with me, lessons that guide me when things get really tough.

At university, I remember going my first maths lecture (it was Analysis I) and there were no numbers, only letters, no standard substitution, no fool-proof method to get an answer. I remember the sheer confusion I felt throughout that course. People around me didn’t seem as confused; they were asking some brilliant questions, getting all the problem sheets correct and even finding time to party every night. Maths was the one thing I thought I was good at, but at university, I really wasn’t. And I’ll be honest, this was a huge knock for me.

Lesson #1: You CAN achieve anything in the world if you put the work in and if it’s through the right methods, as opposed to the most efficient.

I had to find a whole new approach to learning the material. I had to research independently, self-teach a lot of material and I had to do it in time for the assessments and exams. Okay, I didn’t end that that term knowing everything about Analysis. But what this taught me is that I was challenging myself more than I ever had before, and this meant I could grow more quickly than I ever had before. When it came to Analysis II the following term, I was able to use those research skills and I ended up passing with enough marks to pull up my final Analysis grade to a 1st.

Lesson #2: Try new things with an open mind. Whether you end up liking it or not, there’s always something to gain.

I hadn’t really considered Computer Science much at school since there was no course on it at the time. I studied it at university with the aim of converting to a full maths course in my second year, but I really, really enjoyed it! It was practical, it was hands on. It developed familiar skills, such as problem-solving, but in a completely new context. Within the first term, I learned how to program a robot that could figure out the way out of a maze. I created my own version of Twitter. I started supporting hackathons and developing a passion for technology. I didn’t realize Lesson #2 until quite far into my degree. Had I not tried Computer Science, I probably wouldn’t be at Cisco today.

Lesson #3: For technical skills that are relevant, stay up to date by reading articles, researching online and connecting with others.

If you know your stuff about the technology you’re passionate about, it won’t be long before people know to come to you for advice and guidance around it. You can start building this by simply reading an article a week about the area of tech that interests you. You’ll probably see things that don’t make any sense. Use the resources around you, for example, Networking Academy,  to educate yourself. Another idea is to connect with others who have a similar interest; LinkedIn is great for this. Within a month, you’ll be off to a good start with foundation knowledge. Within a year, you’ll be an expert.

Cybersecurity is my favourite area of technology. If you’re interested in this too, the top areas I’d recommend looking into are:

1. Programmability & DevSecOps culture shift: Today, applications form the foundation of our digital world. If you use the Netflix app and find it really slow, you’ll probably switch to Amazon Prime or Disney+ in a heartbeat. This is an application-first world and security needs to be a part of it. DevSecOps is a culture where developers, operations and cybersecurity specialists work together to create a secure app from the ground up, with the best possible user experience for their customers.

2. Quantum Technologies and Communication: Quantum is mind-bending, it’s like an alternate reality. It brings incredibly opportunities and also some serious threats. Whilst I don’t recommend studying the ins and outs of the workings behind quantum technology (unless you’re interested in quantum physics, then you should definitely give it a go!), I would say keep an eye out on articles. There are going to be some really cool applications of quantum technology!

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Umbrella with SecureX built-in: Coordinated Protection

Cybercriminals have been refining their strategies and tactics for over twenty years and attacks have been getting more sophisticated. A successful cyberattack often involves a multi-step, coordinated effort. Research on successful breaches shows that hackers are very thorough with the information they collect and the comprehensive plans they execute to understand the environment, gain access, infect, move laterally, escalate privileges and steal data.

An attack typically includes at least some of the following steps:

◉ reconnaissance activities to find attractive targets
◉ scanning for weaknesses that present a good entry point
◉ stealing credentials
◉ gaining access and privileges within the environment
◉ accessing and exfiltrating data
◉ hiding past actions and ongoing presence

This whole process is sometime called the “attack lifecycle” or “kill chain” and a successful attack requires a coordinated effort throughout the process. The steps above involve many different elements across the IT infrastructure including email, networks, authentication, endpoints, SaaS instances, multiple databases and applications. The attacker has the ability to plan in advance and use multiple tactics along the way to get to the next step.

