Today we released our annual Purpose Report, which reflects and celebrates the past year’s work towards Powering an Inclusive Future for All—the progress we’ve made against our goals, and the people a… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Today we released our annual Purpose Report, which reflects and celebrates the past year’s work towards Powering an Inclusive Future for All—the progress we’ve made against our goals, and the people and lives we’ve touched. The report explores the theme, The Power of Purpose, because we recognize that when we intersect our business, technology, and a network of partners together with our purpose, we create a powerful force for lasting change. And we have some incredible examples from this year, including the announcement that we achieved our goal of positively impacting 1 billion lives, and did so over a year early!

For many years, the purpose of our Purpose Report has been to look back. But we must also look ahead.

Any company looking to successfully execute their business strategy must consider the changing terrain, identify upcoming challenges and trends, and anticipate how to best meet evolving requirements. The same is true for purpose. This year’s Purpose Report begins to explore the landscape, and where we see opportunities for Purpose to grow.

Our biggest challenges are interconnected and interdependent

The past several years brought us all unprecedented challenges, and a world more prone to polarization than before. But instead of binary questions and issues, a more multipolar world has emerged, requiring us to operate with more nuance and greater context than ever. In this context one thing is clear—we are more interconnected and interdependent than ever.

Our lives and futures are linked by our shared dependence on our planet and its environments. We have a global responsibility to solve the climate crisis together. We see the growth of an increasingly digital and global economy, keeping us connected through ecosystems of financial interdependence. And as we learned in the recent pandemic, our collective health is also inextricably linked.

Global crises also continue to grow increasingly interconnected­­––and the consequences disproportionately fall on vulnerable communities. Developing nations who often contribute the least to climate change bear the brunt of its impact. And due to a lack of infrastructure and technological advancement, they are often the least equipped to respond to natural disasters. While the digital economy continues to grow, 2.6 billion people remain unconnected, denying them access to the opportunities and resources available. The consequences of each crisis exacerbate others­­—access to education is disrupted, progress for women and girls is set back, and extreme poverty rates rise.

Pursuing our Purpose can and must be the glue that brings us together to meet this moment and address these complex, interconnected issues. The question we must continue to ask as we look ahead is, how?

This year’s report reflects on how—how we achieved our goal of positively impacting 1 billion lives, how the private sector can work in new ways to address critical issues facing our societies, and how we can apply lessons from the past to build resilience in our communities for the future.

Where do we go from here?

There is no doubt that the path forward for business in a multipolar world isn’t entirely clear. There is significant work ahead to address risks in supply chains and manufacturing, and complex questions on how to best navigate a shifting geopolitical terrain. But should these challenges and uncertainties also apply to Purpose?

I don’t think so. In fact, in this moment when many are shying away from a global mindset and approach, our Purpose work proceeds by pursuing what is most meaningful, regardless if that is at the local or global level. Purpose can flex. It operates in a lane that is valued around the world, giving all of us who do this work the space to create and iterate, to sway and pivot, and find our rhythm. And when we do, pursuing our Purpose holds the door open for economic initiatives.

As we close the year in which we reached a goal of positively impacting one billion people, I’m looking ahead and considering the next goal we’ll set for ourselves. We are stronger with our partners by our side—an ecosystem focused on driving impact. We’ll continue to do this if we integrate the lessons of the past and take a new approach in the days and years ahead. I hope you’ll join us on this journey and read about our impact this year, and my reflections on what’s next, in our FY23 Purpose Report. Together, we can do good for our communities, good for our businesses, and good for all.

Read the full Cisco FY23 Purpose Report

  When we combine our business, technology, and a network of partners together with our purpose, we create a powerful force for lasting change. We have some incredible examples from this year in our Power of Purpose report, including the announcement that we achieved our goal of positively impacting 1 billion lives, and did so over a year early.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Digital customer experience (DCX) is a hot topic these days. As a digital team leader at Cisco, I was recently asked to speak about it at an industry conference. You should know that when I’m put in f… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Digital customer experience (DCX) is a hot topic these days. As a digital team leader at Cisco, I was recently asked to speak about it at an industry conference. You should know that when I’m put in front of an audience, I often lean on hyperbole as a verbal crutch to help sell a point. I opened that speech with a bold overstatement, hoping to elicit a few laughs:

“Digital customer experience is the most important function in your entire company, and will be for the next decade.”

