Joel Cunningham, Head of Connect at Daisy Corporate Services
Attending Cisco Live is always an experience and this year kept up that momentum. I attended a number of inspiring talks around technology and solutions on customer experiences, hybrid working, AI and sustainable solutions.
My 4 key take aways are:
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: This will boost efficiency and help get back precious time with platforms and AI-enhanced products
- Sustainability: Cisco are committed to ensuring eco-friendly practices and solutions
- Powering Hybrid Working: Solutions that support flexible, efficient workplaces
- Ultra Ethernet: Hyper-scale Ethernet, AI fabric for higher levels of performance, utilization, availability, and simplicity
Enhanced offerings coming our way…
Meraki Dashboard will provide further unification and integration
- Meraki Dashboard continues its evolution towards full cloud management, with the ability to monitor Meraki access, WAN, and IoT and Cisco Catalyst access technologies together.
- First introduced as a capability for Catalyst switching, customers can now view and select Catalyst wireless devices in the Meraki dashboard, including the Catalyst 9800 Wireless Controllers (IOS-XE) and access points (public beta March 30).
- Journey to a single, unified hardware architecture with the new Catalyst 9300-M Switches, which will be managed natively from the Meraki dashboard (orderable from February 13 2024).
- AI is being used within Cisco Meraki to manage sprawling camera networks, providing new features to improve security and observability.
- Search for video footage using attributes (e.g. colour of shirt, colour of vehicle). For example, Meraki cameras can now detect specific uniforms of workers to detect unauthorised access on business premises.
- Presence analytics – count, track, and monitor people and vehicles in a particular space and get insight into people and vehicle occupancy.
Integration of Cisco ThousandEyes with Cisco Secure Access
- Experience Insights incorporates the ThousandEyes Endpoint Agent into the Secure Access client on each user’s machine.
- The goal is to provide better insights into connectivity and application issues that users might experience when accessing their cloud applications.
- This provides system-level hardware metrics, plus network and application performance data.
Cisco AI Assistant for security
- Spans across all the security portfolio areas, built securely and aligned with Cisco’s Responsible AI Framework.
- AI Assistant for Firewall Policy: Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Centre and Cisco Defense Orchestrator help administrators use natural language to discover policies and get rule recommendations. This eliminates duplicate rules, misconfigured policies, and complex workflows.
- AI-powered Encrypted Visibility Engine for all firewall models: Most data centre traffic today is encrypted and the inability to inspect encrypted traffic is a key security concern. Decrypting traffic for inspection is resource-intensive and fraught with operational, privacy and compliance issues. The Encrypted Visibility Engine leverages billions of samples, including sandboxed malware samples, to determine if the encrypted traffic is transporting malware.
- AI Assistant in Secure Access: Leveraging the power of generative AI, customers can create security access policies using natural language prompts within Cisco’s Secure Services Edge (SSE) solution.
- Securing AI: New capabilities in Secure Access will also automatically detect and protect intellectual property (IP) as it flows in and out of AI systems.