Security teams have been busy over the past couple of decades as well.  They have been building a robust security practice consisting of tools and processes to track activities, provide alerts and help with the investigation of incidents.  This environment was built over time and new tools were added as different attack methods were developed. However, at the same time, the number of users, applications, infrastructure types, and devices has increased in quantity and diversity.  Networks have become decentralized as more applications and data have moved to the cloud. In most instances, the security environment now includes over 25 separate tools spanning on-prem and cloud deployments. Under these conditions, it’s difficult to coordinate all of the activities necessary to block threats and quickly identify and stop active attacks.

As a consequence, organizations are struggling to get the visibility they need across their IT environment and to maintain their expected level of effectiveness. They are spending too much time integrating separate products and trying to share data and not enough time quickly responding to business, infrastructure, and attacker changes.  The time has come for a more coordinated security approach that reduces the number of separate security tools and simplifies the process of protecting a modern IT environment.

Cisco Umbrella with SecureX can make your security processes more efficient by blocking more threats early in the attack process and simplifying the investigation and remediation steps. Umbrella handles over 200 billion internet requests per day and uses fine-tuned models to detect and block millions of threats. This “first-layer” of defense is critical because it minimizes the volume of malicious activity that makes its way deeper into your environment.  By doing this, Umbrella reduces the stress on your downstream security tools and your scarce security talent.  Umbrella includes DNS Security, a secure web gateway, cloud-delivered firewall, and cloud access security broker (CASB) functionality. But no one solution is going to stop all threats or provide the quickly adapting environment described above. You need to aggregate data from multiple security resources to get a coordinated view of what’s going on in your environment but can’t sink all your operating expenses into simply establishing and maintaining the integrations themselves.

That’s where Cisco SecureX comes in. Cisco SecureX connects the breadth of Cisco’s integrated security portfolio – including Umbrella– and your other security tools for a consistent experience that unifies visibility, enables automation, and strengthens your security across network, endpoints, cloud, and applications. Let’s explore some of the capabilities of SecureX, the Cisco security platform and discuss what they mean in the context of strengthening breach defense.

◉ Visibility: Our SecureX platform provides visibility with one consolidated view of your entire security environment. The SecureX dashboard can be customized to view operational metrics alongside your threat activity feed and the latest threat intelligence. This allows you to save time that was otherwise spent switching consoles. With the Secure threat response feature, you can accelerate threat investigation and take corrective action in under two clicks.

◉ Automation: You can increase the efficiency and precision of your existing security workflows via automation to advance your security maturity and stay ahead of an ever-changing threat landscape. SecureX pre-built, customizable playbooks enable you to automate workflows for phishing and threat hunting use cases. SecureX automation allows you to build your own workflows including collaboration and approval workflow elements to more effectively operate as a team.   It enables your teams to share context between SecOps, ITOps, and NetOps to harmonize security policies and drive stronger outcomes.

◉ Integration: With SecureX, you can advance your security maturity by connecting your existing security infrastructure via out-of-the-box interoperability with third party solutions. In addition to the solution-level integrations we’ve already made available; new, broad, platform-level integrations have also been and continue to be developed. In short, you’re getting more functionality out of the box so that you can multiply your use cases and realize stronger outcomes.

Pre-built playbooks focus on common security use cases, and you can easily build your own using an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface. One example of the coordination between Umbrella and SecureX is in the area of phishing protection and investigation. Umbrella provides protection against a wide range of phishing attacks by blocking connections to known bad domains and URLs. SecureX extends this protection with a phishing investigation workflow that allows your users to forward suspicious email messages from their inbox. In addition, a dedicated inspection mailbox starts an automated investigation and enrichment process. This includes data from multiple solutions including Umbrella, email security, endpoint protection, threat response and malware analysis tools. Suspicious email messages are scraped for various artifacts and inspected in the Threat Grid sandbox. If malicious artifacts are identified, a coordinated response action, including approvals, is carried out automatically, in alignment with your regular operations process.

