In the last few months, Cisco has launched a lot of new capabilities around Cisco Full-Stack Observability (Cisco FSO) that activate important use cases around observability.

Cisco Full-Stack… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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In the last few months, Cisco has launched a lot of new capabilities around Cisco Full-Stack Observability (Cisco FSO) that activate important use cases around observability.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability Innovations

It started  with the launch of application security for hybrid applications with business risk observability  back in January, that brings business context to Cisco’s application security solution. The business risk score enables your security and application teams to have expanded threat visibility and intelligent business risk prioritization to respond instantly to revenue-impacting security risks and reduce overall organizational risk profiles.

Then in May, Cisco launched a pre-built, bi-directional integration of Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes that activated customer digital experience monitoring and application dependency monitoring. These use cases bring application observability and network intelligence data together and help in reducing friction between AppOps and NetOps team. They provide end-to-end insights among application, network, and data teams. They optimize joint operations for triage and troubleshooting application issues while helping teams understand how applications, network and multi-cloud environments affect digital user experience.

Most recently in June, Cisco announced the general availability of an open, extensible and API-driven platform, called Cisco FSO Platform. It is focused on OpenTelemetry and anchored on metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT). It provides AI/ML driven analytics  so that you can do dynamic baselining, anomaly detection, root cause analysis and prioritization. You can build custom use cases based on your needs and create an observability ecosystem that will help you to deliver relevant and impactful business insights. Using the platform, Cisco has activated cost and resource optimization use cases that can help you to understand your cloud spend and how you can optimize your workloads and reduce costs.

Last month, Cisco has extended application security and business risk observability to cloud native application environments. With all these new innovations, you can now observe, secure and optimize applications and create custom observability use cases  using Cisco Full-Stack Observability solutions.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability Bundles

With all these new capabilities, we are also simplifying how you can buy our solutions. Instead of buying separate software licenses for Cisco AppDynamics, Cisco ThousandEyes and Cisco Secure Application individually, you can buy Cisco Full-Stack Observability bundles to solve multiple use cases. We provide discounts for buying these bundles. And attaching Cisco services to these bundles increases your overall discount.

Cisco Full-Stack Observability bundles

FSO Essentials Bundle

Observe, secure and extend your observability by bringing together application performance and security data. This bundles together the following use cases:

Hybrid Application Monitoring
Modern Application Monitoring
Application Security
Extend observability with custom use cases on Cisco FSO Platform

FSO Advantage Bundle

Observe, secure and extend your observability by bringing together application performance, network intelligence and security data. This bundles together all the use cases in Essentials with the following additional use cases:

Customer Digital Experience Monitoring
Application Dependency Monitoring

FSO Premier Bundle

Observe, secure, optimize and extend your observability by bringing together application performance and cost, network intelligence and security data. This bundles together all the use cases in Advantage with the following additional use cases:

Hybrid Cost Optimization
Application Resource Optimization

Accelerate business outcomes with Cisco Services

With Cisco Full-Stack Observability capabilities, you may be wondering how to implement such a powerful solution. You don’t have to do it alone. To help you accelerate your outcomes, Cisco CX delivers the expertise and guidance to help you best leverage your existing monitoring and observability tools with Cisco Full-Stack Observability to remove blind spots, move beyond siloed domain monitoring, and take advantage of full stack visibility, insights, and actions. Through a variety of service offerings such as the , we can help you innovate at each step of your full-stack observability transformation journey. And by showcasing results through real-world use cases, you’ll see how Cisco FSO services and the value of CX expertise can help you confidently and continuously transform and optimize the application experience for your customers and employees, anywhere.

Learn more about Cisco Full-Stack Observability and Cisco FSO bundles.

  In addition to new capabilities that were recently launched in the Cisco Full-Stack Observability portfolio, Cisco has created bundles that solve multiple use cases and offer implementation services to help you accelerate your journey to full stack observability.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Have you ever been at a party and enjoyed the sampler platter so much that you kept going back for more? Just me? That’s okay.

Today, I’ve prepared a smorgasbord* of the latest Cisco U. learning c… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Have you ever been at a party and enjoyed the sampler platter so much that you kept going back for more? Just me? That’s okay.

Today, I’ve prepared a smorgasbord* of the latest Cisco U. learning content for you to enjoy! Don’t worry. This tech learning buffet is all yours. Without further ado, it’s time to see what’s on the menu. Let’s dig in!

*A smorgasbord is a Swedish word for an assortment of hot and cold dishes served in a buffet style, kind of like a sampler platter.

Your first snack from the platter: Access-Control Lists (ACLs)

I recently recorded a fun, new Snack Minute Episode with Kareem and Matt for Cybersecurity Awareness Month on the basics of an Access-Control List (ACL). Since ACL is listed on the CCNA exam topics and it’s a need-to-know stop to sweeten your security, the episode is a total win-win—it’s okay, double-dipping is allowed here (yes, the puns just keep coming!)

In the episode, I walk through a Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) demo inside the DevNet Sandbox using a simple topology that showcases how you can limit traffic from one host and permit traffic to another. If you have ever been confused about what an ACL is or intimidated by the syntax, this is snack will help satisfy your full understanding. (Yum.)

