Cisco yesterday unveiled new advancements across its networking, security, and optimised applications portfolio in a bid to simplify IT and achieve a more unified experience for customers and partners.
At Cisco Live being held this week in Las Vegas, Cisco executives led by chair and CEO Chuck Robbins, shared the company’s vision around hybrid multicloud networking, AI-based security and its new full stack observability (FSO) platform.
“We believe there’s a huge opportunity ahead for Cisco, as we’re uniquely positioned to help our customers solve many of their biggest business challenges using technology,” said Robbins. “Whether security, connectivity, applications or sustainability, Cisco is the partner of choice to help our customers transform and adapt.
According to Cisco’s State of Global Innovation report, 85% of IT professionals indicate they value simplicity in their IT systems. The new technologies introduced at Cisco Live highlight Cisco’s commitment to simplify user experiences and help drive an inclusive future for all.
"As today's digital environment continues to transform at record speed, businesses require robust platform solutions that are innovative, resilient, and secure. To make these work seamlessly, IT decision makers and developers have highlighted a need for a simple and centralised way to manage their expanding and rapidly evolving IT infrastructure," said Vish Iyer, vice president of architectures at Cisco Asia Pacific, Japan, and Greater China.
"We are excited to bring these new technologies and product advancements to our customers and partners in the region and continue to help them grow in their digital journey with new unified experiences that address their challenges and complexities."
Vision for Cisco Networking Cloud
Innovations announced yesterday revolve around Cisco Networking Cloud, an integrated management platform experience for both on-prem and cloud operating models.
As part of its journey to simplification, Cisco has been working to create a simpler network management platform experience to help customers easily access and navigate its platforms to manage all Cisco networking products from one place. Featuring cloud-driven automation, rich network insights, and innovation through its partner ecosystem, Cisco Networking Cloud will accelerate the delivery of unified experiences and drive measurable business outcomes.
New Innovations announced at Cisco Live include single sign-on (SSO), API key exchange/repository, cross-platform navigation, expanded network assurance with Cisco ThousandEyes, cloud monitoring for Catalyst devices, sustainable energy networking solutions for the data center, and more.
Cisco is also simplifying its business to help customers simplify theirs, with a more flexible Cisco Catalyst switch stack, improved visibility into data center power and energy consumption, and new AI data center blueprints to improve performance and visibility for network operators.
New Secure Service Edge solution
The enterprise networking giant launched a new Secure Service Edge (SSE) solution, Cisco Secure Access, to enable superior hybrid work experiences and dramatically simplify access across any location, any device, and any application.
Highlights of Cisco Secure Access include:
- Common Access Experience: Delivers a single, easy way to access all applications and resources (not just some) by intelligently and securely steering traffic to private and public destinations without end-user intervention.
- Single, Cloud-Managed Console: Simplifies security operations by converging multiple functions into one easy to use solution that protects all traffic. Instead of managing a broad set of tools, administrators, and analysts can go to one place to see all traffic, set all policy, and analyze security risks. This translates into efficiency gains, cost reductions, and a flexible IT environment.
- Faster Detection and Response: Provides analysis to speed up investigations and is backed by Cisco Talos AI-driven threat intelligence to detect and block more threats.
Cisco is delivering on its promise of the AI-driven Cisco Security Cloud to simplify cybersecurity and empower people to do their best work from anywhere, regardless of the increasingly sophisticated threat landscape.
The company previewed generative AI capabilities in the Cisco Security Cloud to make security analysts significantly more effective at detecting and remediating threats and managing policy across their security environment.
Finally, Cisco marked several key milestones towards its Security Cloud platform vision with the unveiling of Cisco Multicloud Defense, Cisco Secure Firewall 4200 Series appliance and 7.4 software, as well as cloud-native application security enhancements in Panoptica. Cisco’s latest innovations all protect hybrid and multicloud infrastructures with phenomenal user experiences.
Cisco Full-Stack Observability platform drives smarter digital enterprise
Cisco announced the launch of a new Full Stack Observability (FSO) Platform—a vendor-agnostic solution that harnesses the power of the company’s full portfolio and marks a key advancement in Cisco's accelerating FSO strategy. It delivers contextual, correlated, and predictive insights that allow customers to resolve issues more quickly and optimize experiences, while also minimizing business risk.
This newly-minted offering enables a new observability ecosystem that brings data together from multiple domains including application, networking, infrastructure, security, cloud, sustainability, and business sources.
Cisco’s FSO Platform is focused on OpenTelemetry and is anchored on Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces (MELT), enabling businesses to seamlessly collect and analyze MELT data generated by any source. The Cisco FSO Platform is also designed as a unified, extensible platform, allowing developers to build their own observability solutions, empowering an ecosystem of customers and partners.
The premier solution delivered on Cisco FSO Platform is Cloud Native Application Observability. It helps customers achieve business outcomes, make the right digital experience related decisions, ensure performance alignment with end-user expectations, prioritize, and reduce risk while securing workloads. In addition to Cloud Native Application Observability, the first set of modules on Cisco’s FSO Platform are Cost Insights, Application Resource Optimizer, Security Insights and Cisco AIOps.
Cisco is already collaborating with partners, including CloudFabrix, Evolutio, and Kanari, to develop and monetize a diverse ecosystem of solutions for the Cisco FSO Platform that enable meaningful, new use cases and rapidly deliver customer value from observable telemetry.