Surprisingly, no one in the crowd seemed amused. Instead, almost everyone nodded their head in agreement. Some appeared to be writing it down.  I think one guy even tweeted it. And I thought to myself, “whoa, maybe it’s actually true!” Maybe it’s the truest thing ever uttered in the history of the world.

In all seriousness, digital customer experience is one of the most important differentiators for your business. Why? Because your customers prefer it. They would rather engage with you online through self-serve channels than talk to you—at least as a primary option. This is true in B2B, it’s true across every stage of the pre- and post-sales lifecycle, and it’s true of most customers, regardless of size or industry.

The fundamental reason behind this digital preference is a desire for simplicity. Customers want things to be easy. They want to get value from your product or service as quickly and with as little effort as possible. This is crucial because, in an increasingly subscription-oriented world, if you’re too complicated they’ll just cancel you and find another provider with a better, easier, more digital experience.

So how do you build a great DCX, one that meets your customers’ needs and builds a sustained competitive advantage for your company over the next ten years? Here’s what we’ve done at Cisco, where our DCX team was recently awarded four medals in the International Customer Experience Awards.

Digital Transformation Starts with your People and Culture

You can have the best vision, strategy, and tech stack in the world, but ultimately success depends on your people.

Building a high performing DCX organization includes staffing skilled experience mapping and digital content strategists, data and insights experts, and automation and orchestration platform specialists. Cisco has also established DCX go-to-market teams—folks who embed digital programs into the business and execute through internal teams and partners. It’s been one of the keys to our success.

Most importantly, build a strong culture where people can thrive. Nothing else matters if you don’t have people with shared values who have each other’s backs.

Build Journeys that Guide Customers to Value

At its core, DCX is about the customer journey—a guided path for your customers to help them adopt a solution and achieve their business outcomes. To create an effective journey, it’s imperative to start with the customer. Talk to them. Listen as they describe their experience at every step—their perceptions, feelings, and needs. Map out the experience along the stages of the lifecycle, identifying the exact points in the process where you need to make things easier. Layer in your product adoption framework, which prescribes healthy usage patterns along the way. Then develop helpful, contextual digital content aligned to each of those points on the experience map. Finally, build your data pipelines and business rules to power the automation of the experience. The result is a digital journey that will gracefully guide your customer to value and success.

Once the journey is operational, consistently monitor performance. Recognize where customers slow down or need extra help, and quickly make the necessary adjustments to remove friction and optimize their experience.

Engage Customers in the Channels they Use

The modern customer experience is omni-channel. While most B2B customers may still prefer email, the reality is they are interacting with you across a variety of channels. More than two-thirds of your customers start their experience with online search. They look for information on your website, community forums, social media, and, increasingly, messaging apps like Cisco Webex. Your analytics team should be able to predict how customers engage, enabling you to personalize how you deliver content to them through their preferred channels—which of course should all be connected and synchronized so the experience feels cohesive as the customer moves between touch points.

Omni-channel includes coordinating with people, too. For example, if the customer is stalled and needs human intervention, the system should trigger an alert to the appropriate sales or customer success person and prescribe the action they should take with the customer. It’s what we refer to at Cisco as a digital-led, human-augmented experience.

Orchestrate the Experience Using Insights and Automated Decisions

DCX is often defined as delivering the “right experience at the right time in the right channel”—which emphasizes what we call intelligent orchestration, and it’s indispensable in a contemporary digital strategy.

Building an orchestration engine powered by data science and AI takes everything you know about a customer—who they are, what they have, how they behave, what they should do next—and feeds those insights into an AI infrastructure that makes decisions, automatically, on what content to deliver to what customer in what way.

Your orchestration platform is the brain of the Digital Customer Experience that determines and delivers the type of anticipatory, individualized experience your customers expect. And because it’s fully automated, it delivers that customized experience in real time at tremendous scale.

But don’t be afraid to “fail forward” in your orchestration strategy. Be imaginative, experiment, and try new things. It may not always work, but you’ll learn from it and continually improve.

