Technology leader, Cisco announced a number of software innovations designed for managing and securing networks at the 30th Cisco Live US taking place on 09-13 June 2019 in San Diego, California. The company introduced new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities which will allow IT teams to function at machine speed and scale through personalized network insights. As part of its broadened capabilities offering, Cisco also unveiled innovations to effectively manage users and applications across the entire enterprise network – from campus networks and wide-area networks to data centres and the IoT edge.
“We understand that you are building and delivering more applications to your organisation than you have ever had before and we understand that they are running anywhere and everywhere, we also understand that the demand that users have on you relevant to those applications are at the highest level they ever have been. We want to deliver technologies that help you because we understand that the application is the closest layer of your technology to the business issue or opportunity that you’re trying to drive”, said Chuck Robbins Chief Executive Officer of Cisco during his keynote speech.
Since its introduction two years ago, Cisco’s intent-based networking has reinvented how networks are built and managed. Cisco is furthering this effort through multidomain integrations designed to provide end-to-end security, segmentation and application experience.
“Over the last several years we have been delivering. We have delivered intent based networking. Never before in the history of Cisco have we had a completely refreshed portfolio of campus switches along with a completely refreshed set of wifi access points with a completely refresh set of routing products with SA-WAN all running one operating system at the same time all part of the intent based networking automation architecture” said Robbins.
Bridging the gap between the needs of a business and the resources available requires innovative network automation and analytics tools, powered by data and underpinned by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
These new capabilities will grant IT teams:
• More Visibility: No two networks are the same. Environments are always changing. Cisco continuously collects relevant data from local networks and correlates it against the aggregate deidentified data set to create highly individualized network baselines. These baselines constantly learn and adapt as the number of devices, users and applications evolves, and as environments change.
• Greater Insights: Network complexity has grown beyond the human scale of processing. Cisco uses machine learning to correlate the immense amount of data coming from the network against the individualized network baselines to uncover the issues that will have the greatest impact on the network. This improves issue relevancy, alerting IT of the issues that matter most. It also discovers trends and patterns, so IT can pre-emptively identify issues before they become a problem.
• Guided Actions: Cisco uses machine reasoning algorithms and automated workflows to perform the logical troubleshooting steps that an engineer would execute to resolve a problem. This helps IT detect issues and vulnerabilities, analyze the root cause and execute corrective actions faster than ever.
Cisco is building an architecture that spans every domain of the intent-based network campus, branch, WAN, IoT, data centre and cloud. The company has created solutions optimized to meet the unique needs of each of these networking domains.
The new integrations allow for end-to-end:
• Network segmentation: The integration of Cisco SD-Access with Cisco SD-WAN and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) makes it easier for IT teams to consistently authorize, onboard and segment users and devices across campus, branch, data centre and cloud networks, even when users and applications change. Because of this segmentation, IT is able to safeguard against unauthorized access to sensitive data and critical applications.
• Application experience: Cisco now automatically conveys application requirements between the data centre and the WAN, allowing the network to select the best path and prioritize traffic even if applications move or change. This allows IT teams to dynamically elevate application performance across the enterprise and branch.
• Pervasive security: As an industry leader in cybersecurity, Cisco is leveraging its security innovations across all domains. By extending the ability to detect threats in encrypted traffic across public clouds, and by protecting the campus, branch and WAN against threats, Cisco is providing the end-to-end security customers need.
“At Cisco, we’re just getting started, I believe that there is so much innovation left that we can deliver and over the next years we can deliver and our teams believe that,” said Robbins.
By Fundisiwe Maseko
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