Forecasting Capacity in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN

Organizations are increasingly adopting software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) to enhance network performance, reduce costs, and improve overall connectivity.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for IT operations (AIOps), Cisco SD-WAN enhances and simplifies network management by using predictive analytics based on AI and ML techniques. The result is a proactive tool to address potential network issues before they degrade network and application performance.

Features desired by networks operators for such proactive actions include:

• Predictive Path Recommendations (PPR), which suggests preferred paths for various application groups at each site within an overlay based on long-term modeling of path quality.
• Bandwidth forecast for capacity planning, giving operators insights into possible future network usage based on extensive past usage patterns.
• Anomaly detection for network KPIs (tunnel loss, latency, jitter), application usage patterns with individual sites, and user application usage profile.
• Application modeling to help network operators better understand the impact of rolling out new applications in the overlay so they can implement the correct policies for best performance and minimal impact.

We discussed PPR and demonstrated how it gives operators the best performance for applications on their fabric. In today’s post we will delve into Bandwidth Forecast. To fully leverage the benefits of SD-WAN, effective capacity planning is crucial to help ensure optimal network performance, less downtime, improved cost control, more seamless operations, and a superior user experience.

The Bandwidth Forecast feature takes a comprehensive approach to provide accurate predictions of circuit usage, providing visibility into which circuits are likely to breach the capacity threshold based on the predicted usage. This helps network operators monitor usage trends on the circuits and provides capacity planning for the overlay.

The forecasting is primarily based on the RX/TX bandwidth information of circuits in the WAN fabric. To ensure insights use underlying long-term trends, the circuit usage data is aggregated as daily data points while tracking daily Min/Max ranges. Aggregated data over extended periods is used to generate a forecast for up to three months in the future.

Various other features within this data set can be further leveraged to enhance forecast accuracy. These include:

• Type of circuit (e.g., MPLS, private internet, LTE)
• Type of applications using the circuit (i.e., top 10 applications and their respective volume)
• Number of users at the site served by the circuit
• Regional holiday list and bandwidth information features

To achieve the best forecast possible, a combination of common predictors and those based on deep learning techniques are used to generate more reliable and robust forecasts.

Pre-processing of interface statistics for training and inference pipeline (Click image to enlarge)

Forecast quality is continuously monitored for accuracy. If any data or model drift or deviation from expected results is observed, retraining of the model is triggered based on updated data sets to improve model accuracy. Furthermore, forecasts are assessed for long-term overestimation or underestimation, ensuring that it faithfully predicts the bandwidth to assist network operators in capacity planning and decision-making process.

The Bandwidth Forecast feature in Cisco SD-WAN Analytics helps give network operators a better understanding of the following:

• Growth Trends: By analyzing historical data presented side by side with the forecast, organizations can identify patterns and anticipate future bandwidth demands. This empowers them to plan for anticipated growth without disruptions.
• Seasonality: Long-term visibility into seasonality of usage over the historical period over which the training data set is derived from. The daily, weekly, and monthly seasonality is also factored in while making the forecast and the pattern continues into the forecasted data points.
• Surge: Although visibility is provided into historical surge usage in the overlay so network operators can correlate it to global events (e.g., Black Friday) or internal events (e.g., company all-hands video stream), the model is effective in minimizing the impact of such data points while making long-term forecasts.
• Min/Max Band: The daily data points for forecast has three components, Min, Mean, and Max. The forecast is presented with emphasis on the daily mean value while still showing a Min/Max Band so that the network operators can get insights into usage spikes within the day.
• Model/Forecast Performance: Historical usage data is presented along with the past forecast data points for a quick visual comparison of how the forecast performed against actual recorded values in the past.

User interface

The Bandwidth Forecast feature can be activated for a specific overlay in the Catalyst SD-WAN Analytics Dashboard. This appears under the “Predictive Network” tab. Users can choose the circuits in the overlay for the forecast generation.

A table of circuits with all related metrics such as site or provider info, RX/TX bandwidth, and total usage is displayed, helping users select the circuits for which they want to visualize Bandwidth Forecast details. The minimum data set requirement for forecasts to be generated is 12 weeks of historical daily data points for each circuit.