Optimize and Scale through Partners

Cisco is a channel-led company, and we have found that delivering customer experience works a whole lot better when we combine efforts with our partners. This “greater together” philosophy applies to our DCX strategy as well, which is why we created our flagship Lifecycle Advantage program for partners.

Lifecycle Advantage empowers partners to leverage and co-brand Cisco’s digital journeys to guide our mutual customers through the lifecycle. It’s a powerful program used by more than 7,000 partners globally, and two of the most popular program tracks are Customer Success and Renewals.
In Lifecycle Advantage Customer Success, partners put their customers on a digital adoption journey. They can also monitor and guide their customers’ progress leveraging deep insights such as telemetry data, usage patterns, and stage progression rates, as well as prescriptive alerts. Check out this video to see Lifecycle Advantage in action:

In Lifecycle Advantage Renewals, Cisco’s Commerce Automation eStorefronts empower partners to digitally notify their customers of renewals, and deliver a quote that customers can transact online. This can dramatically reduce partner operational costs while giving customers the simple, frictionless online renewal experience they want.

Build Thriving Customer Relationships through Communities and Advocacy Programs

An essential pillar of a successful DCX strategy is the online customer community. This is a space where you build meaningful two-way relationships with your customers.

At Cisco, we have nearly 15 million users in our Community. It’s a forum where customers can ask questions, share ideas, and learn from each other. For us, it’s a vital source of insight into customer perceptions and needs. It drives tremendous cost savings (as more than 70% of customers prefer to self-serve online instead of opening expensive support cases). And, it leads to higher customer satisfaction, retention, and advocacy—boosted by initiatives like our Cisco Designated VIP and Insider programs.

Turbocharge Your Transformation through Digital Innovation

As you manage your DCX strategy, create space for innovation. Build a culture of ideation, experimentation, and incubation to make sure you’re future ready.

At Cisco, we’ve established a DCX innovation center of excellence consisting of transformation-minded cross-functional leaders chartered with the development of new ideas. Focus areas include predictive data science models, generative AI applications, intelligent content, and next generation e-commerce. This team ensures we stay on the leading edge as new digital trends and technologies emerge.

This isn’t just for the sake of innovation. Remain driven by a deep understanding of your customers’ needs and a clear definition of the problem you’re trying to solve, then pilot your ideas and quantify impact. A design thinking methodology is a great framework for this and will ensure you’re driving the most meaningful innovation initiatives.

DCX Delivers Business Impact

DCX is a mission-critical differentiator for Cisco and our partners. For example, 70% of all Cisco customers who progress from one lifecycle stage to the next have recently interacted with digital content. Those customers who are engaging digitally actually progress 28% faster than those who don’t. They have a 33-point higher average health score, suggesting greater product feature utilization. When they engage in more than one digital channel, they’re more than twice as likely to progress to a “low risk” stage of adoption, indicating value realization and probable retention. And, when customers engage in the digital renewal journey, their renewal rate is 19 points higher than customers not digitally engaged. The impact to our business is undeniable.

As it turns out, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Digital Customer Experience is the most important function in your entire company. Over the next decade, how well you execute your DCX strategy may very well dictate your success or failure as a business. Ultimately, we believe that DCX is the key to transforming your business, building sustainable growth, and delivering long-term customer value.

Maximize your digital customer experience
through Cisco’s Lifecycle Advantage program.

We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with #CiscoPartners on social!

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  Digital customer experience is one of the most important differentiators for your business. How do you build a great DCX, one that meets your customers’ needs and builds a sustained competitive advantage for your company over the next ten years? Here’s what we’ve done at Cisco.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

This is the season when marketers, just like everyone else, try to predict what lies ahead in the new year. Throughout 2023, Cisco Marketing has been looking at the latest trends and how they will… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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This is the season when marketers, just like everyone else, try to predict what lies ahead in the new year. Throughout 2023, Cisco Marketing has been looking at the latest trends and how they will shape the future of marketing. Fresh out of Cisco’s recent Partner Summit and Marketing Velocity Executive Exchange, we would like to share some insights with you as you prepare plans for 2024!

Welcome to the era of change, where the marketing game is always evolving. As marketers, it’s essential for us to track all changes, keep our finger on the pulse, and stay up to date with current trends.