The SecureX platform is included with Cisco security solutions to advance the value of your investment. It connects Cisco’s integrated security portfolio, your other security tools and existing security infrastructure with out-of-the-box interoperability for a consistent experience that unifies visibility, enables automation, and strengthens your security across network, endpoints, cloud, and applications.

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Cisco and LiveAction: Better Together

Visibility into the performance of your network is of utmost importance. Consider, for example, that network traffic can occasionally become bottlenecked, degrading the user experience with cloud-based applications. In this and similar scenarios, it’s helpful to be able to see a particular network traffic flow on your WAN in real time. This is where LiveNX from LiveAction comes in. LiveNX collects data from different sources and, in a few clicks, shows how applications are performing and where traffic is flowing—without requiring a dive into a switch or router command line. This capability is hugely valuable to Cisco customers.

Cisco and LiveAction have been jointly innovating for years, ultimately with the objective of helping our mutual customers deliver better user experiences, while simplifying network performance management and troubleshooting. Today, LiveNX is deeply integrated into Cisco SD-WAN; Cisco DNA Center; and most Cisco routers, switches, and firewalls. LiveNX provides unified network monitoring across Cisco network environments such as Cisco Webex, hybrid cloud, and multidomain monitoring. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1 – A typical enterprise SD-WAN environment

As enterprises continue to migrate to Cisco SD-WAN to control and direct traffic over their wide area networks, many are turning to LiveNX to gain insights into performance, QoS policies, path routing, and traffic management complexities. These insights allow them to optimize Cisco SD-WAN, other Cisco infrastructure, and even extend visibility into multivendor network environments.

In addition, with Cisco SD-WAN now supported by Cisco IOS XE router software—enabling a large installed base of Cisco ISR, ASR and ENCS devices to deliver on Cisco SD-WAN benefits—LiveNX now offers visibility into an even broader range of devices. And LiveNX is the only Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostic (NPMD) platform to support migration to the Cisco cEdge.

Speaking tactically, enterprises can begin to realize the benefit of the Cisco and LiveAction collaboration throughout the SD-WAN journey:

◉ Day 0—Plan: Select pilot sites when planning SD-WAN deployments, identify unsanctioned applications and end users, and establish network utilization baselines to be used for rightsizing.

◉ Day 1—Verify: Use LiveNX real-time visualization to verify SD-WAN policies and prevent services from being impacted by brownouts or other abnormal events.

◉ Day 2—Operate: Monitor bandwidth and visualize path control so network administrators can manage performance and address problems before they affect users. Use business application reporting to manage and optimize voice and video communications. Easily visualize issues and make repairs with the click of a mouse.

Webex performance monitoring

Cisco Webex is simple to use, but protecting voice and video call quality across the enterprise network can be challenging. To meet this challenge, network administrators can utilize LiveNX to monitor, troubleshoot, and provision Webex QoS, helping to ensure that bandwidth is properly allocated. For example, administrators can use LiveNX to go back in time—like a “network DVR”—to analyze and troubleshoot Webex calls and address VoIP call quality issues. In addition, LiveNX can easily protect critical Webex traffic across the managed network.

Hybrid cloud monitoring and more

As organizations migrate their workloads and applications to hybrid architectures utilizing AWS and Azure, LiveNX provides end-to-end visibility of all network traffic over the public cloud network. This capability includes support for AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Azure Virtual Network (VNet) and delivers value in a number of use cases:

Cloud migration

◉ Baseline the current state of the data center network to create a migration plan.

◉ Track and display network traffic and job movement during migration.

◉ Understand, from the network perspective, what has changed in the data center post-migration.

Cost analysis

◉ Understand traffic flows to and from different cloud services, enabling more informed cost analysis and reducing the risk of budget surprises.

Operations

◉ Provide persistent monitoring of mixed hybrid and multicloud environments.

◉ Troubleshoot application and public cloud services.

