Building Adaptive IT that Runs at Market Speed

The challenges of 2020 have pushed the reset button on nearly every aspect of business, including the way you work, operate, and deliver products and services. As organizations work toward recovery and growth, there needs to be a focus on creating an adaptive IT environment.

Why adaptive IT? New research tells us adaptive organizations enjoy three times’ faster revenue growth than their competition. Given that 80% of revenue growth could depend on digital offerings and operations by 2022, adaptive IT is necessary for delivering a resilient and sustainable future.

Cultivating adaptive IT starts with your workforce

There are several ways to improve your adaptability as an organization, according to Forrester. These include:

◉ Acting on insights: Let the data drive your decisions to boost your odds of meeting future customer demand.

◉ Leveraging platforms to deliver new value: Use powerful technology advancements to transition to new business models.

◉ Building a culture that embraces change: Inspire employees to think outside of the box to improve flexibility and reduce fear of change.

The success of these actions depends on the capabilities of your workforce.

With 76% of organizations challenged to find the expertise they need, organizations need to think differently about how they build and maintain an adaptive workforce.

Creating a flexible workforce

Engineering an adaptive workforce enables you to address evolving business priorities as the market changes. This means tapping into the right skill sets, where and when you need them. To ensure organizations of all sizes have access to the expertise, analytics, and insights they need, Cisco Business Critical Services (BCS) recently restructured our lifecycle services portfolio into a three-tier service: Essentials, Advantage, and Premier.

With each tier, you get a pre-determined set of services with the right amount of intelligence and guidance – at every step of your Cisco lifecycle journey. For organizations that need access to dedicated experts, our Specialized Expertise – Scrum Services and Expert-as-a-Service – can help.

With BCS, your teams can create adaptive IT by:

◉ Identifying capabilities and deliverables to address changing priorities, speed adoption, support cross-architecture projects, and accelerate transformation.

◉ Augmenting your workforce with industry-leading expertise in strategy, design, implementation, operations, and optimization

◉ Accelerating complex problem solving through 1:1 coaching sessions and workshops based on specific use cases and insight reviews

Ever found yourself in a situation where you didn’t have the right capabilities to drive a new initiative or address a technical initiative? For assistance with priority projects or unexpected events, Specialized Expertise is a great fit.

Say your business kickstarted its digital transformation journey, but it’s progressing at a slow and steady pace. You realize the urgency of enabling digital ways of working and delivering services. However, to ramp up digital transformation, your IT teams need to modernize legacy systems to ensure applications run smoothly.

With our Scrum Services, you could proactively address your top initiatives throughout the lifecycle with​ flexible IT engagements that allow you to adjust skill sets to match the evolving business needs of your large, multi-domain Cisco solutions.​ Capabilities range from planning and architecture, design and engineering, implementation planning and execution, operations and enablement, automation, cloud transformation, to security readiness, and security breach and attack simulation.

With BCS Expert-as-a-Service, you can close technology gaps by adding the precise expertise you need to elevate collective knowledge and perform at peak levels.

◉ For domain knowledge and architectural design and support, you might select a solution architect.

◉ For hands-on confirmation of your Cisco technologies, a consulting engineer could be the right choice.

◉ For large strategic projects requiring end-to-end delivery management and team coordination, a project manager can assist.

In addition, BCS also offers teams Accelerators best practice coaching sessions to skill-up together.  During these sessions, your staff get the chance to dive into real-world technical cases and engineering challenges, analyze your IT environment to uncover strengths and opportunities for improvement, and learn best practices from experts.

With continuous access to expertise, analytics, and insights, our customers have achieved three times’ faster software upgrades and 70% faster configuration changes.

An operating model to help you adapt

For more than three decades, Cisco has been helping organizations operate at market speed to address changing business priorities. Whether you’re looking to optimize performance and de-risk IT, accelerate technology adoption and transformation, or address the changing priorities of your multi-domain solutions, BCS can help.