The line between consumer and business buyer is blurred and we now realize it doesn’t matter – consumer or business, we are marketing to humans and the way we consume content is rapidly changing. Did you know:

68% of online experiences start with a search query (Brightedge Research)
79% of brands use content to generate leads (SEMrush)
70% of consumers bought a product after seeing a video about it on YouTube (Google)
63% of B2B marketers use content to boost customer loyalty (Content Marketing Institute)

To understand the bigger picture, watch the marketing trends video I shared at Partner Summit during the Marketing Velocity Executive Exchange and enjoy the session recordings.

Carrie Palin, Cisco SVP and Chief Marketing Officer, included her thoughts on the rapid change in marketing in her keynote presentation: Greater Together with Future-Ready Marketing. Carrie highlighted three pivotal trends: AI, encompassing the buzz surrounding generative capabilities, applying a digital-first approach, and the cultivation of modern legendary teams, and delved further into how our company is going to turn these ideas into action.

Apparently, the marketing world is abuzz with AI excitement. As keynote speaker Mitch Joel stated in his talk: at its core, Generative AI tools are reinventing the very essence of marketing.

The topic of Building Legendary Teams was explored deeply by Luxy Thuraisingam and her panelists during their roundtable discussion. The evolving reality raises certain questions, such as: How the roles of sales and marketing have and will continue to evolve. The conversation during the BIS Marketing BIS Panel Session: The Art of Sales and Marketing Alignment: Empowering Growth provided some interesting answers.

As Carrie Palin stated in her talk, developing modern legendary teams starts and ends with the people: inclusive and diverse culture, diversity of thoughts around the table. Caring is deeply ingrained in Cisco’s culture. This is why we also focus on contemplating a sustainable future: on the power of purpose, how to find and develop your purpose, and promote it.

Having insight into trends ignites our drive to respond. Here is another interesting statistic: According to Zendesk, 73% of consumers want to be able to seamlessly move between channels, while per McKinsey only 12% of digital platforms are highly integrated. With this in mind, Cisco is excited to announce that we are embarking on a journey to integrate our own industry-leading co-marketing experience: Cisco Marketing Velocity.

Imagine a seamless experience where finding the right asset, campaign, or learning takes just 5 clicks or less. Growing demand by precisely targeting leads with integrated account-based insights and find campaigns to help grow your market for managed services, SaaS, and SMB customers. And for the first time ever, we are bringing Marketing Velocity Central and Marketing Velocity Learning together so you can execute your end-to-end co-marketing strategy on a single, integrated platform. Watch this video to experience the vision.

We have already made significant strides in this multi-year journey by simplifying our navigation, offering more imagery for co-branding opportunities, and improving styling for a better overall experience. And there is a lot more to come!

Have a wonderful holiday, I wish you peace, happiness, and relaxation!

We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with #CiscoPartners on social!

Cisco Partners Facebook  |  @CiscoPartners X/Twitter  |  Cisco Partners LinkedIn

  This is the season when marketers try to predict what lies ahead in the new year. Cisco Marketing has been looking at the latest trends and how they will shape the future of marketing. Fresh out of Cisco’s recent Partner Summit and Marketing Velocity Executive Exchange, we would like to share some insights with you as you prepare plans for 2024!  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Webex is excited to announce a comprehensive solution for 3rd party Device Management (DM) referred to as ‘Partner Managed Devices.’ Partner Managed Devices allows Webex Cloud Calling offers (Webex Ca… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Webex is excited to announce a comprehensive solution for 3rd party Device Management (DM) referred to as ‘Partner Managed Devices.’ Partner Managed Devices allows Webex Cloud Calling offers (Webex Calling and Webex Wholesale) to support a flexible Device Management (DM) strategy. With this development, Webex enables its customers and partners to deliver a fully-managed Cisco-on-Cisco experience with deep Webex integration, as well as a self-managed DM option for non-Cisco devices via , enabling them to cater to

For Cisco devices, Webex Control Hub includes a complete set of DM tools that allow customized device configurations, bulk provisioning, self-activation, and automatic onboarding. For non-Cisco devices, the Partner Managed Devices DM option provides a architecture that allows customers to provision and integrating their own or a Partner’s DM tool with Webex. The first such DM is Phonism.