Security analysis and incident response

◉ Identify inbound or outbound traffic being blocked by security group rules.

◉ Offer visibility into public cloud infrastructure from external sources by country.

◉ Enable search by service, IP, port, protocol, and location of security issues.

LiveNX monitoring goes beyond hybrid cloud, to include monitoring multivendor, multifabric, multicloud, and multitelemetry environments. In essence, it provides visibility across the most complicated enterprise networks. (See Figure 2.)

◉ Multivendor: 100+ vendors supported

◉ Multidomain: Campus, branch, data center, cloud, and WAN

◉ Multifabric: SD-Wan, SD – ACCESS, ACI

◉ Multitelemetry: SNMP, API, IPFIX, Netflow

Figure 2  LiveNX delivers multivendor, multifabric, and multicloud monitoring

The value of partnership

LiveAction is perhaps best known for visual analytics that simplify network management and enable faster troubleshooting. Cisco is well known as a market leader in networking. So it’s no surprise that the two companies have forged a partnership whose overall objective is to allow our mutual customers to optimize the value of their wide area networks.

Further validating the strength of this partnership, LiveNX is now available to Cisco sellers on the Cisco general price list.

If your success depends on the performance and security of your wide area network, take a look at how Cisco and LiveAction join innovations can support you.

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Using Wi-Fi to Help Manage the Return to the Office

In some locations around the world, buildings that were closed to slow the spread of the coronavirus are beginning to open again — slowly. Fully opening offices will take months. During the process, employers will need to monitor their workspaces closely for social and physical distancing.

A technology we already have can help: Wi-Fi. It is pervasive in our workplaces, and Wi-Fi access points can act as powerful sensors. In particular, we can use location data gathered from Wi-Fi to help manage the re-introduction of workers, customers, and visitors into our facilities.

Our tool for this is Cisco DNA Spaces, a cloud-based system that offers site-specific, location-based analytics for any network using our Catalyst, Aironet, or Meraki wireless access points. Many of our customers already have a license for this product and simply need to turn it on. For others, we offer a 90-day, no-charge trial period to use the tool. Regardless, it should take under half an hour to activate and configure.

We have added applications on to our DNA Spaces platform to provide both real-time and historical analysis tools for businesses that are reopening their offices. The technology is flexible, and the amount of detail collected can be configured by each customer – from collecting anonymous statistical counts to individually identifying people at a site.

Watch Your Workspaces

Let’s look at an example of how the new DNA Spaces applications could help a business re-open its offices to bring people back to the workplace more safely, optionally communicate with specific people as needed, and improve the new workplace over time.

In the first phase of re-opening an office, we’re going to want to bring back a small proportion of employees and track how they use the space. The concern is that even with low population density in a building, people still may be congregating in hot-spots and breaking social and physical distance guidelines. We can use Cisco DNA Spaces’ Right Now app to see if this is happening at a site.

DNA Spaces Right Now shows how many people are using your facilities at the moment.

Traditional data for building occupancy — pulled from access card badge-in records — can tell us how many people enter a building and when, but this data stream doesn’t usually monitor which parts of a building people use, nor when they leave. With Wi-Fi, we can gather much more robust data that tracks how people use, move, and occupy spaces throughout the day.

The Right Now service tracks new devices that enter a space when they connect to Wi-Fi, and by recording which access points are able to electronically “see” them, it can tell which part of the building they are in.

Businesses can use DNA Spaces in a privacy protective, fully anonymized mode (with hashed MAC addresses); in this mode, it does not record any information that could correlate device locations to specific people. It can tell a facilities manager how the workforce in a building is behaving overall, but not the identity of individuals on-site.

You can set density alerts from the Web-based service.

With this data stream, we can watch how behavior changes as we allow more people back into the office over the weeks and months of a return-to-office program. In particular, we can determine if there is an occupancy load at which people start to cluster, breaking general distancing guidelines. If and when this happens, a company can work on reconfiguring hot-spot locations, educating employees, dialing back the number of people allowed into the office, or a combination of mitigations.

