Cisco Live! Day One: Focus on SASE, Passwordless, Purchasing Models
Cisco makes a raft of product announcements based on the theme of "connect, secure, and automate" at Cisco Live!
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EMEAR president Wendy Mars (pictured above) reiterated Cisco’s focus on how to “connect, secure, and automate” in a cloud-first world.
“It’s key to digital transformation for us,” she said. “Those principles are important to give the flexibility and the choice for our customers for all their different circumstances.”
Adam MacHale, VP for service provider at Cisco, added that the digitization of society “is an opportunity for us to innovate and … change a lot of the things that we’re doing. Particularly from my side with our service providers, we can build that digital platform [to] adopt all of these new ideas.”
Visibility beyond the corporate network is increasingly critical in the era of remote working. This is especially the case as organizations accelerate the adoption of SaaS, internet and cloud solutions.
On Tuesday, Cisco announced the integration of its ThousandEyes internet and cloud intelligence with its switching portfolio and AppDynamics. This means IT will have visibility and actionable insights into external networks and services, as well as within the corporate network.
Joint ThousandEyes and AppDynamics customers will be able to view network and internet metrics within the AppDynamics Dash Studio from April. They won’t have to buy additional licenses or agents. Catalyst 9300/9400 customers with a DNA Advantage or Premier license will be entitled to access ThousandEyes in early April.
Cisco has unveiled infrastructure-agnostic, passwordless authentication. Integrated into its existing Duo offering, users can skip the password and log into cloud applications via security keys or platform biometrics.
Duo passwordless authentication leverages the Web Authentication (WebAuthn) standard which is based in asymmetric cryptography. This enables biometrics to be securely stored on and validated by the device, locally, as opposed to a centralized database.
Duo passwordless authentication will be available for public preview this summer with general availability by year’s end.
Cisco says it is simplifying networking and security operations with an expanded Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture.
It is to allow customers to buy all core SASE product components in a single offer with the option to transition to a subscription service. The vendor calls it an important step for helping network operations (NetOps) and security operations (SecOps) teams securely connect users to applications.
Cisco’s vision is to combine networking, remote access, cloud security, zero-trust network access and observability into a single subscription service. That way, it says it can deliver seamless, secure access to any application, over any network or cloud, anywhere users work.
Cisco also unveiled innovations to the cloud-native platform, SecureX. This, it says, delivers complete protection from endpoint to the cloud.
Cisco says it wants to give customers more choice as to how they buy and consume IT. As such, it says it is transforming its go-to-market strategy for hardware, software and services.
On Tuesday it announced Cisco Plus, a “solution as a service” that will provide simpler consumption and use of the Cisco portfolio.
Cisco Plus will offer networking, security, compute, storage, applications and observability solutions as a service with unified subscriptions.
Cisco highlighted network as a service (NaaS), which gives customers network capability without owning, building and maintaining their own infrastructure. Cisco is planning limited-release NaaS solutions later this calendar year.
Ali Niroo, founding partner of CNSG, said on a panel that the sales cycle is moving back to where it was pre-pandemic. Most importantly, customers’ sense of urgency has slowed down from its rapid state between March and August of 2020.
Niroo said the discovery session resembles its former self. However, customers are asking themselves different questions than before. For example, how much real estate do they plan to occupy when people go back into the office? How many locations do they need? Do they trust their employees with remote work?
Ali Niroo, founding partner of CNSG, said on a panel that the sales cycle is moving back to where it was pre-pandemic. Most importantly, customers’ sense of urgency has slowed down from its rapid state between March and August of 2020.
Niroo said the discovery session resembles its former self. However, customers are asking themselves different questions than before. For example, how much real estate do they plan to occupy when people go back into the office? How many locations do they need? Do they trust their employees with remote work?
“Cisco Live!” kicked off Tuesday with a raft of new product announcements. Cisco says this year it will celebrate customers and partners that are “the IT heroes of their organizations.”
Cisco’s Chuck Robbins
“We are at a unique point in time in which we can shape the future ahead of us, and to do that, we need the right technology to form the foundation,” said Cisco chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins. “With the innovation we are delivering this week, our customers around the world will not only be able to connect, secure and automate the future of IT, but also leverage technology to truly power an inclusive future for all.”
We offer a roundup of partner-impacting announcements from day one at Cisco Live in the slideshow above.
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