Phonism is a cloud-based SaaS platform that specializes in deploying, managing, securing, and migrating compliant devices at scale. Phonism’s integration to Webex allows new and existing Webex customers to support onboarding any Cisco security compliant and certified device to the Webex platform at scale and with significant customizations via the Partner Managed Devices DM option. This opens new possibilities for Webex customers, specifically Service Providers to support multiple new devices on the Webex platform that were previously not supported, also making it easier to migrate customers from legacy on-prem UCaaS platforms onto .

The integration with Phonism empowers Webex partners and customers to streamline and centralize their VoIP phone provisioning, management, compliance, and customer experience. Connecting these platforms provides an automatic hierarchy sync and imports devices into a feature-rich admin and user experience. Additionally, Phonism offers a compliance lock for supported devices on Webex, preventing the tampering or misconfiguration of settings and firmware.  Finally, with Phonism Technician onsite visits are greatly reduced as the self-service model eliminates most device-related support tickets.

Key benefits of using Partner Managed Devices Solution with Phonism

Enables support for security compliant and cloud certified non-Cisco Devices on Webex.
Syncs and maps Webex users and devices into Phonism.
Eases non-Cisco device customizations
Supports Bulk Move, Add, Change, Delete Devices
Phonism platform supports 280+ Devices from 10+ Device Manufacturers and counting, making it easier to support a non-Cisco device on Webex

We are excited to share the Partner Managed Devices solution with the world. It enables partners and customers alike to support virtually 3rd party SIP Device for the Webex Calling and Wholesale offers. By providing a path to support non-Cisco devices, Please check out more information on Sales Connect or contact at:  webexcallingteam@cisco.com

Learn more about Webex Device Management

We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with #CiscoPartners on social!

Cisco Partners Facebook  |  @CiscoPartners Twitter  |  Cisco Partners LinkedIn

About Phonism:
Phonism is the market leading intelligent Device Lifecycle Management (iDLM) productivity platform enabling service providers, manufacturers, distributors and app developers eliminate complexities of provisioning, deploying, migrating and managing VoIP devices throughout their entire lifecycles.
Phonism was founded in 2012 in Tampa, Florida. In the past year alone, Phonism has doubled headcount and expanded offices on 3 continents. We make it easy for anyone in the VoIP ecosystem to support 270+ devices from 10+ manufacturers. Their vendor agnostic approach allows customers to expand TAM (Total Addressable Markets) by taking advantage of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) opportunities, enabling a host of previously unsupported devices the ability to now be powered by Cisco.

  We are excited to share the Partner Managed Devices solution with the world. It enables partners and customers alike to support virtually 3rd party SIP Device for the Webex Calling and Wholesale offers.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

In an era where businesses are embracing the vital role of sustainability, Cisco Customer Experience (CX) is here to support you on your sustainability journey. We’re thrilled to share we are… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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In an era where businesses are embracing the vital role of sustainability, Cisco Customer Experience (CX) is here to support you on your sustainability journey. We’re thrilled to share we are expanding our sustainability services and weaving environmental solutions into the fabric of our offers. Through Cisco Lifecycle Services and individual assessments, we’re now providing services that demonstrate how invested we are in helping you succeed in your sustainability goals.

A Commitment to Sustainability

Our journey toward sustainability is marked by significant achievements that initially helped Cisco shape, scale, and sustain our transformation. Cisco’s dedication to environmentally responsible practices resulted in a 41% reduction in our data center floor space and a remarkable $1.5 million in savings through reusing materials reclaimed after data center closures between 2019 and 2021. Moreover, our commitment to clean energy is evident, with 100% of Cisco’s U.S. data center electricity and 72% of global data center electricity obtained from renewable sources.

The core of all these efforts reflects our holistic approach to sustainability. From how we run our business and interact with suppliers to how we guide customers and communities to reduce their environmental footprint and adapt to a changing world — it’s all interconnected.

Expanded Services for Sustainability

Cisco CX leverages our experience to provide a comprehensive approach and guide you through a sustainable transformation journey to achieve measurable outcomes. Our sustainability offers listed below provide a range of services designed to align your technology investments with your sustainability vision while also reducing costs.