The workflow is subject to the following:

• The table shows only circuits configured on physical interfaces and this will exclude any circuits configured on logical interfaces (e.g., sub-interfaces, loopback, dialer-group).
• Default sorting is based on descending order of RX/TX bandwidth, which helps bubble most heavily used circuits to the top of the table. The chart display is used to show the forecast for the Top Circuit.
• Users can select any other circuit by clicking on the checkbox.
• Users can search and sort as they wish to isolate specific circuits of interest.

Table of circuits and their metrics [Click image to enlarge]

Bandwidth Forecast for selected circuit showing actual and predicted (dotted) values [Click image to enlarge]

Metrics

Accurate bandwidth forecasting is critical in capacity planning. One key metric is the accuracy of the forecasted bandwidth requirements. A successful forecast should closely align with the actual capacity goals for your business. The current solution computes mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and mean absolute scaled error (MASE) scores in addition to tracking percentiles. Any of these can be used as the optimization target for the predictors used. The choice of target metrics for the predictors can be specified as per the needs for a specific overlay or use case.

By accurately predicting bandwidth requirements, organizations can optimize traffic routing, provision appropriate link capacities, manage QoS effectively, plan for scalability, and ensure adherence to SLAs. This proactive approach enables businesses to leverage the full potential of SD-WAN, delivering enhanced network performance, improved user experiences, and the ability to adapt to changing business needs. As organizations embrace the digital transformation journey, incorporating bandwidth forecast in SD-WAN capacity planning becomes a key strategy for success.

Source: cisco.com

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Enabling a new generation of AI with Ethernet

Few transformational technologies have generated the kind of buzz as Artificial Intelligence. Organizations around the world are finding exciting new ways to collaborate, manage applications, enhance their digital security, and reimagine customer experiences. Cisco already harnesses AI-powered capabilities across our product and customer service portfolio. We are also leading innovation that enables AI infrastructure. Our vision for AI Network fabrics offers unparalleled programmability, performance, flexibility, and efficiency. And we enable these fabrics with a familiar technology that has broad ecosystem support — Ethernet.

At the foundation of every AI generated product capability will be ground-breaking infrastructure. GPUs and massively scalable data stores and compute will be deployed in AI/ML platforms of unprecedented scale and performance. This massive movement and processing of data will need a network fabric that meets the considerable demands of these platforms. These networks need to enable AI with economical, flexible, and innovative connectivity. An economical and flexible platform enables you to invest early and evolve in a way that fits your unique business model. Innovation offers you a fabric that is high throughput, low-latency and lossless — without sacrificing flexibility. As a result of Cisco’s considerable investments, that AI fabric is already here. And we believe that this fabric needs to be built on Ethernet.

AI Fabrics will be Ethernet-based

Ethernet offers advantages of economy and scale. As transformational technologies approach maturity, customers tend to move away from sole-source components towards multi-source components, to improve purchasing power. In the case of AI/ML infrastructure, this means a move away from single-source connectors, fabric, and GPUs. Moving towards multi-source components typically means using a broadly adopted standard, and it is difficult to find a more broadly deployed data center network technology than Ethernet. This increases the ability to find the right ROI with interoperability within component types, as well as between component types. Additionally, familiar and consistent technology for all data center fabrics produces efficiencies in training, procurement, and support. Lastly, Ethernet is well-placed to support the massive scale that the world’s largest AI network fabrics require, with a broad base of suppliers.

Every organization’s AI journey is unique and requires agile technology and the ability to scale on your terms. Whether you are retraining models, deploying model inference, or building your own large language model, you need infrastructure that keeps pace with your demands. Moving quickly means leveraging the skills that you have and deploying familiar technology. Ethernet is the most deployed infrastructure and has the broadest architectural support. You can find your choice of partners, suppliers, and architects to help your unique organizational goals.

