Cisco Promises Insight Into Hybrid Workforce with Latest Updates

CISCO PARTNER SUMMIT — Cisco has unveiled new technologies designed to manage the complexity of a hybrid workforce.

The vendor announced the updates at Cisco’s Partner Summit 2021 Tuesday. It said it would provide zero-trust solutions to ensure secure access to any application, over any network, anywhere users work.

It is leveraging its 2020 ThousandEyes acquisition with the addition of Application Outages to its Internet Insights platform. This will provide IT teams with real-time and historic view into the availability of SaaS applications. Customers can correlate user-specific issues to broader application issues to proactively alert their workforce an app is unavailable. At the same time they can escalate the issue with the SaaS provider.

The goal, says Cisco, is to empower customers with global insight into all the networks, services, and now SaaS applications, which impact digital experience.

Cisco’s Todd Nightingale

Todd Nightingale is executive VP and general manager, Cisco enterprise networking and cloud. He said as a leader in networking, security and collaboration, the vendor has “a unique opportunity to address challenges and concerns of a hybrid workforce end-to-end.”

ThousandEyes is also making available the first live view of business-critical SaaS application and internet outages based on actual performance data. Cisco notes that other sites rely on user-reported issues, which can be misleading and inaccurate. However, the Cisco ThousandEyes Internet Outage Map is powered by “billions of daily measurements across thousands of global vantage points.” This, it says, puts “the power of real-world data in the hands of every user.”

In addition to the public internet, visibility across collaboration applications and cloud environments has emerged as key to delivering great digital experiences for users.

Access Across Clouds

Elsewhere, Cisco noted the importance of collaboration applications for remote workers. It says that between May 2020 and August 2021, collaboration apps became the No. 1 most monitored application type by IT teams. In addition, managing users, branches, clouds and the internet requires a simpler, more intuitive approach to SD-WAN.

To address these challenges, Cisco SD-WAN recently announced new enhancements for greater access and visibility across more clouds. Cisco says it is offering greater interconnection with cloud and SDCI partners, enhanced multitenancy support, and a better user interface. This includes the availability of new integrations with Equinix, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Furthermore, Cisco recently announced greater visibility into the performance of Cisco Webex through ThousandEyes and Cisco Meraki. Now, IT can leverage new ThousandEyes Webex agents for bidirectional visibility between user locations and Webex services. It can also use Meraki Insight, which automates root-cause analysis and specific remediation steps across the local network, in the WAN, or in a SaaS provider’s cloud.

Cisco says channel partners can play a pivotal role in helping their end customers address the transition to a hybrid workforce.