Sustainability Priority Assessment Advisory Service—general availability November 19, 2023: Bridge the gap between your current sustainability priorities and future business goals with an executable roadmap. This service enables you to conduct a capability maturity assessment, addressing sustainability imperatives and defining a workable roadmap.
Energy Optimization Assessment Advisory Service—limited availability November 19, 2023: We provide energy measurement and expert consulting to optimize energy utilization aligned with your business and sustainability goals. This service offers near real-time data observability, a recommended improvement plan, and a roadmap with actionable insights.
Cisco Lifecycle Services Energy Optimization Management: Initially covering campus (Meraki) architecture, this service is expanding to include energy optimization management for data centers. Gain a direct view of IT asset consumption, align energy efficiency, and reduce costs across the Meraki campus and data center environment. Campus (Meraki) became generally available on August 13, 2023, and Data Center will be generally available in January 2024.

Ecosystem of Partnerships for a Sustainable Future

With an ecosystem of partners, we aim to support businesses at every stage of their sustainability journey. Our lifecycle approach, enhanced by AI/ML, automation, telemetry, and guided expertise, provides flexibility and choice to empower organizations to identify, accelerate, and measure the impact of their sustainability technology initiatives.

Fostering Sustainability Together

Just like you, we are deeply committed to building a sustainable future. As one of the world’s largest providers of cloud, networking, hybrid work, and security technologies, we leverage our scale, years of telemetry insight, and innovation to ensure our increasingly digital future is sustainable, equitable, and resilient.

Together, let’s work toward creating a sustainable future for all. For more information on how Cisco Sustainability Services can empower your organization, contact your Cisco sales representative and learn more about Cisco CX Services and Cisco Lifecycle Services.

  Cisco CX expands sustainability services, aligning customer technology investments with environmental goals. New offerings empower businesses, reduce costs, and potentially accelerate a greener future with Cisco Lifecycle Services and individual assessments.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

More than any technology in cybersecurity history, AI is redrawing the lines between defender and attacker. For the first time, I believe the scales are tipping in favor of the defenders because of a… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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More than any technology in cybersecurity history, AI is redrawing the lines between defender and attacker. For the first time, I believe the scales are tipping in favor of the defenders because of a data advantage. With AI, we can correlate data on a massive scale, see more attacks, and contain attacks faster to minimize damage.

At Cisco Live Melbourne, we shared how we’re making AI pervasive across the Cisco Security Cloud and our entire portfolio. The combination of our AI and our access to massive amounts of data will reframe how customers think about cybersecurity outcomes – from detection and remediation to prediction and prevention.

There are three ways we’re using AI across our simplified Security portfolio:

Assist Security Teams

For decades the security industry has struggled with the talent gap – both in terms of the staggering number of unfilled positions and the competition for highly specialized talent. We’re using AI to assist and “level up” existing talent in the organization. Basically, we’re using AI to give security analysts superpowers, helping your organization operate at machine-scale.

At Cisco Live we announced our all-new Cisco AI Assistant for Security. It’s a generative AI-powered assistant that helps admins through complex tasks, saves them time, and eliminates errors and misconfigurations.

We demonstrated the AI Assistant for the use case of firewall policy management, which is going live within the Cisco Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center and Cisco Defense Orchestrator. Firewall administration is an area that’s notorious for requiring highly specialized talent and a large learning curve for understanding the context and complexities of a company’s full firewall environment.

Using natural language, an administrator can iterate with the AI Assistant to do things like discover and identify all the policies that control access to an application, define a new policy or rule for the administrator, and implement the policy. The AI Assistant can also identify duplicate or misconfigured security policies from amongst thousands of existing policies and make recommendations for resolving them. To me, this is mind-blowing because this is a level of intelligence that just isn’t possible without AI.

One Fortune 500 customer shared the following findings after leveraging our beta product:

49% of rules were mergeable
13% of rules were shadowed or duplicated
3% of rules were expired, disabled, or overlapping
66% of rules were misconfigured

Consider the worker hours that could be saved for your organization.  This is what we mean by operating at machine-scale.

Augment Human Insight

We’re also augmenting human insight with AI-powered detections and insights on another level. One example is in Cisco XDR, which correlates data across email, web, process, and network domains to detect a real attack with more accuracy. It works at scale to identify patterns and potential attacks that humans might miss because of alert fatigue or if they’re only looking at one domain in isolation. Each small signal adds up to a bigger signal.