Enabling this feature on a network, if it is not already turned on, takes about 30 minutes. It does not require the installation of software on end-user devices.

At Cisco, we have been using DNA Spaces in fully anonymized mode in some of our offices in South Korea and China, after testing in our San Jose buildings. We will have more to say about how these projects are progressing soon.

Data for a Changing Office

Over time, as the return-to-office program gets established, businesses will need to evaluate the new use patterns and the economics of company workplaces. With our Impact Analysis app in DNA Spaces, facilities managers across a business will be able to see how buildings and campuses are being used – not just how much they are being used. We’ll be able to provide reports on time spent in the office, building utilization, and other metrics that could inform how workplaces could get reconfigured. We think these tools will be especially important for buildings that are used by visitors and guests, like stores and schools.

DNA Spaces Impact Analysis shows how building use changes over time.

The applications to monitor building use are available now.

Meanwhile, we are investigating additional capabilities that customers could enable if we offered tracking of not just how devices move around a space in the aggregate, but whose devices they are. This more granular data would let employers contact specific employees and inform them of potential Covid-19 exposure, if necessary. Critically, these features will always be optional, and data collected in a company’s private network will always belong solely to the company that owns the network. DNA Spaces currently does not offer contact tracing to tell precisely who is near whom.

Activating Your Wi-Fi Sensors

We believe using Wi-Fi access points as sensors can provide facilities managers and business leaders with critical information that can help keep people safer, and make spaces more effective and efficient. All our tools are quick to set up, and we are making them available at no charge to all who can use them: Anyone running Cisco or Meraki wireless access points.

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Building character towards future success

Why does someone become a fashion designer? Or a scientist, an investor, or entrepreneur – or all of the above?

I don’t ever recall thinking I wanted to “be” this or that. I just wanted to do something. And then I looked up and discovered I had become something.

It is your skills and character that makes you who you are. You get to decide on which skills you have. But your character … how does that happen? Three character traits have helped me enormously in my life. I’ll share the secret to how you might be able to amplify these in yourself.

The first trait: Curiosity

My own curiosity meant I was taking risks. I hit bumps in the road, but also had great adventures. College was a huge transition for me; it allowed me to escape my old life. I went to my state’s college, the University of Maryland. It was like a sandbox to me. I was eager to try new things – which in the 1970’s was sometimes dangerous.

As a freshman, I took a job washing dishes in an algal biology lab. It wasn’t very interesting. But the lab tech next door, an older man, was using a crazy-sounding instrument called the Scanning Electron Microscope, or SEM, in the Engineering Dept. After a bit of my pestering, he took me to the SEM lab and let me watch as he looked at specimens. The microscope shot electrons onto the gold coated surface of the specimen, which allowed us to see the specimen in 3D, at a microscopic level.

Soon, I got to know the person who ran the microscope lab in that same Engineering Dept. In passing, he mentioned an upcoming three-day meeting in Chicago, with international scientists gathering to talk about Scanning Electron Microscopy!

I had to go. This was my calling. It was my curiosity talking to me.

I drove for two days, from Maryland to Chicago, and slept on the floor of a friend of a friend’s apartment to attend this meeting. I met scientists from Oxford, Cambridge, and the famed IBM Research Labs, who were involved in groundbreaking work in microscopy. I made friends with all of them, talking about the lectures, their research, and joining the group for meals.

The team from Oxford labs invited me to join them as an intern that summer, where I could work on one of three existing million-volt microscopes and help them build the first Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope, now known as a STEM instrument. I was so curious and fascinated by electron microscopy that I took all the available classes on campus in this area.

And so, by listening to my curiosity, I got the priceless experience of working with top scientists, learning about a groundbreaking new technology, and participating in its development, at one of the most respected universities in the world.

Now, my second life trait: Perseverance

Some years ago, I received a letter from a US Presidential Science Advisor thanking me for a job well done as a consultant. He said, the one thing I should be sure to pass on to my children is my perseverance. He thought it was a rare trait.

