- Cisco wrapped up its annual conference, Cisco Live 2023, yesterday in Las Vegas.
- Cisco Live 2023 was attended by nearly 20,000 people in-person, while almost one million tuned in online.
- The company introduced Cisco Networking Cloud, Cisco Secure Access, Cisco Panoptica, Full-Stack Observability, and AI Policy Assistant and SOC Assistant, its new generative AI-based tools for security policy management and situation analysis tools, respectively.
Cisco wrapped up its annual conference, Cisco Live 2023, yesterday. During the event, the company ensured the world knows what they are up to: to create a simpler, sustainable, and more inclusive technology.
“It’s a complicated world,” Cisco chair and CEO Chuck Robbins noted during the keynote address. “We’re gonna help figure it all out.”
“We want to simplify your experience,” Robbins added, spelling out networking, security, and application development as part of its transformational strategy. Robbins claimed Cisco’s products have positively impacted 893 million people worldwide since 2016 when the company set a target of one billion by 2025.
Cisco Live 2023, attended by nearly 20,000 people in-person and almost one million tuning in online, saw the introduction of the following Cisco products:
- Cisco Networking Cloud: Designed to deliver a single platform experience for networking management.
- Cisco Secure Access: A security service edge (SSE) solution for location-, device-, and application-agnostic network visibility and security.
- Cisco Panoptica: For end-to-end lifecycle protection of cloud-native application environments.
- Full-Stack Observability: A platform for contextual predictive insights for decision-making, prioritization, aligning performance, securing workloads, and more.
- Generative AI-powered collaboration tools: Cisco is now leveraging large language models (LLMs) across its Collaboration and Security tools suite. This includes meeting and conversation summarization in Webex, AI Policy Assistant for security policy creation and management and security operations center (SOC) Assistant in Cisco Security Cloud.
See More: Cisco Live 2023 — Important Announcements So Far
How Cisco Is Simplifying Networking and Security With These Products
Cisco is on a mission to ensure it thrives in the next networking phase, i.e., over the cloud, as it did in conventional networking, all the while making it simpler (that’s what Robbins and the rest of Cisco’s executive leadership team kept on reiterating).
To this end, at Cisco Live 2022, the company integrated the hardware portfolio of products under Cisco Catalyst with Cisco Meraki, its cloud-based networking management platform. Through Cisco Networking Cloud, both Meraki and Catalyst, along with ThousandEyes, would be available to enterprise customers.
It also clubs together data center, compute, IoT, and SD-WAN components scattered across campus and branch. As such, isolated data and fragmented platforms will be accessible to derive insights.
“Both partners and customers are [say], ‘Simplify the tools that you’re selling to us, simplify how we buy from you, and then help us understand the outcomes and how your tools fit in the outcomes that we’re looking for,’” said Rebecca Stone, SVP of customer solutions marketing and CMO at Cisco Meraki. “Just selling them the tools without giving them the solution for how to pull all these things together into one experience isn’t working for them.”
And why not? Speaking with Network World, Shamus McGillicuddy, research director for the network-management practice at Enterprise Management Associates, highlighted the present-day crunch in technical roles. “Skilled network engineers have traditionally preferred discrete, technical management interfaces that allowed them to dig deep into functionality when configuring and managing devices.”
“Now there’s less time for that. Engineering teams are understaffed and overworked. So simpler, unified management experiences are essential,” McGillicuddy added. “That’s what Cisco is aiming for.”
Cisco Secure Access also combines zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateways (SWG), DNS security, cloud access security brokers (CASB), and firewall-as-a-service (FaaS) for software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) use cases.
In line with its goal to simplify, the solution is also managed over the cloud through a single dashboard. It has extended support for several application architectures, such as peer-to-peer applications, server-initiated communication, multi-channel applications, and more.
Additionally, while Cisco Secure Access is designed to secure resources on the network edge, the company also updated Cisco Panoptica, its cloud-native solution designed to secure all phases of the software development lifecycle, right from development to deployment, on the cloud.
Finally, given the expeditious adoption of generative AI in the recent past, Cisco Live 2023 would have been incomplete without AI-related updates. “I think it will be bigger than the internet,” Robbins proclaimed at Cisco Live 2023.
Subsequently, Cisco is looking to leverage generative AI in its products to enable clients to analyze, suggest and manage security policies as part of their accessibility and threat response measures. Cisco’s new AI Policy Assistant is at the core of this AI-driven approach to policy management through Cisco Security Cloud.
“There are two things we have to keep in mind,” said Jeetu Patel, EVP & GM of Security & Collaboration at Cisco. “One is it actually augments the administrator. We’re not trying to automate the human out of this; we’re trying to ensure that every human has an assistant with AI.”
“And number two, we’re actually starting to see it in the next big revolution of user interface design, where we used to be in a command line interface, then we went to [graphical user interfaces] GUIs, then after GUIs, we went to touch interfaces.”
“Now we’re in a prompt interface that actually merges with the GUI. So, what you’ll see as many, many more of these natural language interfaces that come in, it then becomes so much simpler to go on manage these things, and there’s no need to have a Ph.D. to go out to manage firewall policies.”
Meanwhile, Cisco’s security operations center or SOC Assistant also uses AI for situation analysis, assessing potential impact, and providing recommendations for action.
While Cisco focuses on cloud-delivered networking and security solutions, it also maintains solutions for on-premise servers, public cloud, colocation centers, and more.
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