Stay Flexible and Prepared with Virtual Education by Webex

There is so much more to the world than the four walls of our classrooms. Distance learning is expanding the world for students, teachers, and administrators. More educational institutions of all types and sizes around the world are turning to Cisco Webex as their remote learning tool of choice. 

Virtual classroom doors never close, ensuring the continuity of our education systems. Whether your institution needs to serve summer school classes or wants to ensure a smooth and prepared entry into virtual education next school year, Cisco Customer Experience (CX) team is here for you.

Keep Your Students Safe and Secure

You want to make sure your remote learning platform is an enabler, not a vulnerability. Built by the pioneer in video conferencing and industry leaders in cyber security, Webex is structured on various security frameworks, including end-to-end encryption. Always-on security runs unobtrusively in the background to keep all Webex participants safe and sensitive data secure. Let us help make sure you are satisfying the most stringent remote and distance learning security requirements. 

Cisco CX QuickStart Implementation Services 

Education can’t wait. The CX team can facilitate the rapid and secure deployment of your remote and distance learning environment. So, you can go about your core business of providing education to students, even if it is via an alternate means.

Users can leverage free on-demand self-help resources to get started, including recorded training sessions, quick–start guides, tips and tricks, and IT can attend Business Continuity Ask the Expert (ATX) webinars, including a special “Enabling Virtual Education” session.

But you don’t have to go it alone. We recognize that educational IT teams are under a new level of pressure to serve their communities, students, faculty, and staff, and may not have the network infrastructure in place or be familiar with Webex solutions and tools. Our CX team offers multiple levels of QuickStart Implementation Services for smooth, simplified, and rapid deployment. 

We’ll help IT with these essential services:

1. Efficiently onboard students, faculty, and staff to a remote learning experience.  We will introduce you to the administrative portal for user provisioning, which allows you to efficiently control adding, updating, and deactivating users. Avoid the security vulnerabilities born of executing changes manually for recurring school enrollment and staffing fluctuations.

2. Seamless integration with your single sign-on (SSO) system to the Cisco cloud. This will allow users to easily authenticate with their institutional credentials (username and password), while reducing calls to your helpdesk.

3. Focused hands-on training for your staff and students. Cisco will show teachers how to successfully get started, so your team can focus on other critical IT issues.

For schools and learning institutions who want to use Webex for administrative collaboration, such as holding faculty meetings remotely, we can help with integrating your business systems such as: 

1. Hands-on help with integrating Microsoft Active Directory to the Cisco cloud. Meeting organizers can then easily look up staff from the school directory for scheduling administrative meetings.  

2. Expert assistance integrating your local calendar to the Cisco cloud. This will help your faculty and staff avoid calendar conflicts between virtual school meetings and regular activities. 

3. Leverage Cisco guidance and expertise to help with testing and overcome any technological challenges that emerge in the first two weeks after going into production, making the transition as seamless as possible.

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Enterprise Network Availability: How to Calculate and Improve

Right now, I am sitting at home thinking about how the world is being held together by the Internet. So far, the Internet has stood up to our new reality amazingly well. This is despite redistributed traffic loads, and an explosive growth in interactive, high-bandwidth applications. For a brief time at least, even casual users are recognizing and appreciating the network’s robustness and availability.

We shouldn’t bask in this success yet. Failures will happen. And some of these failures might result in application impacts which could have been avoided. If you are an Enterprise Operator, now is the perfect time to examine your design assumptions against the new reality of your network. What weaknesses have become exposed based on the shift to Telework? What needs upgrading considering the shift in application mix and resulting performance requirements? 

One way or another, your end users will adapt to what you are providing. And it is best if your network is flexible and robust enough to meet new expectations. Nobody wants end-users to acclimate themselves to a degraded Enterprise network experience.