Later, as I thought back on it, my first memory with perseverance was in my first job after college. Soon after graduation, I took a job at Johnson & Johnson, establishing an electron microscope lab in one of their subsidiaries. Up to that point, my professional experiences was in government and academic environments.

Moving to a for-profit organization was confusing for me, and I didn’t feel that I fit-in. But then, I saw a notice, on the bulletin board in the lunchroom to participate in a graduate class “on the pharmaceutical industry.”

I took the GRE – which means I took the risk of applying, which led me to a degree. This laid the groundwork for what was to follow. Johnson & Johnson had a tuition reimbursement program for that MBA, but it did not extend to my job level. I was told to wait until I was in a higher position to take the program, when I could use the degree. I fought that suggestion. I talked with the head of HR to lobby for a change in policy. I ended up getting all of my tuition reimbursed. In my six years at Johnson & Johnson, I continued to persevere, and went from Research & Development, to Regulatory Affairs, and then on to finance where I did sales forecasting.

Finally, my third life trait: Innovation

My innate curiosity and asking “what might appear to be dumb” questions to understand my environment would soon open up more opportunities for me.

While at a conference for another employer, I overheard a group of people in their late twenties chatting ahead of me in the registration line. They worked on Wall Street, and I was fascinated by their conversation on industries and markets. Soon, I became close friends with that group and learned a lot from them.

After that chance encounter, I was inspired and started to look for a job on Wall Street. I quickly realized that my varied experiences were an asset in this new fiscal world.

I had no idea what investment banking was, so I met with anyone who would talk with me. As luck would have it, I ran into the Chairman of the Board from my company at a Christmas party. It was awkward to answer the question, “Where do you work?” But taking hold of my courage, I told him I worked for him and was looking for a job.

Unknown to me, over the next few days, he made some calls. Soon I had an interview at a venture capital firm. At first, I was confused because I didn’t know what venture capital was. I decided to take a leap of faith and, after many interviews, got that job.

After four years of working in venture capital, I decided to move to the other side of the table, as I realized that I wanted to be on the creative side of the equation. Over the years, I’ve founded seven companies, all of them with great teams of people. Some succeeded, and some didn’t succeed.

In the middle of that, I went back to school to earn my MFA in fashion design and spent five years running a fashion label. I didn’t realize that, while it is hard for a consumer to shop e-commerce stores and find the right clothes that will look good on them, no-one teaches designers how to fix that problem. I spent several more years experimenting with my label and eventually changed direction again entirely.

You see, prior to earning my MFA, I had owned two successful predictive modeling start-ups, and I saw similarities with the kind of problems we were solving in my eCommerce fashion company and the issues we faced in those two companies. So four-and-a-half years ago, I started up Savitude, an AI technology company, to solve the “fit” and “flatter” problem we had in our eCommerce label.

Reflecting on traits for success

Now in a reflective time of my life, I have wondered, “what has kept me going in this direction?” What keeps me doing this now? The nature of my reflection has changed, and I started to see new patterns. Not long ago, I connected my attraction to early stage startups, inventions, and inventors to my early life. I started to think I could alter my own perception of my surroundings. How and when this started, I don’t know…but I do know why.

To survive my abusive childhood, I created alternate narratives. I searched for the rules on how it could be. I wanted a copy of the “rule book” that I thought everyone was born with.

Eventually, I realized I had to write my own rule book.

If you resonate with even a small part of my story, you too can transfer the energy you spend on questions like “why didn’t I do?” into creative exploration and innovative contemplation.

I am most grateful for the perseverance this exercise has given me. And, perhaps some of you have also found the inner strength to endure difficult times. You can repurpose that strength to navigate a rewarding path.

The traits of curiosity, perseverance, and innovation have helped me enormously. I have had experiences that have made me feel small, and those memories are enduring. But in those times, I have imagined brightness in the dark, interest where was none, and the will to wake up every day, which in turn has given me the power to invent, to patent, to hire, to sell, to deposit money.