To fast-track your path to recovery and growth, BCS recently created a business resiliency operating model that accelerates transformation by improving IT resilience and adaptability. Grounded in best practices and Cisco intellectual capital, this model can help you survive and thrive in these dynamic times.

When used in conjunction with our lifecycle services, our model empowers organizations to respond quickly to emerging needs with an adaptive workforce, enable continuous transformation to strengthen infrastructure to support emerging workforce models, and deliver a fully optimized digital customer experience.

Find out how Cisco Business Critical Services can help you create an adaptive workforce with Specialized Expertise.

If you missed our webinar on how to create resilient, adaptive, and transformative IT, you can watch it on demand.

Source: cisco.com

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The Future of the Cell Site is the Router

Evolving Cell Site to Multi-Service Cell Site

With 2G, Cell Sites were primarily (designed around circuit-switched TDM Based connectivity and ) responsible for enabling Voice traffic. As the 3G/4G picked up momentum, Cell Sites were upgraded to carry (IP based traffic for) both Voice and Data traffic. This upgrade of Cell Site functionality aligned well with the profitability of Operators. The networks which were aggressive in this transition of Cell Site enabled the profitability. With the 5G around the corner, the role of the Cell Site will be even more crucial. It plays a critical role in adding a new revenue stream, enhance the current offering, and build the business case for 5G adoption. Cell Sites would need to evolve to Multi-Service Site which would offer new revenue-generating streams like B2B service for Small Enterprises and SMB customers, enhanced user experience for social media and streaming services, public safety applications, IOT/Smart City applications, and far edge use cases.

For the Multi-Service Cell Site – it’s imperative that it would demand much higher bandwidth, resiliency, and significantly lower latency. However, most of the Cell Site deploys sub-optimal architecture with layer 2 technologies. While layer 2 solutions have a lower capex, they tend to have higher opex and extremely restrictive in terms of new service creation. To realize the full potential of the Cell Site, it’s critical to bring Layer3 to Cell Site. The backhaul networks have already evolved from MPLS-TP / TDM to Layer3/IP-MPLS-SR. Extending these technologies to Cell Site will bring significant benefits to the service which can be delivered.

Cisco Converged 5G Transport

Let’s look at some of the key benefits of such evolved architecture:

Robust Infrastructure: The Infrastructure which enabled 3G/4G will not be sufficient to fully realize the potential of the Multi-Service Cell Site. It needs to secure, redundant, reliable, scalable, and SDN enabled. Any compromise on this aspect could result in sub-optimal performance of the network. Using Router/Layer3 based devices at the Cell Site would enable:

◉ Site Sharing/Densification

◉ Best in class Timing capability with Class C precision and SyncE up to the cell site

◉ Carrier-Class Reliability and Redundancy

◉ Consistent OAM end to end

◉ Trust Worthy System with complete visibility of Device Security health.

Service Agility: As we look ahead and build a business case for 5G investment, every network port in the cell site would be viewed as a service port. Uniform function availability / Flexibility and consistency of features will be of utmost importance. The gateway device at the cell Site should have the capability of Network Slicing / Service Demarcation / Quality of Service / Monitoring capability of Service and seamless integration. The Cell Site router provides all the capabilities mentioned along with:

◉ Ease of Integrating 5G Core with AMF/SMF/UPF.

◉ End to End Network Slicing

◉ Seamless Service provisioning & workflow

◉ Consistent QoS across the network

◉ Consistent Service Monitoring across the network.

Operational benefits: Apart from the Capex investment and generating the business case for new revenue-generating streams, the subject of Operational Expenditure has also been the primary part of the 5G journey. It’s unfathomable to build a network that relies on manual intervention apart from racking and stacking activities. Using Router at Cell Site will make the operation seamless and aligned to the rest of the networks. Consistent Tools cross the network allow for stronger control over the network. While the Backhaul & Edge networks have been using the Automation capabilities for a while, given the remoteness of Cell Site – it’s even more critical to have an Automation-first approach for the Cell Site. Features like ZTP, Telemetry

◉ End to End Automation and tighter integration with backhaul.