Key to supporting today’s needs is understanding the flexibility–or lack thereof—of the end-to-end network architecture. For your architecture you need to understand:

◉ the behavior of deployed technologies/protocols,
◉ the strengths and weakness of embedded platforms, and
◉ how your topology can handle application demands while remaining resilient to failures.

Each of these impacts the resulting end-user experience, especially during failures.

But where do you start this architectural analysis? You need to first establish a quantitative basis that measures end-user application availability and performance under various failure scenarios.  It is possible to do this as there is a direct relationship between the probability of failure and the end user’s perception of network availability. Such a quantitative basis is essential as availability with acceptable performance is ultimately how a network is judged. 

Getting to Five Nines

The best-known metric of network availability is known as “five nines”. What five nines means is that the end-user perceives that their application is available 99.999% of the time. This permits only 5.26 minutes of downtime a year. Depending on the application and network topology, this can be a very stringent standard.

Consider Figure 1 below which shows serially connected routers, switches, access points, servers, and transited clouds.  When these ten elements are connected without any redundancy, each of these elements must be up and available 99.9999% (or six nines) of the time for the end-user to perceive five nines of availability.  As six nines allows only 32 seconds of downtime, having a single reboot a year could prove problematic.

Figure 1: Serial Transport Availability

The good news is that with the proper network, application, and services architecture, the individual devices making up the Internet do not need to support six nines of availability. All we need to do is add some redundancy. The following network design includes such a well-architected redundancy-based design. For this network design, if each element is fully independent, and if each element is available just 99.9% of the time, then the end-user will experience 99.999% availability.

Figure 2: Parallel Transport Availability

Despite the user’s experience being identical, the difference between the two figures above is huge. We have reduced the availability requirements of all component parts by three orders of magnitude. And we have made something highly reliable from less reliable parts. This really shouldn’t be surprising however. From its very beginnings, the Internet was designed to be available even when devices were lost to nuclear attacks.

In the decades since the Internet’s conception, Cisco has documented many technologies and approaches to achieving a very high degree of availability. A small subset of these includes quickly converging routing and switching protocols, device and link redundancy, and boot time reduction. But such technologies and approaches are only part of the availability equation. Network operators have the ultimate say in deploying these technologies to maximize network availability. Strategies include the distribution of application servers across geographically and organizationally diverse datacenters, as well as redundancy of access and core networks all the way to ensuring that fiber-optic cables from different service providers don’t run in the same fiber conduit. These strategies are proven to be effective at providing high availability.

The result of all this good network design and planning is that the majority of application availability failures don’t come from equipment failures. Instead they come from equipment misconfiguration. Protecting the consistency of the network configuration is non-trivial and becomes more difficult as you add new technologies to the network. In fact, protecting network consistency is a key reason network operators are choosing to deploy controllers to manage device configuration based on higher level expressions of intent. One of the main goals of network controllers is to automatically ensure correct and consistent configuration of all of the equipment in the network.

Intent, while very useful in this role, might not address every dimension of application availability. Consider the picture below of an Enterprise network integrated with a Public-Cloud topology.

Figure 3: Public Cloud Apps need Enterprise Authentication

In this network design, the Public cloud-based applications accessed solely through cellular data do not just depend on the cloud. They still depend on the accessibility of an Enterprise’s RADIUS Authentication infrastructure. In other words, at best a cloud-based application will only be as available as access to your Enterprise Data Center. This is a nuance which very few end-users will be able to recognize or troubleshoot as a cause of availability issues.

New Technologies Add Risks to Availability

It is not just the Enterprise’s Authentication infrastructure which we need to consider when thinking about the future of availability. There is a set of forces which are changing network design. Geoffrey Moore has done much work describing the continuous technology invention and deployment cycle. Based on this, it is best to think of the network as a continually changing entity.

Figure 4 below shows a subset of the forces and technologies which are top-of-mind Enterprise network design. Each of these have the opportunity to improve or degrade application availability if they are not taken into consideration during the network design.