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Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire ThousandEyes, Inc. – Network Intelligence for What’s Next

Today businesses, schools and governments depend on applications and digital services more than ever. Those applications run in data centers and clouds around the world. Our users and sites are connected over broadband, SD-WAN and cellular networks. It is key for every technology group to understand that the Internet is mission critical and business critical for all of us. It is now our corporate network, and we need to have better visibility, intelligence and insights of the Internet than we ever had from private networks.

Today I’m excited to announce Cisco’s intent to acquire ThousandEyes. Headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2010, ThousandEyes provides Internet intelligence at a scale and accuracy never seen before. In a time when every meeting is held and every document is shared through connected applications, the need for ThousandEyes technology has never been so high.

ThousandEyes’ technology warns us when a user’s experience is less than ideal and can pinpoint where those failures were caused. With thousands of agents deployed throughout the Internet, ThousandEyes’ platform has an unprecedented understanding of the Internet and grows more intelligent with ever deployment. With ThousandEyes, AppDynamics and Cisco SD-WAN technology, we will have the ability to improve the performance, reliability and scalability of all the applications on which we depend so much.

ThousandEyes’ network intelligence platform focuses on the user experience and network performance. The platform gathers data from various points throughout the public Internet — from within data centers, colocation centers, campuses, branches and on end-user devices —to identify dependencies that impact service delivery. This enables businesses to see, understand and improve all our users’ digital experience.

Frequently, when acquiring important technologies like this, we try to find the right product analogy or comparison to an existing business or product. Consider this; is ThousandEyes the ultimate IP SLA for a multi-cloud, SD-WAN world?  Yes.* Does ThousandEyes give network-as-a-service offerings the visibility they need to respond proactively, now that the Internet is our Enterprise network? Yes. However, I believe more than anything, ThousandEyes is to the network what Talos is to security.

In 2013, after the acquisition of Sourcefire, we merged Sourcefire’s Vulnerability Research Team with Cisco TRAC and SecApps groups to form Cisco Talos, our security threat research team. Since then, all Cisco security products have been fueled by threat intelligence from Talos. I had an incredible view of this when Talos WannaCry signatures were pushed to Meraki MXs and we started detecting true WannaCry infiltration around the world. We were even able to reach out to those affected and help them through the mitigation process. This type of deep intelligence changed the game for our customer’s security posture. I’m incredibly excited about ThousandEyes, because ThousandEyes is Cisco’s new Internet Intelligence group. All of our networking products can become more intelligent and more proactive by leveraging this technology.

The ThousandEyes acquisition will enable deeper and broader visibility to pin-point deficiencies and improve the network and application performance across all networks your business relies on by enabling end-to-end visibility when accessing cloud applications. Internet Intelligence won’t just improve networking reliability, but end-to-end application experience. Embedding ThousandEyes technology into Cisco’s networking portfolio will give unprecedented intelligence on the largest deployed base of networking equipment in the world.

ThousandEyes’ further complement Cisco’s capabilities with proactive application modeling to help improve application quality of experience (QoE). Cisco will incorporate ThousandEyes’ capabilities in our AppDynamics application intelligence portfolio to enhance visibility across the enterprise, internet and the cloud. AppDynamics, another acquisition that cemented Cisco’s place in the business intelligence, analytics and IT operations market, will be able to offer even deeper application insights paired with true Network Intelligence from ThousandEyes.

I can’t tell you how excited I am about ThousandEyes. To all of ThousandEyes’ employees and partners, welcome to Cisco. To everyone looking for more intelligent, reliable and agile application and internet experience, come take a look at this amazing technology and stay tuned for developments as we embed ThousandEyes into Cisco products throughout our networking, cloud and application offerings.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco continues investment protection with 64G FC readiness using Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors

In this series of blogs, we are trying to discuss some of the unique advantages of Cisco MDS 9000 series switches across the Fibre Channel industry. In the first blog, we talked about NVMe/FC support in Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches. Now, let’s talk about investment protection.