Another augmentation example is the Encrypted Visibility Engine in the 7.4.1 Operating System for the Cisco Secure Firewall family. It can analyze encrypted traffic to identify indicators of malicious behavior that humans can’t, and it does so without decrypting and all the associated overhead and performance impacts. For instance, an insulin pump that’s running certain operating systems cannot run an end-point client. If it gets attacked by malware that communicates with the outside world via encrypted traffic, you can lose control of the insulin pump. With Encrypted Visibility Engine, you can now block this at the firewall.

Automate Complex Workflows

And last but certainly not least, we’re using AI to automate actions and workflows. Automation is woven into every aspect of how we deploy AI to our customers. For example, if you attempt to deploy a misconfigured rule, AI recognizes the misconfiguration and recommends a better version. Almost like how we all use auto-correct every day.

We’re also using automation in ransomware recovery. When a new CVE (Common Vulnerability or Exposure) finds its way into an environment, our XDR leverages the deep learning models deployed by Talos to detect the threat and trigger a snapshot of the environment. If the threat turns out to be ransomware, there is a point of immediate recovery, and no data is lost. This means that even if defenders aren’t right every single time, the damage is minimized if an attack somehow gets through.

Our Stance: Responsible AI is Non-Negotiable

When it comes to AI, trust is paramount. Ultimately, our customers trust us with their data because we view data privacy as a fundamental human right. That’s why we built governance tools that measure our data management, data provenance (where data originated and its movement), and how it’s being leveraged in the models.

None of the outcomes listed above matter if there is a lack of transparency, because that leaves the door open for privacy loss, algorithm bias, and data manipulation. Any customer using AI should be asking the questions: “What data sets are you training your AI on?” and “Does any of my data become public domain because of your use of AI?”

Learn More

Read Cisco’s Responsible AI Principles, documenting in more detail our position on AI. Our Responsible AI Framework aligns to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

To learn more about how we are making AI pervasive in the Security Cloud:

Cisco Redefines Cybersecurity Defense with Powerful, Portfolio-Wide Artificial Intelligence Capabilities (Press release)

Give Your Firewall Admins Superpowers with the Cisco AI Assistant for Security (Blog)

  More than any technology in cybersecurity history, AI is redrawing the lines between defender and attacker. For the first time, I believe the scales are tipping in favor of the defenders because of a data advantage. With AI, we can correlate data on a massive scale, see more attacks, and contain attacks faster to minimize  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Recently, when I speak with business and IT leaders around the globe, there is a common question that permeates the discussion. How can I provide the additional security necessary to protect my… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Recently, when I speak with business and IT leaders around the globe, there is a common question that permeates the discussion. How can I provide the additional security necessary to protect my distributed workforce without burdening end users and slowing down the business? This isn’t a simple question to answer, especially with the significant changes in the typical IT environment over the last couple of years. To address this challenge, Cisco has developed innovative ways to secure both internet and private application traffic from a broad spectrum of users, locations and devices without burdening the user.

Earlier this year, we introduced Cisco Secure Access, a security service edge (SSE) solution that combines a secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, firewall-as-a-service, zero trust access and more, to help organizations address this challenge and better protect their users. Today, we are continuing that mission with two major developments. In collaboration with Samsung, we are announcing simplified mobile access from Samsung Galaxy devices to private applications and resources. Now, end users can access the information they need in a seamless, easy fashion, and IT administrators can enforce a consistent set of zero trust policies across a larger set of users and devices, regardless of location.

In addition, Cisco Secure Access is improving the administrator experience with resource connectors. With a few clicks, administrators can now connect private resources to Secure Access, allowing users to remotely connect to these applications while also enforcing secure, zero-trust access policies. This reduces the time to onboard a private application from hours to minutes, minimize the attack surface by obfuscating the internal network structure and absorbs much of the complexity involved in routing traffic.

Cisco also has a verified history of running a highly available, enterprise-ready security-as-a-service product, and we are extending that to our flagship SSE product. We will be committing to 99.999% uptime as part of the Cisco Secure Access service level agreement.