I also created a related Cisco U. tutorial to give you an opportunity to try out writing your first ACL. Understanding ACLs is super important to network engineers getting started, cloud engineers, and security engineers. Take the time to play with it and see how all the moving pieces work, it will be worth it.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and turn on notifications to catch the episode premiere on October 31, 2023.

Filling your plate: Tons of new, free Security tutorials

Did you know that Cisco U. has free tutorials on a variety of topics, including security? Our newly added Introduction to Firewall Management Center APIs tutorial walks you through Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Application (FMC) program interfaces and guides you through configuring APIs to automatically manage firewall devices.

Check out the new Introduction to the Cisco ISE Policy Set tutorial, which will help you draft effective Identity Services Engine (ISE) policy conditions and show you how to create a policy set using the ISE Personal Area Network (PAN) Graphical User Interface (GUI). When it comes to security, getting more familiar with identity management is critical. (I mean, you can’t have a party without some drinks with some “ISE,” right?)

Finally, security is important when you are building automation or other software. Your API token is effectively your password, so locking it down is critical. Take a look at the Securing your API Token with Vault tutorial to learn how to configure Vault for secrets and to deploy a Vault instance, as well as leverage Vault Software Development Kit (SDK) in your applications. I know it can seem trivial to focus on security when moving fast in your automation journey, but you don’t want to miss this concept!

Make sure you check out these new Cisco U. tutorials as you level up your security skills during Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Get ’em while they’re hot—or snack on them later. They’ll be waiting for you inside Cisco U. Free.

Sneaking leftovers into your purse: Everything else new in Cisco U. in September

Thanks for reading! Before you go, be sure to watch the  “What’s new with Cisco U.” video below, then stop by the Cisco Learning Network for the after-party, where you’ll find the full list of everything that’s all-new in Cisco U.

<iframe title="Free Cisco #Security Training, New Tech Learning, and More  LinkedIn 

A few weeks back I shared one of our latest customer stories on Trident Technical College. If you missed that blog, I’d recommend checking it out, but If you are limited on time and just want the l… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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A few weeks back I shared one of our latest customer stories on Trident Technical College. If you missed that blog, I’d recommend checking it out, but If you are limited on time and just want the latest story, then let’s talk about Puntonet. This is another great story that highlights how customers like Puntonet are succeeding with help from CX.

Puntonet, a telecommunications and IT services company headquartered in Quito, Ecuador, collaborated with Cisco Services to optimize its network so subscribers had access to fast, reliable, and secure internet services. Let’s hear directly from Roberto Falconi Cardona, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Puntonet S.A on how that collaboration worked.

As you saw in the video, Roberto is originally from a more rural area but moved away from family and friends for work. To succeed in a technical field then, he had no choice but to relocate to where technology supported the job he wanted to do.

Now, however, Puntonet, with help from Cisco Services, is helping expand access to high-performing networking to both businesses and residential customers throughout Ecuador. They are connecting the more rural areas so that in the future, someone like Roberto won’t have to move away to have access to connectivity and subsequently, work.

At the same time, Puntonet has strengthened the security of its network across the board, so working remotely, or conducting financial transactions is much more secure.

Visit our Customer Stories Index

Cisco helped ensure the technology upgrade went smoothly by providing risk mitigation and design review services. On top of that collaboration, Cisco Services was also able to help with an overwhelming number of manual tasks resulting from an excessive number of network problem logs. This freed up Puntonet to focus on strategy.

I can go on, but I encourage you to read the full Puntonet story, “Puntonet modernizes network to accelerate growth” on our Customer Stories Index . It’s a great story and a fantastic example of how technology, and Cisco Services, combine to change the course of business and affect how individuals interact with the world, even outside a major city. It’s also a great look at how someone like Roberto is guiding technology to provide more opportunities for the next generation.

Again, we are regularly highlighting the successes of our customers. For all the most recent updates, please visit our  Customer Stories Index – a catalog of stories highlighting how Cisco services customers are transforming and innovating to drive impact in their organizations and across the world. Don’t worry, I’ll keep bringing you selected ones to my blog as well.

More importantly, if you want to share your own customer story, connect with us at cxcustomerstories@cisco.com. We’d love to hear from you. Stay tuned and follow @CiscoCX on X for more CX updates.

Don’t have a story to tell just yet? Our team can help you build it, along with your network. Just let us know and we can help celebrate your success.

  Let’s see how Puntonet was able to transform its network to strengthen security, performance, and availability throughout Ecuador. Celebrate another Cisco Customer Story with me.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Managed services are an essential and fast-growing part of the security market, growing 14% annually. This presents new challenges for you, including onboarding vendors, driving customer acquisition,… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Managed services are an essential and fast-growing part of the security market, growing 14% annually. This presents new challenges for you, including onboarding vendors, driving customer acquisition, and providing robust IT solutions for clients. Security is a priority for your clients and your business, especially given the rise of cyber-attacks targeting your customers as well as you, the MSP. Every client has unique needs, and we know you as an MSP do not have time to deal with complicated billing structures and inefficient processes that cannot be automated.