AI/ML infrastructure will need to be set up for innovation that drives greater capabilities and performance. Ethernet has a proven history of disruptive innovation. In the approximately 20-year period following 1998, Ethernet standard speeds grew from 1Gbps to 400Gbps, with 800G options available in systems such as the Cisco 8111-EH and the Cisco Nexus 9232E switch. Ethernet’s versatility has been proven in data center networks through protocols such as iSCSI and RoCE; along with several innovations that reduce the need for separate types of network connectivity.

This impressive rate of growth, combined with flexibility, has made it possible to connect several generations of front-end and back-end components. Storage networks that once required specialized back-end fabrics can now connect resources with Ethernet through advances in IP based storage solutions. Similarly, resources requiring InfiniBand connectivity can be deployed with RoCE. This means that back-end networks for advanced compute or GPUs can now be consolidated with a single network fabric.

Cisco’s unique value for Ethernet fabrics

Cisco expands the value that you can achieve from Ethernet by advancing the economics, agility, choice and innovation even further. We make it possible to standardize switching and routing with a single silicon architecture — Cisco Silicon One. This gives you the option of reducing the complexity of your network architectures by managing one experience across the entire network, across all network functions. To maximize economic benefits, Cisco produces a full range of silicon, systems and optics in a way that transfers economies of scale to the end user. We build silicon with Customer Owned Tooling (COT), rather than using traditional ASIC models, or off shelf components, so that we can eliminate the premiums introduced when adding additional vendors to a value chain — and drive end to end innovations.

Cisco offers you the choice of procuring components, white boxes, or fully built systems in your AI Network fabric. Does your business model drive value by building systems and software on top of silicon components? Or do you want ease of deployment by having fully built systems arrive ready for use? Alternatively, you may be in the middle — needing a white box shipped to you with the option to customize software that is unique to your own platform. Whichever model you need, you can partner with Cisco.

Our development of silicon offers differentiated capabilities for Ethernet that truly unlock the power of AI Network fabrics. With one architecture, you can build three deployment models that offer increasing degrees of efficiency for precious system resources through multipathing. You may choose to use standard Ethernet for the widest interoperability solution, or an advanced scheduled Ethernet that halves the Job Completion Time (JCT) compared to standard Ethernet, or the middle ground with enhanced Ethernet taking the best from standard and scheduled Ethernet. Because of the innovation and power of Cisco Silicon One, you can confidently use the same network for high throughput, lossless training fabrics, and ultra-low latency inference fabrics.

Conclusion

Ethernet is ready for the next technology transformation. Whether you are fine-tuning your own models, running off-the-shelf models for inference, or building your own large language models, you can be assured that you have a fabric that meets your needs. Cisco will partner with you so that you can build your AI infrastructure in a way that matches your business model.

Source: cisco.com

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Securing the Modern Hyper-Distributed Network: Perspectives from the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN

A typical day’s tasks for today’s modern worker are frequently distributed across multiple devices, applications, and locations. They could be working from home, analyzing CRM dashboards, and later, they might be at a coffee shop reviewing slides for an upcoming customer meeting. Perhaps they then head into the office for team meetings, followed by catching up with emails and messages on the commute home.

For a networking and security leader, a typical day looks very different. Those individuals need to ensure that the WAN is delivering a superior app performance connecting users to applications wherever they are. They also need to know if an untrusted device is being used to access confidential CRM dashboards. How is network traffic being secured outside the office? How are apps and services being accessed and secured?

Multiply these security concerns by the number of employees at numerous office locations, and then factor in technology-led business transformation initiatives, and we start to understand the complexity facing IT to secure and connect hyper-distributed users and resources everywhere.

Choose the right security

We hear you loud and clear—security and high performance are top priorities. In the face of constant change and increasing complexity—especially over the WAN—organizations must implement security technologies that converge with their SD-WAN, enforcing them as close as possible to users and workloads. For the most effective implementation, this will require security hosted on-premises and in the cloud that ensures the best possible app performance.

The importance of security with SD-WAN was acknowledge by Gartner in its recently published 2023 Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN report, which provides an annual evaluation of the SD-WAN market for IT leaders. We feel this year’s report includes the most thorough assessment of security capabilities—hosted on-premises and in the cloud—since Gartner Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN began.

