NETWORKING

Reflecting on the nexus of Cisco’s product takeback and reuse program a year and a half after we relaunched it, Cisco VP of Global Distribution Sales Andrew Sage explains, “We wanted to make it as easy for our customers and partners to [send back old equipment] as it is to take recycling to the end of the driveway.” By streamlining and simplifying the customer experience, Cisco has made important progress toward that goal. Let’s take…

From the dot-com bust to the global financial crisis, past disruptions have led many businesses to put their digital strategies on the backburner. Organizations that continued to invest in next-generation technologies had an easier time shifting gears to speed ahead. They understood that proactive optimization and continuous transformation are necessary pathways to agility, growth, and innovation. It’s time to transform Fast-forward to 2021. Digital technology is now commonplace in nearly every industry, but organizations are…

Not to state the overly obvious, but companies have substantially accelerated their migration to the cloud over the last eighteen months. The pandemic forced them to get more done, faster, and often for less. And they found the cloud was the ultimate enabler. The move to the cloud, even with all of its promise, isn’t without challenges. Cloud-based applications may seem easy for individual users to access—just click and go. But, for IT departments, it’s…

Welcome to part 2 of the journey to Vanilla ISE, a simplified ISE GUI for endpoint technicians. In part 1 we covered the background and requirements for the UI. In this part 2, we will explore the relevant documentation to find the relevant API calls we will use. Documentation Exploration Once I had an idea for the functionality I needed to incorporate with the program, I started breaking it down to individual functions and individual…

Many challenges NetDevOps teams run up against relate to staying true to the Source of Truth approach to automation.  To truly matter, a Source of Truth must be used everywhere, not just where and when convenient.  I recently tackled on of these challenges within our network automation projects over in Learning at Cisco. For more details on Source of Truth checkout The challenge was how to keep the device inventory in our Cisco NSO servers accurate…

With the proliferation of IoT and BYOD devices, wireless security is top-of-the-mind for network administrators and customers. Globally, there will be nearly 628 million public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2023, which is almost four-fold increase from 2018. This will increase the attack surface and hence the vulnerability for the network. The total number of DDoS attacks is predicted to reach 15.4 million by 2023, more than double the number from 2018. Due to inherent open nature…

Almost every aspect of business has been impacted from some form of disruption. For instance, our work has changed so much we now find ourselves operating from just about anywhere. We live in a digital-first world with a new normal that is likely to stay with us into the foreseeable future. Disruption isn’t always a bad thing. It can also motivate and feed the necessity for innovation and invention. The pandemic forced businesses to become…

Celebrating International Girls in ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Day has never been more important. Recent data reveals a startling economic disparity caused by the pandemic – women losing jobs at almost twice the rate of men, leaving 47 million more women and girls around the world below the poverty line. This makes exposing women and girls to the wide range of career opportunities available in IT – the world’s fastest-growing job sector – critical to helping improve the…

I am excited to share with you that Cisco Secure Endpoint (formerly AMP for Endpoints) has successfully completed the 2020 MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK® Evaluation. This round is particularly rewarding because we had to face the difficult challenge of performing well against a set of simulated attacks from the formidable threat actors Carbanak and FIN7. I will not go into the details of our performance in the Evaluation – you can learn about them here instead….

Open source software has been a key underpinning of enterprise IT for years, so it’s no surprise that it’s helping to drive the infrastructure part of the equation forward just as much as application development. Some projects are much more influential than others, and here are five that are doing the most to help enterprise infrastructure keep pace with the demands of an ever-more sophisticated operating environment. OpenStack OpenStack is notable in part for being…