NETWORKING

People are wired with an innate desire to learn. Yet, while desire may be evenly distributed, access to education tools, resources, and opportunity is not. At Cisco Networking Academy, we believe that all people, regardless of where they live, their means, age, gender, or background, deserve equal access to education and the opportunity to pursue meaningful work that provides for themselves, their families, and contributes to the betterment of society. “Cisco Networking Academy courses gave…

Now that the Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge 2021 winners have been officially announced, we are excited for you to learn more about each winning team and the story behind each innovation. The Cisco Global Problem Solver Challenge is an annual competition that awards cash prizes to early-stage tech entrepreneurs solving the world’s toughest problems. Now in its fifth year, the competition awarded its largest prize pool ever, $1 million USD, to 20 winning teams from around the world. To…

Earlier this year, Cisco completed its acquisition of imimobile, adding an enterprise-grade CPaaS platform to Cisco’s industry-leading collaboration and contact center solution portfolio. Our guest blogger this week is Dave Jennings, VP Strategic Solutions at imimobile. With consumer behavior constantly evolving, customers want their interactions with businesses to be more seamless than ever. However, the retail industry, like many others, faces challenges to create the experiences that customers expect. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many customers…

As customers race to the cloud, Cisco partners are leading the way, each bringing their unique services and capabilities to solve new challenges.  But this new focus on cloud requires a new skillset for IT professionals.  Partner sellers and architects who are traditionally focused on networks and infrastructure must now learn how to operate in a cloud model.  At the same time, those who have been working with cloud native environments must also learn how…

Things are changing in the world of endpoint security. Part of this change has to do with how organizations are digitally transforming themselves to accommodate the abrupt shift to remote work in 2020. In March of that year, for instance, Gartner revealed that 88% of business organizations around the world had encouraged their employees to work from home due to the pandemic. The shift to remote work led employees to connect to the corporate network…

The day is coming when enterprise IT professionals will be able to order network infrastructure components from a menu of options, have them designed to fit their business needs, and have the whole thing delivered and running in perhaps hours. The concept is called Network as a Service (NaaS), and it has been around in a number of different forms for a few years, mostly in the service provider arena. For enterprises, the as-a-service concept…

What an exciting time for Cisco Secure Firewall, with the announcements of new innovations including our Firewall 7.0 release and the enhanced integration between SecureX and Secure Firewall, we are raising the bar when it comes to simplifying, strengthening, and redefining your customer’s network, workload, and multi-cloud security.  Our Reimagine Network Security – Partner Insights Forum on June 15th highlighted all of the exciting updates in the 7.0 release. These new firewall innovations bring a…

Scratch two things off the list! The Center for Internet Security (CIS) recently dropped the number of Critical Controls from 20 to 18. Some of us still think of them as the SANS Top 20, so that’s kind of a big deal. There really aren’t fewer things to do, of course. CIS updated the Controls to better address modern technology and to help you prioritize. There’s no magic in the actual number of Controls that…

What Are Microbursts and Why Do They Matter? Ever wondered why a switch interface shows an average utilization of well below wire rate, and yet egress discards are incrementing? Most likely, that interface is experiencing microbursts. Often, when multiple input interfaces simultaneously receive traffic destined to a single egress interface – a so-called “incast” traffic pattern – no problem arises because the instantaneous receive rate is low enough that the output interface can handle the…

We have all heard the maxim “Life Imitates Art”. It might also be true that Life imitates IT operations as well. A recent personal experience led me to a new perspective on how important it is to have proper Day 2 Operations Tools in the data center. In this blog post, I refer specifically to Nexus Dashboard Insights as the tool of choice for ACI and NXOS DC fabrics. About a year ago, I was…