◉ End to End Layer3/IP for consistent reporting & analytics

◉ Reduced network Touch Points

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Drive business efficiency with secure remote work technology

Remote work is nothing new. In fact, it might be one of the most dominant phrases in 2020’s word cloud. The good news is that with the right technology in place, remote work can deliver benefits across your organization.

Cloud-delivered solutions enable remote workers to remain productive, efficient, and secure – even from the couch. All while helping drive down costs. And with the tips below, you can get even more out of your remote work experience.

Secure your remote workspaces

The three most important words in real estate are location, location, location. In remote work, they’re security, security, security.

The FBI has seen a 300 percent – yes 300 percent – increase in cybercrime since the start of COVID-19. With multiple sites to protect, and employees using home networks and personal devices, remote work opens you up to increased risk. You need to give your remote employees and your business the confidence to collaborate safely with security solutions that:

◉ Offer built-in encryption

◉ Ensure secure endpoint access for any device in your network

◉ Protect sensitive data with robust identity verification for users and devices

◉ Allow employees to communicate and share files securely

◉ Defend against threats with cloud-delivered security

Keep collaboration simple

Login issues, dropped connections, poor audio quality, and other issues like blurry video can affect your team’s ability to work together. Give your employees access to reliable, high-quality voice, video, and messaging in a single solution. Choose collaboration technology that allows employees to:

◉ Seamlessly communicate and collaborate across devices

◉ Share messages and files quickly 1:1 or with a whole team

◉ Quickly find conversations and documents

◉ Brainstorm using a digital whiteboard

◉ Integrate with the apps they use every day

◉ Record meetings and get automatic transcripts

Reduce IT complexity

IT should work for you, not vice versa. Make sure your collaboration technology helps you maximize your time while minimizing your IT hassles. To that end, look for simplified solutions that:

◉ Effortlessly integrate virtual meetings, calling, WiFi, and security

◉ Can easily be deployed and managed by employees who might not have IT skills

◉ Scale with you as your business needs change

Cisco Designed Secure Remote Work  

Fortunately, you don’t have to look far to find the right work from anywhere technology. At Cisco, our small business portfolio includes the collaboration and security solutions you need to simplify, secure, and support your remote work environments. With Cisco Designed Secure Remote Work, you get everything your business needs to deliver an exceptional remote work experience.

◉ Cisco Webex®: Make it easy for your remote teams to meet, securely share messages and files, search for information, private message, group chat, brainstorm, and work together efficiently.

◉ Cisco Secure Access by Duo: Protect your remote workers’ sensitive data with robust two-factor security that verifies the identity of users, devices, and applications attempting to access your data.

◉ Cisco UmbrellaTM: Protect remote users wherever they’re working with flexible, fast, and effective front-line security by blocking malicious destinations before a connection is established.

◉ Cisco Cloud Mailbox Defense: Scan all your email, internal and external, without difficult technical challenges or interrupting the regular delivery of messages from the cloud while detecting and blocking threats.

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How I Got Started with Network Automation

Recently I joined the Cisco DevNet team as a Content Developer Engineer. This is exciting for me, because I have an opportunity to merge the two things that I love most: learning more about network automation and helping the IT community grow within their skills.

This year marks 20 years that I have been in information technology. I’ve seen the industry change multiple times, and right now we are in the middle of another major shift. That shift is being driven by organizations needing to expand and extend their networks, resources and services rapidly and at scale. In other words, automation.

By the end of this post, I will share my journey into network automation, Cisco Systems, as well as provide you with everything you need to join the #DevNetClassOf2020. Quick note: I am also going to let you know how you can get a 25% off exam voucher too!

How I started with Network Automation

In my career, the greatest rewards have come when I have stepped outside of my comfort zone and taken some risks. From joining the Military (USAF), to starting my YouTube channel, learning Python, and now being a part of Cisco Systems. Each one of these moments has helped me get to where I am today. Now that I am here, I am committed to helping you walk, run, and fly in network automation! Are you ready to step outside of your comfort zone?

