As one of the top 25 Cisco Channel Partners in the United States, we have a deep understanding of Cisco’s product lifecycles and how their products can be properly deployed and integrated for use as a platform for enterprise-wide solutions.
In this blog, our Cisco experts share the key takeaways from this year’s Cisco Live – as well as what you and your company can expect to see in the market as we head into the back half of 2023.
What is Cisco Live?
Cisco Live is an annual conference where IT professionals can learn about the latest technologies, review best practices, and discuss industry trends. This year’s five-day event was held in Las Vegas and provided attendees the chance to network with industry professionals, enhance their skills, and take part in a variety of learning opportunities such as keynote speeches, technical sessions, hands-on labs, and workshops.
Security and Performance Solutions and Products
Secure Access Services Edge (SASE)
SASE is an architecture around the Cisco security portfolio that converges networking and security functions in the cloud to connect users to the applications and data they need. SASE allows users to seamlessly connect to workforce applications from anywhere, while maintaining security and policy enforcement. The components of this architecture include Cisco Umbrella, Secure Connect, SD-WAN, and Secure Client (formerly Anyconnect).
Full Stack Observability (FSO)
FSO is a combination of Cisco solutions that help you monitor applications and performance in your environment. FSO provides unified visibility that drives real-time insights, proactively identifies problems, and makes recommendations to reduce challenges within your infrastructure. The components of this solution include Thousand Eyes, AppDynamics, and Intersight.
Sustainability Dashboard
Cisco is working on creating a sustainability dashboard in Control Hub that will provide an overview of things such as your green score, carbon emissions, energy usage, etc. Although the dashboard is not quite ready for market yet, it will also have predictive modeling that can showcase how making certain changes to your infrastructure environment will impact your sustainability efforts over time.
Cloud and Azure Foundation
Cisco Networking Cloud
As many companies are experiencing constraints for full-time employees and resources, Cisco is moving its networking cloud vision to a simplified management approach. The Cisco Networking Cloud is focused on the unification of product lines to allow clients to leverage the right solution while maintaining a single point of management. This is the evolution of the Cisco Meraki and Catalyst story into a single cloud managed environment.
Multicloud Security
Cisco is offering a new product called Multicloud Defense which allows companies to have a security overlay that centralizes all security policies across public or private clouds and on-premises infrastructure. Multicloud Defense protects your environments using a single software-as-a-service (SaaS) control pane, which simplifies your cloud security and increases operational efficiency.
Containers and Automation
In the fast-paced world of containers and microservices, trying to maintain a standard framework (while also performing security reviews) has become a major challenge. Cisco has helped streamline this process with Panoptica, a Cisco tool to perform security analysis on Kubernetes workloads – as well as Calisti, a service mesh manager designed to deploy Kubernetes clusters in a streamlined fashion. This provides a simple, validated, and secure approach to the microservices space instead of managing multiple independent solutions.
Improvements and New Additions to Webex
Webex Collaboration and Interoperability with Microsoft Teams
For a long time, there has been a disconnect between Cisco video devices and Microsoft Teams. To remedy some of the issues companies have been experiencing, Cisco announced improved interoperability and integration for Cisco Webex devices joining Teams meetings and utilizing aspects of the Teams experience (such as Teams Rooms, Displays, Panels, etc.).
Webex Security
Security has always been a major priority for Cisco. In their efforts to continue improving security for Webex, they’ve launched (or will be soon launching) several new features. A few we like to highlight include:
- Audio Watermarking: This is a huge step forward in protecting information shared on calls. It works by making a unique, inaudible identifier for each audio output. If that audio is then leaked or shared without authorization, you will be able to trace it back to the source.
- External Identity Verification: With the rise of AI and “deep fake” technology, this third-party verification uses Zero Trust Security framework to help ensure that the right people are joining meetings and gaining access to that information.
- Real-time Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Cisco is adding additional DLP capabilities that can detect if a file being shared contains classified information, and if so, Webex will prohibit the sharing of that file.
New Webex Features – Coming Soon
- Webex Noise Removal: With the acquisition of Babblelabs, Cisco will be bringing noise removal natively to Webex. This will allow Cisco devices to better distinguish human voice from background noises, automatically remove those background noises, and naturally enhance your voice (no matter the language). Processing for this noise reduction is 100% local and adds no additional cloud security or privacy risk.
- Catch Me Up: This new Cisco Webex feature uses AI to generate meeting summaries with key points, personalized action summaries, and more.
- Webex for Automobiles: Cisco has been working closely with auto manufacturers and technology companies (like Apple, CarPlay, Android, etc.) to create more seamless experiences for Webex meetings in vehicles. These features will be coming soon to certain Ford, Volkswagen, Audi, and Mercedes Benz vehicles.
- Managing Hybrid Work with Control Hub: This provides users with the ability to proactively manage the status of third-party peripheral devices. So even if your employees are not all using Cisco devices, you can still manage them in once place.
Conclusion
While Cisco’s technologies can be incredibly helpful in transforming your business, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin. We are experts in applying the right Cisco technologies to match your business needs. Reach out to us to us today to learn how we can help.