Investment protection is usually discussed as a business advantage. But I am not going to talk about only money savings, but also about easing the technical and operational pain the customer endures because of the complex chassis forklifting as well.

Cisco MDS 9700 Multilayer Director class switches carry on the legacy of investment protection that the Cisco MDS 9500 class of directors were originally founded on. The legacy that started with the MDS 9500 platform in 2002 continues with the MDS 9700 platform, launched in Apr 2013.

Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors had three models to match up with different port density requirements. Cisco MDS 9509, launched in 2002, had capacity for 224 Fibre Channel (FC) ports; Cisco MDS 9506, launched in 2003, for 128 FC ports; and Cisco MDS 9513, launched in 2006, for 528 FC ports.  The total active life span (sales announcement to end of support) of MDS 9506 was 17 years, MDS 9509 was ~19 years, and MDS 9513 was ~16 years.

With an operational life span of nearly 19 years, the Cisco MDS 9500 went through three speed upgrades from 1G/2G  4G  8G FC speed, using new modules simultaneously in the same chassis. Additionally, we upgraded from Supervisor-1 to Supervisor-2 to Supervisor-2A modules to enhance the scalability required by customer data center environments. More importantly, all of these changes were done without any disruption.

Fast forward to April 2013: The Cisco MDS 9710 Multilayer Director was launched, supporting 48 ports of line-rate performance at 16G FC speed per module, followed by MDS 9706 and MDS 9718.

Say Hi to 2017 and the same chassis (Cisco MDS 9700) is ready to support 32G FC speed at line-rate performance. Additionally, new software features like SCSI and NVMe Analytics, anti-counterfeit security, improved scalability, enhanced redundancy, and high availability were also introduced in this platform.

Today, we are now talking about 64G FC speeds and NVMe based fabrics. Again, the same chassis – Cisco MDS 9700 series directors are now 64G FC ready. The recently launched new supervisor-4 modules and fabric-3 modules provide the capability to provide 64G FC performance in the future. So, the chassis you buy today is ready to drive the SAN with optimal speed of 64G FC because the back plane is ready. That’s adding almost a decade long life in already ~8 year old chassis.

So, if we look at Cisco’s SAN investment in the MDS 9700 series platform in the pictures below, shows the commitment of Cisco towards the Fibre Channel industry with continuous hardware and software innovation, through three generations speed (16G, 32G and 64G), along with Cisco NX-OS software from the 6.x to 7.x to 8.x releases.

Figure 1. Hardware innovation

Figure 2. Software innovation

Now, the question is – where is the investment protection we are talking about?

To understand that, let’s look at this example.

CapEx investment needed for customers using Cisco MDS 9700 series directors:

CapEx investment needed for non-Cisco customers (with every speed upgrade):

Note:  New chassis = New (Chassis + Supervisor modules + Fabric Modules + Line cards) + new switch license(s) + new management software license(s) + Components (SFPs, Cables, etc.) and so on… an abscess drainage procedure but pus is replaced with money in this case.

And it does not stop here.

◉ Ask the DC architects how much planning goes in for chassis upgrade (airflow, space, power, etc.)

◉ Ask the engineer on the data center floor for the amount of efforts required to rack and stack new chassis (new cables, new SFPs, new airflow directions, new power requirements, and the downtime to physically swap the chassis). And if something goes haywire during this chassis swap (Murphy’s 

Law), a simple 15-minute outage means millions of dollars lost in revenue.

This is where the Cisco MDS 9700 Series Multilayer Directors continue their technical innovation to maintain feature superiority, in both directions – hardware and software.

This is how hundreds of Cisco MDS 9500 directors are still running nonstop for more than 10 years.

This is how hundreds of Cisco MDS 9700 directors are running nonstop for more than 5 years.

And finally, this is how YOU, the customer, can save millions of dollars by investing in the Cisco MDS 9700 series director class switches.

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