Three years ago, I was a Systems Administrator working in a comfortable government position. Back then, I thought I would never need to learn to code. To be honest, I could have stayed in that environment, but I decided to take a risk so that I could follow my passion which is network engineering.

In that position, I was tasked with some highly visible projects that drove me to learn the programming language Python. My road to this point has been awesome. I am DevOps certified, DevNet certified, and I have been in a NetDevOps role for the past year. Balancing software sprints and network engineering have prepared me for this new role within Cisco Systems.

Learning Python

People ask me often, “do you need to know Python as a network engineer?” The answer is no you do not… That is until you need a tool to perform a task that has not yet been created. Python gives you the ability to customize and create applications as you need them.

When I first began coding, I could have started with Ansible. However, I found Netmiko to be one of the best tools available for network automation. Because it allowed me to write my python scripts and then parse my return data exactly as I needed. So, I started there. My first automation script was to change the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) configuration for over 300 devices in our network. My second automation script was to update the enable secret password on 700 devices. All of this was achieved in under 50 lines of code. This task normally would take days, to manually login and update each router and switch. But with the power of automation, I took about a day to write and test my code in a nonproduction environment. Then about 30 minutes to run and verify the completion of my script in production.

How you can get started

When I started automating, learning resources were scarce on these topics. Now, you have a great opportunity to leverage platforms like the DevNet sandbox. Here you can access multiple Cisco platforms and labs that will walk you through utilizing tools like Python, Postman, and Ansible to configure and manage your networks. Many of these resources are free and always available. If you are totally brand new to automation, I recommend you visit the “Start Now” page on DevNet to get started.

Get DevNet Certified

One of the top questions being asked of network engineers right now is, can you automate? Organizations want to manage their networks more effectively and efficiently. The Cisco DevNet Associates certification can set you on the path to do that. The certificates not only validates your skillset but also will add value to your resume to help you stand out. Lastly, the DevNet Associates certification will give you the ability to speak the same language as software developers and other automation stakeholders.

Here’s a link for a 25% off exam voucher. If you pass before the end of the year, you will get a cool digital badge, free DevNet merchandise, access to special DevNet sessions with the one and only Susie Wee, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco DevNet & CX Ecosystem Success. 

Call to Action

If I can automate, so can you! Change is inevitable and the more you embrace it, the further ahead you will be. I wish you much success on your automation journey. I look forward to welcoming you to the #DevNetClassof2020.

Source: cisco.com

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Cisco MDS 9000 and IBM FICON: Just Got Married Again

We know humans like to celebrate. The wedding date represents a significant one for many couples and there is a tradition to celebrate again, even if with less fanfare, upon reaching a specific amount of years together. Apparently originated from an ancient German tradition, there is also a symbolic name to represent how long ago the wedding occurred. For example, the golden wedding indicates 50 years of marriage.

Cisco MDS 9000 series and IBM mainframe FICON have not reached that level yet. The original wedding date was in 2004, and 2020 marks 16 years, assuming my math is not wrong. There is a name for this, despite not popularly used. It is called ivy wedding….but don’t ask me why.

IBM originally announced FICON channels for the S/390 system in May of 1998. Since then, FICON has evolved from 1 Gbit to the 16 Gbit FICON Express16S channels, announced in January 2015 in conjunction with the IBM Systems z13. Each generation of FICON channels offered increased performance and capacity. Initially, the FC-SB-2 Fibre Channel upper-level protocol (ULP) was used by FICON. As the name implies, a single byte (SB) link address was used to specify the switch port on the director, out of a range of 00-255. It supported key features like native FICON storage devices, channel-to-channel connections, FICON directors (or switches), and more. But it did not allow for switched paths over multiple directors. In 2003, with the introduction of a new and enhanced ULP, this limitation was removed. In fact, FC-SB-3 employs a dual byte address.