In 2023, Cisco was named a Leader for the fourth consecutive year.

At Cisco, we work closely with our customers and partners to better understand their challenges so we can build products and solutions that support their long-term goals. These continued partnerships provide us with the insight to deeply ingrain advanced security technologies into Cisco SD-WAN.

• The right security: Stateful firewall, intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), advanced malware protection (AMP), URL filtering, HTTPS inspection, data loss prevention (DLP), cloud access security broker (CASB), and more—are all natively informed by the world’s largest commercial threat intelligence team, Talos.
• Hosted in the right place: On-premises or in the cloud (native or third party) hosting ensures that security policies are enforced closely to workloads and users.
• SASE your way: WAN appliances provide the building blocks to effortlessly chart your own journey.

Seek real-world validation

With a highly dense market of network security technologies and products to choose from, understanding which solutions will perform best for your environment and be the right long-term strategic fit can be confusing. While there is no substitute for testing solutions in a production environment, independent testing that mirrors real-world conditions can help identify top performers and refine a shortlist.

Miercom, a leading independent product test center, conducted a thorough evaluation of Cisco’s security and SD-WAN technologies delivered through Cisco Catalyst and Meraki WAN appliances. These tests were meticulously designed to match real-world conditions as closely as possible, instead of a theoretical laboratory environment.

Figure 1. According to leading independent product test center Miercom, Cisco’s malware efficacy is 25% better than the industry average. Across 11 malware exploit categories, Cisco averaged 98% malware efficacy.

Maximize your WAN

The WAN is central to an organization’s success. In addition to an uncompromising commitment to security, we continue to push Cisco SD-WAN beyond traditional expectations to help IT leaders maximize the potential of the WAN for their business through:

• Delivering high performance, irrespective of where users and workloads live, to provide a superior experience wherever users and workloads are.
• Simplifying cloud migration with integration and streamlined workflows for AWS Cloud WAN and Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN.
• Enabling secure, long-term remote work strategies with Meraki Z4 and Catalyst CG113 secure teleworker gateways.
• Providing continuous visibility across all the hyper-distributed internal and external domains with instant activation of Cisco ThousandEyes, which leverages predictive patch recommendations (PPR) to deliver proactive feedback, enhancing the user experience for critical application performance across the SD-WAN fabric.
• Enabling agile business models using 5G fixed wireless access through indoor and outdoor Meraki MG51 and Catalyst CG522 cellular gateways.

Build a long-term strategy for simplicity

At Cisco, we’re committed to helping organizations simplify IT. Our vision is to create a simpler network management platform experience to help customers easily access and manage Cisco networking products from one place—the Cisco Networking Cloud.

The distribution of users and resources will continue to evolve along with the IT landscape, creating new complexities along the way. Simplifying the IT experience enables IT to better automate, analyze, and diagnose issues—supporting a framework that is well-positioned to evolve alongside the modern hyper-distributed network and helping to secure and connect hyper-distributed users and resources, no matter where they are located.

Source: cisco.com

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End-to-End Visibility and Actionable Insights Underpin Great Connected Experiences

Three networking megatrends have upended how businesses approach networking to support the distributed workforce.

First, cloud has become the new data center, with workloads moving from on-premises to hybrid cloud and multicloud architectures. Secondly, the internet is now the new network, with reliance on business connectivity traversing diverse networking domains. And lastly, with so many remote and hybrid workers, the office is now essentially anywhere.

This evolution has made delivering a high-quality, reliable experience—connecting everyone to everything everywhere—significantly more complex. After the need to provide secure access to applications across multiple clouds, the second biggest challenge cited by 37% of respondents in our 2023 Global Networking Trends Report was gaining end-to-end visibility into network performance and security as more traffic originates or terminates beyond the boundaries of the corporate network.

Which begs the question: How do you identify, diagnose, and remediate problems that occur throughout the digital supply chain—the domains within and outside your infrastructure and all hops between a user’s device and an application or service in the cloud? Read on to find out how.