Zero Trust Access from Samsung Galaxy Devices

User friendly, zero trust access from Samsung Galaxy devices will provide Galaxy users better protection without burdening them with cumbersome security steps. Mobile users will access work resources via Cisco Secure Access using zero trust access policies. Organizations can easily enforce app specific granular policies based on user identity and posture status, facilitating least privileged access to the appropriate private applications and resources. This innovative zero trust architecture utilizes a modern MASQUE proxy and the QUIC (HTTP/3) protocol to provide quick access while protecting corporate resources. It prevents the exposure of private apps to the internet while also enabling policy-controlled access on an individual application basis, reducing the risk of lateral movement throughout the network.

For end users with a Samsung Galaxy device and Cisco’s Zero Trust Access client, the experience is far better than traditional, remote access solutions. Instead of opening a client, selecting a VPN destination point and waiting for a completed connection, the user just clicks on the app to connect. It’s the same simple experience as when they are on their laptop or in the office. In addition, modern protocols enable faster, more performant connections than with traditional remote access technologies. Ultimately, this leads to increased productivity and less time wasted on repetitive tasks to manually establish and shut down connections. Users are happy, IT has less hardware and maintenance tasks and everyone is more secure.

Easily connect private applications with resource connectors

Our second announcement is the unveiling of our Resource Connectors, which drastically improve the experience of connecting private applications to our zero trust network access system, removing the need for a specialized networking engineer to configure the connection. This reduces the amount of time needed to onboard new private applications from hours to minutes.

In each of your environments where private applications exist, simply deploy our lightweight Resource Connector, which then manages the connection between Secure Access and those applications. Resource Connectors can be deployed on-premises or in public cloud infrastructure.

This provides several benefits, including:

Simplified deployment by removing the need for specialized networking knowledge. Instead of manually setting up tunnels and routing, the administrator just needs to complete a simple webform that anyone with basic knowledge of the network can configure.
It automatically handles complex networking logic such as dynamic routing and overlapping IP address ranges out of the box, minimizing both the complexity of implementing zero trust network access but also the likelihood of outages and disruptions due to configuration mistakes.
Resource connectors also obfuscate the internal network from everyone, including Cisco and the Secure Access service. This limits the ability for attackers to perform reconnaissance and map out your internal network structure.
It also isolates your resources and networks, which prevents attackers from moving laterally throughout the network in the event they do obtain initial access.
Lastly, resource connectors are standards-based and built on modern protocols, which makes it compatible with upcoming mobile clients, such as the aforementioned Cisco Zero Trust client on Samsung Galaxy devices.

“Five 9s” availability

At Cisco, we have a strong track record of running highly available enterprise security services. Offerings, such as Cisco Umbrella, have maintained high availability over many years. With Cisco Secure Access, we will be committing to 99.999% uptime as part of our enterprise service level agreement (SLA). Since security-as-a-service solutions are a lynchpin to remote connectivity, an outage can disrupt users’ ability to do their jobs. With our “five 9s” SLA, customers can rest assured that they can safely choose Cisco Secure Access to protect their users while maintaining a great user experience and a high level of productivity.

Improve security, without sacrificing the end user experience

These announcements are just the latest set of advancement for Cisco Secure Access, a security service edge (SSE) solution grounded in zero trust that enforces modern cybersecurity while radically reducing risk and delighting both end-users and IT staff. This product combines more than 13 different technologies to provide a unified, cloud-delivered security solution that allows users, regardless of where they are located, to connect to the internet, SaaS applications, and private applications securely and easily.

In short Cisco Secure Access is:

Better for users by providing seamless, frictionless connection to the resources they need to do their job
Easier for IT through converged cloud-native security in a single dashboard that delivers increased visibility, aggregated reporting, and unified policy management
Safer for everyone by enforcing a consistent set of controls and reducing the attack surface with granular, zero trust access policies

Why Cisco?

Scale matters in security, and Cisco has a proven track record with cloud-delivered security solutions. We have over 70 thousand cloud security customers, manage 220 million remote endpoints, and secure over 600 billion web requests per day. We know how to do security at scale. To learn more, visit  Cisco Secure Access.

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  Cisco has developed innovative ways to secure both internet and private application traffic from a broad spectrum of users, locations and devices without burdening the user.  Read More Cisco Blogs