Figure 4: Emerging Technologies Use Controllers

With the advent of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), the emergence and growth of new types of controllers is a trend which broadly impacts network availability calculations. Above in Figure 4, you can see a number of starred* technologies. Each star represents a new controller involved in the establishment and maintenance of an application flow. And the result of each star is the addition of a transactional subsystem which impacts the calculation of network availability.

What are examples of these transactional subsystems? Historically we have depended on transactional subsystems as DNS, BGP, DHCP, and Wireless LAN Controllers. As networks evolve, we are seeing the proposal or introduction of new transactional subsystems such as OpenFlow servers. We are also seeing the evolution of existing transactional subsystems such as RADIUS/Identity. The RADIUS/Identity evolution is quite important here. The evolution of user and workload identification is becoming more complex as cloud systems are integrated into the Enterprise. It is worth considering the impacts to application availability as corporate access control gets more deeply integrated into the cloud via technologies like Azure AD, Google IAP, SPIFFE, and ADFS.

Calculating the Availability of a Component Subsystem

The emerging technologies listed above are changing established network availability profiles. As a result, now is a good time for you to revisit any previous calculations. And if you do not have previous calculations then this may be an excellent time to calculate your availability and determine if it is appropriate.  

If you are looking to get started, an excellent primer is the Cisco Press book “High Availability Network Fundamentals“. Although it is from 2001, it is still excellent.  Within the book the free introduction chapter discusses two base concepts upon which system level availability calculations are ultimately constructed. The first concept is Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).  MTBF is equal to the total time a component is in service divided by the number of failures. The second concept is Mean Time To Repair (MTTR). MTTR is equal to the total down time divided by the number of failures. You can also think about MTTR is the mean total time to detect a problem, diagnosis the problem, and resolve the problem. Using these two concepts, it becomes possible to calculate expected component availability via the equation:

In this equation, “A” stands for availability, which is expressed as a probability of 0% to 100%.  Key in the equation are the words “component subsystem”.  A component subsystem can be one device. A component subsystem can also be a network of devices. A component subsystem can even be infrastructure software running on a cloud of virtual hardware. What is critical for the equation is that the failure modes of this component subsystem are understood and can be quantified.

While the equation itself is simple, quantifying MTBF and MTTR for any component subsystem does take some effort. To begin with you should acquire MTBF estimates for equipment provided by your vendor. You may then choose to adjust these vendor MTBF estimates by considering factors as diverse the age of the equipment and even your local weather.  But equipment MTBF is only part of the picture. MTBF for transmission links should also be considered. When estimating these numbers, you need consider questions such as “how often do you see cable cuts or other failures in your environment” and “how well secured are your networking patch panels?”

Beyond MTBF is MTTR of your component subsystem. Getting a history of your MTTR is easy — as all you need to do is divide the total outage time by the total number of repairs during a given reporting interval. But your historical MTTR might not be an accurate predictor of your future MTTR. The longest (and most painful) outages are infrequent. The best way to predict future MTTR is to estimate the average time it takes to make a repair across the universe of all conceivable repairs. This helps you start quantifying infrequent issues. Especially if you are a small Enterprise, you really want to understand the hours or days it might take to diagnosis a new issue type and then a get a spare part installed or a cable fixed by a qualified local support.

If you are interested in quantified examples of MTBF and MTTR, again I recommend “High Availability Network Fundamentals“. This book explores specifics at a useful level of depth.

Looking back at the component subsystem availability equation, it is important to remember that the perception of what a failure is at the overall system level is unlikely to be the same as the definition of a failure in a component subsystem. For example in Figure 2, a failure of any single router component should be invisible at the overall system layer. I.e., MTBF is zero at the system level as there is no user perceived system failure.

However, if there are concurrent failures in redundant subsystems, there will be outages at the system level. We need to account for this in our availability calculations.

Luckily most network failures are independent events. And where networks do have cascading outages, this is often the result of underestimating the traffic needing support during failure events. As a result, simulating traffic during peak usage periods while a network is under load should result in the provisioning of adequate link capacity.  And assuming link capacities are properly dimensioned, traditional system level availability equations, such as we describe in this article, can then be applied.