Tackling assurance complexity across multiple network domains

Great connected experiences are table stakes for businesses today. The digital economy relies on always-on applications and services to support employees and consumers. Failure is not an option.

Prior to the hyperconnectivity of today’s digital economy, business applications and services within corporate domains were well served by network monitoring solutions and processes that were localized and handled specific domains like wireless. But to remediate issues in enterprise WANs, admins had to contact their counterparts within cloud and internet provider organizations to jointly diagnose and remediate service and security problems. Often, this resulted in a lot of finger pointing. Businesses acted reactively instead of proactively. Issues could take a long time to get resolved.

Providing network assurance for a high-quality connected experience today requires end-to-end visibility and insights across diverse clouds, network providers, the internet, devices, and geographies—each with their own operational domains (see Figure 1). Without end-to-end visibility into network performance, application responsiveness, and security, it is extremely challenging for IT teams to deliver consistent digital experiences to end users.

Figure 1. Complex digital supply chain with interdependencies, increased failure surface, and unpredictability (click to enlarge)

A person working from home, for example, might run into a problem with Slack. The wireless network in their home office would be connected to an access network that would be connected to an edge router traversing a cloud network to the Slack application. Domain-specific tools can only see a small segment of this traffic. Admins without end-to-end visibility can’t see the big picture.

End-to-end visibility is foundational for SASE

A majority (51%) of organizations in our 2023 Global Networking Trends Report said that with their adoption of more software-as-a-service (SaaS) and multicloud solutions, they see investment in a solution that provides end-to-end visibility as a top priority. This may be in response to recent research by the Uptime Institute that found third-party operators—including cloud, hosting, colocation, and telecom providers—accounted for 70% of all publicly reported outages.

End-to-end visibility, analytics, and operational workflows allow admins to take decisive action to proactively remediate connectivity issues. In a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, for example, end-to-end visibility feeds the actionable intelligence used to optimize path selection to provide the best digital experience anywhere at any time. Reliable connectivity is foundational to securely connecting people and things in a SASE architecture. If connectivity is poor, the secure access experience will be degraded.

Even before an SD-WAN or a converged SASE architecture with security service edge (SSE) is rolled out, organizations can use end-to-end visibility to evaluate, compare, and optimize the network experience before and after adoption of these architectures. The performance of individual providers in different locations that each form part of a digital supply chain can be proactively tested and benchmarked, with the results used to make more informed vendor selections to ensure the delivery of always-on digital experiences.

Gaining visibility into every connection

A European airline transitioned its network infrastructure from MPLS to SD-WAN, moving many applications and services to the cloud. The company needed to make sure that services met agreed-upon service level agreements (SLAs). To do so, the IT department deployed end-to-end visibility, specifically to monitor and enhance the digital experiences of customers and employees. With this solution in place, the airline can now measure connection latency and other factors—with a specific focus on connections between its data center and the cloud provider, Amazon Web Services. They can continually monitor and prioritize network experiences by accelerating incident response times, introduce more proactive maintenance, and enjoy greater cost efficiency through streamlined troubleshooting.

RichRelevance, a customer experience personalization provider for 250 global retailers, reduced its outages by 88% and shrunk outage windows from an average of four hours to 30 minutes, all thanks to end-to-end visibility. IT service management software company ServiceNow identified network issues 95% faster for their customers with visibility across all network layers that focused on the application experience.

Enabling quality digital experiences through a networking platform approach

Cisco is pioneering end-to-end network visibility and driving exceptional experiences through operational simplicity. It’s a cornerstone of our Cisco Networking Cloud long-term vision, a unified management experience platform for on-premises and cloud operating models to reduce IT complexity.

End-to-end visibility relies on compute power to capture and analyze billions of daily measurements in the digital supply chains that comprise today’s enterprise networks (see Figure 2). It is a powerful and indispensable feature that helps organizations maintain top-quality digital experiences and move from reactive to preventative and automated operations.