Funny enough, rather than changing the name from SB to DB, it was decided to change the version instead, increasing its number from 2 to 3. This was the beginning of cascaded FICON. Two directors per fabric, also known as single-hop cascading, became possible since then. Recently multi-hop cascading has been qualified and has opened up new deployment options. Fibre Channel Single-Byte-4 (FC-SB-4) standard followed in 2008 and accounted for a big step forward in terms of performance, by reducing FICON channel overhead with the introduction of the high-performance FICON for System Z (zHPF).

A few years later, FC-SB-5 was standardized and in 2020 work is still in progress for the FC-SB-6 standard and new improvements are expected. Meanwhile, new routing schemas have come along, specifically FICON Dynamic Routing (FIDR), creating an exchange-based routing model (OXID-based routing). Meanwhile, the mainframe gained enhanced monitoring capabilities for switching devices with a revamped version of the CUP protocol.

Just as the protocol and the topologies have evolved over time, the same is true for requirements, expectations, and underlying hardware products. Cisco MDS 9000 series has just completed the most stringent testing and validation exercise, successfully receiving its latest FICON certification letter and can be found on the IBM resource link page (registration is needed to access this website).

With software version, NX OS 8.4(2b), Cisco MDS 9710, MDS 9706, and MDS 9250i and their IBM c-type counterpart have renewed their approval for use within mainframe environments with the full feature set. It is a great achievement, putting Cisco MDS 9000 series at the center of customers’ preferences when it comes to both FICON and Fibre Channel switching. Specifically, the new certification adds support for:

◉ IBM Fiber Channel Endpoint Security

◉ CUP Diagnostics

◉ Support for z/OS health checker

◉ 16G and 32G ELW optics for extended reach on dark fiber

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Cisco CCNP Collaboration 350-801 Certification Practice Test

 

Cisco CLCOR Exam Description:

This exam tests a candidate's knowledge of implementing core collaboration technologies including infrastructure and design, protocols, codecs, and endpoints, Cisco IOS XE gateway and media resources, Call Control, QoS, and collaboration applications. The course, Implementing Cisco Collaboration Core Technologies, helps candidates to prepare for this exam.

Cisco 350-801 Exam Overview:

• Exam Name:- Implementing Cisco Collaboration Core Technologies
• Exam Number:- 350-801 CLCOR
• Exam Price:- $400 USD
• Duration:- 120 minutes
• Number of Questions:- 90-110
• Passing Score:- Variable (750-850 / 1000 Approx.)
• Recommended Training:- Implementing Cisco Collaboration Core Technologies (CLCOR)
• Exam Registration:- PEARSON VUE
• Sample Questions:- Cisco 350-801 Sample Questions
• Practice Exam:- Cisco Certified Network Professional Collaboration Practice Test

Related Articles:-

1. Pass CCNP 350-801 CLCOR Exam and Enjoy Benefits It Draws
2. It’s High Time to Take Cisco 350-801 Certification Exam
3. Your Journey to Being CCNP Collaboration 350-801 Certified Made Easier

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Cisco DNA Spaces helps businesses weather the pandemic

As we wrap 2020, I want to reflect on the year gone by and what it meant for us folks at Cisco DNA Spaces. I think we can all agree that 2020 was a year like no other. It was a time of crisis, it was a period of upheaval; but it was also a period of innovation and transformation for location analytics products.

DNA Spaces is Cisco’s indoor location and IoT services cloud platform.  It enables Cisco Catalyst and Meraki wireless customers to use their existing network to drive digitization within their buildings.

In a world where our websites and mobile apps are becoming smarter by the day, DNA Spaces was launched with the vision to make buildings smarter, for our customers to drive seamless Wi-Fi onboarding for people and IoT devices, for loyalty based differentiated experiences and for behavioral analytics across your business locations.