As a network designer, it is important to remember where there are failure domains which can span subsystems. For example, if a clustered database is shared between two nodes, then a failure here will potentially impact what you considered your redundant subsystem. When this is a possibility, it is necessary to dimension this failure type at the system level, being careful not to also double-count that outage type at the component subsystem level.

Once you have a handle on your subsystems, you can start assembling larger availability estimates using the three probability equations listed below:

Serial Transport Availability

The first of these probability equations is used to calculate availability when several transport systems exist in serial. Here each transport subsystem encompasses its own failure domain, with its own availability estimate. The availability of a serial transport subsystems is the product of all the subsystems, as the component subsystem failure domains are serialized. That is, if any subsystem in the chain fails the whole system fails. Below is an example of how such a network availability calculation might be made for a simple Enterprise topology where the user application is connected via WiFi to a server located in an Enterprise data center.

Parallel Transport Systems Availability

The second of these equations is where transport systems exist in parallel. In other words, one transport subsystem backs up another. These are, unsurprisingly, known as parallel transport subsystems. The availability of a parallel transport subsystem is 1 minus the chance the multiple subsystems are out at the same time. A good example of such a design would be your home Wi-Fi which is backed up by your service provider wireless data service.

In practice, parallel transport subsystems will eventually connect to some serial subsystem. This is because application servers will typically exist within a single administrative domain. A more complex example of parallel subsystems in practice is shown in the figure below. Here an SD-WAN service is used to back up an Enterprise core network, but the application servers exist in a single datacenter.

Business Critical Transactional System Availability

The third equation calculates business critical transactional availability. This calculation is much like that of the serial transport calculation in that the product of all subsystems is included. However, as a transactional subsystem might only be required at or before flow initiation, it is sometimes useful to separate out this calculation, as shown in the figure below. Here the application user is accessing the network via campus WiFi, the application is itself sitting in public cloud, and the Application Authentication Server (such as a RADIUS single sign-on server) is in the Enterprise datacenter.

Such a calculation shows that the availability of cloud service is dependent on the availability of the enterprise Application Authentication Server. It is interesting to note that perhaps only once a day a user might need to acquire authentication credentials needed to access a cloud service during the remainder of the day. Such caching of transactional information itself can improve availability and scale.

As you use these equations, remember that your results can be no better than the underlying assumptions. For example, each equation is most easily applied where there is a strict hierarchical topology consisting of uniformly deployed equipment types. Topologies with rings and irregular layering either need far more complex equations, or you need to make simplifying assumptions, such as users having slightly different experiences based on where they sit within your topology.

Results of Modeling

After you have constructed these system and component level equations, measure them! It is this measurement data which will enable you to prove or disprove the MTBF and MTTR assumptions which you have made. They might even enable you to make changes before a more serious outage adversely impacts your business.

When you have modeled and measured for a while, you will see that a well-designed, redundant network architecture plays a paramount role in achieving excellent and predictable availability. Additionally, you will internalize how good design results in networks which are capable of five nines to be constructed out of subsystems which individually are not nearly as available.

The results of such calculation efforts might even provide you the business justification needed to make fundamental changes in your network architecture allowing you to achieve five nines. This should not be surprising. This result has been borne out by decades of network operator experience across a variety of deployment environments.

What are your experiences?

As mentioned above, these methods of calculating availability are not new. However they can seem heavyweight, especially to network operators not used to such quantification. As a result, network operators sometimes make simplifying assumptions. For example, some Enterprise operators will assume that their Internet backbone providers are 100% available. Such assumptions can provide reasonable simplification as the backbone might not be part of that individual’s personal operational metrics.  

So how do you measure the availability of your operational environment? It would be great to hear from you below on any rules of thumb you use, as well as any simplifying assumptions you make!

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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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