Figure 2. Organizations need to leverage a platform-driven approach that drives end-to-end visibility throughout the digital supply chain (click to enlarge)

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Building a transparent Notification Center to Enable Customer Control

Personalization is critical to a guided customer experience. It helps build trust, foster relationships, and enables a deeper connection with customers.

At Cisco, we have been trying to help our customers along each step of their post-sale experience for nearly a decade. And as a key part of that experience, we want our customers to have more control over what communications they receive – a more intentional step towards the right message, right person, right time goal that we are all striving to achieve.

Before we could begin, we took a thorough inventory of what exactly the post-sale experience for customers today looked like.

Evaluating a disconnected customer experience

Over the years, we’ve built several programs where customers could sign up for various post-sale notifications to help guide them on their path to success – but they were fragmented and lacked transparency.

One of the customer pages from the legacy experience

For instance, a customer could access a link via an email where they could enroll or unenroll from a specific Cisco product architecture. There was no way to access the link again if the customer changed their mind after unenrolling. It also was not totally clear to the customer exactly what they were unenrolling from.

Similarly, a customer could enroll in a digital journey from a form on the main website, Cisco.com, but they could not see what else they were subscribed to. There were 6+ programs of this nature that evolved over the years – each designed to help provide the customer more control over their experience, but lacking a critical ingredient – transparency.

Thus, began an initiative to build a Notification Center that was flexible, centralized, and personalized just for what a customer was eligible to receive. One tool for a customer to rule their post-sale experience.

Rooted in research

We built the Notification Center collaboratively with our customer research and design team, evaluating all the different existing programs we had, we defined MVP parameters that would enable us to evolve the data model to support a more cohesive experience. We experimented with design, naming conventions, login experiences and more. Each piece of feedback helped our design team iterate and ultimately finalize the MVP requirements so our Orchestration & Notification team could build out the digital experience.

The research as well as consultation with Forrester served as the foundation and guiding principles as we went through the development process. These principles included:

• Build an experience that fosters trust and respects customer privacy and choices​
• Collect only data we can act on​ – do not collect unnecessary data
• Design scalability and flexibility, between MVP to future platform​s
• Design consistency ​
• Configurable UI that can be personalized based off of customer eligibility for products and services
• Flexible data model that can handle changing products and services
• Strict adherence to Cisco data security and privacy standards

The new interface replaces two of our previous data collection customer experiences that were linked in our emails. Now customers have full access to:

• View all subscriptions associated with their email
• Activate/Inactivate subscriptions for Renewals, Services, and Adopt Emails at the Use Case or Solution level
• Continue to nominate contacts for respective subscriptions
• Provide feedback on the experience directly to the experience design team

This new system supports all of our critical integrations with Snowflake, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), Cisco Single Sign On, and it can be integrated across other channels as well.

Implementation Changes

This new approach to subscription management not only transformed the front-end customer experience, but it also changed the granularity of data we were collecting. To enable it, we designed an entirely new back-end process to support the front-end application. We also had to make some significant changes to the data model and our custom activities in SFMC.

The new experience design

• The Notification Center UI, built on an SFMC Cloud Page, is supported by a Python-based Flask API, acting as an intermediary connecting the front-end with the backend database.
• We made the strategic decision to use PostgreSQL as our backend database, hosted on Google Cloud Platform’s Cloud SQL instance, to replace SFMC’s native Data Extension for storing customer choices and Custom Activity log data. We chose this because of the advanced data capabilities, indexing options, ACID compliance for data integrity, trigger support, and scalability.
• The database shift significantly reduced our reliance on SFMC as a database. This change decreased the overall number of SFMC API calls from 18 to 13 and increased the Custom Activity processing efficiency from 52 to 70 requests per second while concurrently reducing latency from 60 seconds to approximately 13 seconds.
• Digital journeys executed through SFMC previously had Cisco product architecture level entry criteria, meaning customers qualified for journeys if they bought a particular product. With the introduction of Notification Center data, we are mapping at the use case level, so we can build our journey segments based on the particular reason a customer bought a product. This transition has increased the granularity of our data while enabling a more personalized customer experience.
• Additionally, we enabled a daily sync between the Notification Center customer database and Enterprise Use Case Eligibility data to ensure Notification Center UI displays content in accordance with each customer’s eligibility criteria for a specific use case.

