NETWORKING

The COVID-19 pandemic set a new high bar for organizations and their need for increased business resiliency. When the pandemic hit, thousands of organizations around the world found themselves forced to rethink how to keep things running while keeping their employees safe and serving customers and the community. Cisco was one of them. When work-from-home policies took effect in March, we sent home virtually our entire workforce of 100,000-plus employees, contractors, and partners almost overnight….

The Rise of Digital and Customer Expectations According to a global survey by McKinsey & Company, 62% of organizations are experiencing increasing demand for online purchasing and services by their customers, and 53% believe this trend will continue in the future.  The banking industry is one example of widespread adoption of digital and omnichannel service. By July 2020, contact center usage in banking across the US was up by about 6% and mobile usage was…

Join us for the latest installation in the Global Leaders Forum highlights series in #EducationNow. This week, we welcome back Ronaldo Mota.  Entering a New Era The current era might best be called “the age of algorithms.” If you haven’t had the chance to read our previous blog – an algorithm is a sequence of instructions that tells computers what to do. Computers are made up of many tiny keys, transistors, and algorithms turn those keys on and…

5G is confusing. It’s not one technology that will bring you gigabit-per-second-speeds and sub-10-millisecond latency. 5G’s actually three different network approaches. Only one of these — millimeter-wave (mmWave) — can give you gigabit speeds. Verizon, under the name 5G Ultra-Wideband, leads in US mmWave deployment. But the company also muddied the water by introducing yet another 5G approach: Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS). Verizon 5G DSS performance is pretty much the same as you’re getting from Verizon 4G LTE….

Zero trust is such a popular term in the security space today.  Everyone is talking zero trust, Cisco included. The interesting point is it’s not new – the original architecture model was released in 2010, and the important guidelines have been part of good security practices for years; think about your important assets and develop secure perimeters around them.  What has changed today is the design of security controls as it relates to secure perimeters. …

We recently announced the launch of our fifth annual Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge, with prize money totaling $1 million USD. The Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge is a competition that awards cash prizes to early-stage technology entrepreneurs solving the world’s social and environmental problems. Dream The great abolitionist Harriet Tubman once said, “Every great dream begins with a dreamer.” This is what drives more than 290,000 students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)…

Many Silver Peak SD-WAN customers have adopted Palo Alto Prisma Access cloud-delivered security services. You might be wondering how you can make Silver Peak and Palo Alto work together to take advantage of secure local Internet breakout from your branch or remotes sites to maintain both the performance and security of your business applications. The Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect™ SD-WAN edge platform integration with Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Access cloud-delivered security enables enterprises to shift to a…

There is power in community, and if this year showed us anything – 2020 proved just how powerful our communities are. For me, my community runs deep in family and friends – and, also at work.   Through the team I’m on, Employee/Employer Brand, being a #WeAreCisco ambassador, and the Employee Resource Organizations (ERO) – like Conexion – that I am a part of, I am constantly reminded of the strong sense of community we have…

The networking world is abuzz from, in awe of, and completely enamored by the launch of the Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms Family announced just last month. For those unaware, the Catalyst 8000 transforms the WAN edge by delivering the best of SD-WAN, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and 5G-ready connectivity across all users, to any cloud, data center or edge location via software or hardware platforms. The true star of Cisco’s intent-based networking portfolio…

Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is getting a big boost from AIOps as vendors look to simplify operations, lower costs, and optimize WAN performance in the modern cloud era. SD-WAN decouples the control aspect of a network from the hardware to create a virtualized network overlay, while AIOps applies machine learning and data analytics to IT operations to automate processes. The convergence of the two – a.k.a. AI-driven WAN – promises to usher in a new era…