Prior to Covid-19, we fulfilled our industry’s need for location analytics, behavioral insights, engagement and onboarding tools. In the two years since launch we are the most deployed indoor location services platform in the world, with over 120,000 global business locations on the platform at present. Most customers used the platform to set up Wi-Fi onboarding, engagement rules, locate assets or collect monthly analytics reports and stats on how their locations were performing. Setup DNA Spaces one time and you are all set from an indoor location services perspective.

And then the pandemic hit.

New circumstances require new solutions

Schools and universities closed without notice. Companies went remote overnight. Stores had to close for in-person shopping. Venues had to cancel their events. The Covid-19 crisis was turning out to be most difficult for our customers that operated out of physical locations.

As the state and federal governments started imposing restrictions and social distancing became a survival tactic, everyone woke up to the importance of understanding how people move and interact within buildings—not just in retrospect but in real time. Navigating the global pandemic required enterprises, policymakers and health officials to understand indoor location behavior trends intimately and use those insights to drive safety and compliance.

The product team at Cisco DNA Spaces saw this as an opportunity to help the community adapt for long-term business resiliency. For a product whose mission is to digitize physical spaces, it was clear that if there was ever a moment we could make an impact, it was now.

Pivoting to meet immediate demands

Our team decided to quickly pivot and reprioritize our product roadmap to include apps that would help customers respond to the pandemic and prepare them to safely get back to business. At the heart of our product pivot strategy were our users. We engaged in conversation with them at every step – acknowledged their needs, collected their feedback, understood their point of view.

Any product team will tell you that taking new features to market with a very short runway isn’t exactly an ideal scenario. But we learnt that if your purpose is clear, if your whole team is onboard and if executed well, the experience can be extremely gratifying.

We tapped into some of our core features and repurposed them to build apps more relevant to the new needs created by the pandemic. This resulted in a suite of apps that facilitate a safe return to work in a suite of Back to Business apps and features, including:

◉ Proximity Reporting App for contact tracing based on wi-fi presence

◉ Right Now App for real-time people count and behavioral monitoring on a single pane across your business locations

◉ Density threshold-based triggers for safe capacities and social distancing

◉ Instant Captive Portals for contact-less customer experiences

Smoothing the path to adoption

We built and shipped these apps in the shortest time possible. But our work was far from over. How could we scale adoption at a time when customers were working from home and short on both time and money?

Our adoption strategy was based on two key principles:

1. We ensured that all new features would work with zero support– no training, no long customer meetings and no demo. We wanted it to be possible for customers to sign-up, activate and deploy the new Covid-19 apps in 30 minutes or less. This required heavy focus on simplifying and scaling onboarding, providing in-product guidance and proactively addressing support issues with 24/7 service-level agreements (SLAs).

2. We opened up our tier offerings for everyone as a free trial so customers who hadn’t yet adopted DNA Spaces could get started and do contact tracing, monitor real time occupancy within their buildings and deliver contactless experiences. Every Cisco wireless customer deserved to make their buildings safe for business.

Build it and they will come

Over 300 Cisco enterprise customers deployed the new features across 50,000 business locations in the first 60 days after release, leading to improved management of social distancing in places like retail stores, workspaces, hospitals, universities, malls across the world.

The positive response and validation motivated us to stretch ourselves even further and make our apps ready for Meraki as well.

Countless hours and many sleepless nights went into building and shipping these features but all of our efforts were rewarded when we received the ‘Customer Choice’ recognition on Gartner Peer Insights. To be recognized for the value that DNA Spaces continues to deliver was the icing on the cake. The real reward has been the opportunity to share the journey with our customers and be part of their commitments to caring for their employees, customers and communities.

Looking back, but actually looking ahead

As I look back on 2020 one last time, I see what a tough year it has been for all of us. But I also realize that if we broaden our perspective just a little, life becomes that much easier. That said, I believe that for the product and engineering team at Cisco DNA Spaces, 2020 was a year of courage and shared responsibility. But most of all, 2020 was the year of indoor location services – a year when our product found its true relevance and meaning. We will go into 2021 with all our learnings and I believe, we will all be better for it.

Source: cisco.com

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