Source: cisco.com

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New bundles make it easy to start your Cisco Full-Stack Observability journey

In the last few months, Cisco has launched a lot of new capabilities around Cisco Full-Stack Observability (Cisco FSO) that activate important use cases around observability.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability Innovations

It started  with the launch of application security for hybrid applications with business risk observability  back in January, that brings business context to Cisco’s application security solution. The business risk score enables your security and application teams to have expanded threat visibility and intelligent business risk prioritization to respond instantly to revenue-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.

Then in May, Cisco launched a pre-built, bi-directional integration of Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes that activated customer digital experience monitoring and application dependency monitoring. These use cases bring application observability and network intelligence data together and help in reducing friction between AppOps and NetOps team. They provide end-to-end insights among application, network, and data teams. They optimize joint operations for triage and troubleshooting application issues while helping teams understand how applications, network and multi-cloud environments affect digital user experience.

Most recently in June, Cisco announced the general availability of an open, extensible and API-driven platform, called Cisco FSO Platform. It is focused on OpenTelemetry and anchored on metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT). It provides AI/ML driven analytics  so that you can do dynamic baselining, anomaly detection, root cause analysis and prioritization. You can build custom use cases based on your needs and create an observability ecosystem that will help you to deliver relevant and impactful business insights. Using the platform, Cisco has activated cost and resource optimization use cases that can help you to understand your cloud spend and how you can optimize your workloads and reduce costs.

Last month, Cisco has extended application security and business risk observability to cloud native application environments. With all these new innovations, you can now observe, secure and optimize applications and create custom observability use cases  using Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability Bundles

With all these new capabilities, we are also simplifying how you can buy our solutions. Instead of buying separate software licenses for Cisco AppDynamics, Cisco ThousandEyes and Cisco Secure Application individually, you can buy Cisco Full-Stack Observability bundles to solve multiple use cases. We provide discounts for buying these bundles. And attaching Cisco services to these bundles increases your overall discount.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability bundles

FSO Essentials Bundle

Observe, secure and extend your observability by bringing together application performance and security data. This bundles together the following use cases:

◉ Hybrid Application Monitoring

◉ Modern Application Monitoring

◉ Application Security

◉ Extend observability with custom use cases on Cisco FSO Platform

FSO Advantage Bundle

Observe, secure and extend your observability by bringing together application performance, network intelligence and security data. This bundles together all the use cases in Essentials with the following additional use cases:

◉ Customer Digital Experience Monitoring

◉ Application Dependency Monitoring

FSO Premier Bundle

Observe, secure, optimize and extend your observability by bringing together application performance and cost, network intelligence and security data. This bundles together all the use cases in Advantage with the following additional use cases:

◉ Hybrid Cost Optimization

◉ Application Resource Optimization

Accelerate business outcomes with Cisco Services

With Cisco Full-Stack Observability capabilities, you may be wondering how to implement such a powerful solution. You don’t have to do it alone. To help you accelerate your outcomes, Cisco CX delivers the expertise and guidance to help you best leverage your existing monitoring and observability tools with Cisco Full-Stack Observability to remove blind spots, move beyond siloed domain monitoring, and take advantage of full stack visibility, insights, and actions. Through a variety of service offerings such as the , we can help you innovate at each step of your full-stack observability transformation journey. And by showcasing results through real-world use cases, you’ll see how Cisco FSO services and the value of CX expertise can help you confidently and continuously transform and optimize the application experience for your customers and employees, anywhere.

Source: cisco.com

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Driving a Successful Sustainability Agenda – A Deep Dive into a Holistic Approach

Driving a sustainability strategy comes with incredible complexity and a spectrum of expectations. With the stakes being as high as it gets – the preservation of our planet – this is one we need to get right. The question is: HOW?

In Cisco CX we have designed a coherent and holistic framework to help you synergize different aspects of sustainability into a unified strategy. This enables a strategic alignment between sustainability & business goals, and a comprehensive stakeholder engagement – integrating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics into business performance indicators and optimizing the allocation of resources.

Importantly, our framework recognizes the inherent diversity among stakeholders and their varying priorities and value drivers in the realm of sustainability. It can be a common scenario where initiatives aimed at sustainability are often confined within silos, resulting in different parts of the organization operating at different maturity levels.

By acknowledging this reality, our framework helps organizations align their capabilities and benchmark themselves against industry leaders. This entails a comprehensive approach that takes into account the distinct perspectives and objectives of different stakeholders. By integrating their efforts and fostering collaboration across departments, organizations can bridge the gaps in maturity levels and ensure a more cohesive and holistic approach toward sustainability.

Moreover, this integrated approach promotes a more unified organizational culture, where sustainability becomes an intrinsic part of the overall business strategy.

In part 1 of this 2-part blog series, I want to share with you our signature approach, developed by Cisco CX to drive a successful sustainability agenda.

Six Dimensions to driving a holistic approach to sustainability

We take a structured approach in assessing the technology maturity across six key dimensions: Strategy, Governance, Execution, IT for Sustainability, Sustainable IT, and ESG Data Management. By evaluating each dimension, we help our customers gain valuable insights into their current state, identify areas for improvement, and translate them – leveraging our expertise – into a roadmap.

• Strategy: Focuses on evaluating your approach to sustainability within your overall business strategy. It assesses how effectively sustainability goals are aligned with your vision and mission. This also considers the level of integration of sustainability into strategic decision-making processes and the establishment of clear objectives and targets.
• Governance: Examines your governance structure and processes regarding sustainability. It evaluates the presence of dedicated sustainability governance bodies, the level of senior leadership involvement, and the effectiveness of oversight mechanisms. This dimension also takes into account the organization’s commitment to transparency, accountability, and risk management related to sustainability initiatives.
• Execution: Assesses your ability to translate your sustainability strategy into action. It evaluates the presence of well-defined implementation plans, the allocation and skills of resources, and the engagement of relevant stakeholders. This also examines your capability to drive change, implement more sustainable practices, and monitor progress effectively.
• IT for sustainable business: Focuses on your utilization of technology to support sustainability initiatives. It assesses the integration of sustainability considerations into IT strategy and the use of technology solutions to optimize resource consumption, reduce environmental impact, and enhance operational efficiency. This also examines your capability to leverage emerging technologies for sustainable innovation.
• Sustainable IT: Evaluates your internal IT infrastructure and operations with a sustainability lens. It assesses your efforts to minimize energy consumption, reduce e-waste, and adopt environmentally friendly practices in IT procurement and asset management. This also considers your commitment to sustainability-related IT standards and certifications.
• ESG data management: Focuses on your ability to collect, analyze, and report ESG-related data. It assesses the quality, accuracy, and completeness of data collection processes, as well as your capability to derive meaningful insights from the data. This also evaluates your transparency and reliability in reporting ESG performance to stakeholders.

Focus on Measurable Outcomes: Turning Data into Action for Progress on Sustainability

In Cisco CX we love turning data into actionable insights.

It’s time for organizations to move beyond data collection and analysis and focus on translating those insights into tangible actions and committing to implementing practices designed with sustainability in mind. Energy management offers a great example; Access to data allows us to evaluate consumption, optimize usage, implement energy-efficient technologies, and explore renewable energy sources. Taking action can result in reducing emissions, reducing costs, and improving operational efficiency.

Let’s not forget, that measurable outcomes play a vital role in progressing the sustainability agenda; we all need to set quantifiable goals, track progress, monitor performance, identify gaps, and take corrective actions as needed. In other words, we need to be able to report on our progress and milestones transparently. Not only to be accountable and build trust but also to benchmark our performance against industry peers and further improve.

Be more sustainable with Cisco CX

Leveraging our years of experience, Cisco CX’s comprehensive approach to guide you through your sustainability transformation journey can help you achieve measurable outcomes.

Sustainability can be a competitive differentiator in today’s fast-changing business landscape.

Source: cisco.com

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