Your job as an MSP is to manage your clients’ security needs so they do not have to. We’re here to make it easy for you so you can scale your business. That’s why we are simplifying how MSPs acquire our market-leading SaaS security products for organizations. We launched Secure MSP Center in the US market in November 2021 to improve the buying experience for MSPs purchasing Cisco products. MSPs can directly sign up, buy, and deploy SaaS security products to protect their clients’ environments within minutes. Now, almost 2 years later, we have continued to iterate on our program to ensure we deliver the best buying experience for our MSP partners.

Which SaaS security products can I purchase via Secure MSP Center?

Cisco Secure MSP Center gives you the opportunity to purchase Cisco Umbrella and Secure Endpoint. Cisco Umbrella provides your first line of defense against internet threats. With Umbrella DNS-layer protection, you can save time and block malware through enforcement, visibility, and management – on or off the network. Cisco Secure Endpoint offers cloud-delivered endpoint protection and advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR) across multi-domain control points. We stop threats and block malware then rapidly detect, contain, and remediate advanced threats that evade front-line defenses.

How does this benefit you as an MSP?

To be effective, we know your experiences needs to be as frictionless as possible to not only safeguard your clients, but to maximize your time to value. Secure MSP Center helps you:

Generate revenue faster by signing up to become a partner. You can buy and deploy multiple SaaS security products from one location. Then easily make monthly credit card payment without invoicing. Plus, MSPs can transact in local currency without transaction fees.
Streamline client onboarding with our radically simple, integrated cloud platform. After directly purchasing licenses for multiple products, immediately begin managing your customers’ security through one multi-tenant console. MSPs can seamlessly onboard customers, manage policy, and automate enforcement.
Scale your client base without the hassle of going through separate sites for each SaaS security product your clients need. You’ll get market-based pricing for simple, direct transactions – and faster ROI for your business.
Partner with our team to receive end-to-end business enablement and support. Our team is here to make both MSPs and their customers more secure and help decrease security risks through our partnership. We serve as your strategic advisors.

What’s new with Secure MSP Center?

We aren’t stopping there! Our goal is to continue to optimize Secure MSP Center to create a one-stop shop for MSPs to seamlessly purchase SaaS security products. A few recent updates:

Protect your internal network for free with our not-for-resale (NFR) offer. This allows you to protect your organization with Cisco Umbrella. Enjoy this protection worry free, for up to a year. You can also use this as a demo tool for clients by showcasing installations, policy framework, and client-side reporting. Learn more here.
Check out where we are currently open – and transact in your country’s local currency for ease of business:
United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand (and more on the way!)

We offer a free end user trial so you can make sure Umbrella on Secure MSP Center fits your clients’ needs. Sign up today for a free MSP or MSSP trial request.

Test drive Cisco Secure MSP Center to see how it can streamline SaaS security management for your business. New partners can sign up for Cisco Secure MSP Center today. Existing customers can reach out to their dedicated partner manager or email msp@cisco.com for support.

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

Cisco Secure Social Channels

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  Managed services are an essential and fast-growing part of the security market, growing 14% annually. This presents new challenges for you, including onboarding.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Part 3 of the six-part series – The 2023 Global Networking Trends Report series

Three networking megatrends have upended how businesses approach networking to support the distributed w… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Part 3 of the six-part series – The 2023 Global Networking Trends Report series

Three networking megatrends have upended how businesses approach networking to support the distributed workforce.

First, cloud has become the new data center, with workloads moving from on-premises to hybrid cloud and multicloud architectures. Secondly, the internet is now the new network, with reliance on business connectivity traversing diverse networking domains. And lastly, with so many remote and hybrid workers, the office is now essentially anywhere.

This evolution has made delivering a high-quality, reliable experience—connecting everyone to everything everywhere—significantly more complex. After the need to provide secure access to applications across multiple clouds, the second biggest challenge cited by 37% of respondents in our 2023 Global Networking Trends Report was gaining end-to-end visibility into network performance and security as more traffic originates or terminates beyond the boundaries of the corporate network.

Which begs the question: How do you identify, diagnose, and remediate problems that occur throughout the digital supply chain—the domains within and outside your infrastructure and all hops between a user’s device and an application or service in the cloud? Read on to find out how.

Tackling assurance complexity across multiple network domains

Great connected experiences are table stakes for businesses today. The digital economy relies on always-on applications and services to support employees and consumers. Failure is not an option.

Prior to the hyperconnectivity of today’s digital economy, business applications and services within corporate domains were well served by network monitoring solutions and processes that were localized and handled specific domains like wireless. But to remediate issues in enterprise WANs, admins had to contact their counterparts within cloud and internet provider organizations to jointly diagnose and remediate service and security problems. Often, this resulted in a lot of finger pointing. Businesses acted reactively instead of proactively. Issues could take a long time to get resolved.

Providing network assurance for a high-quality connected experience today requires end-to-end visibility and insights across diverse clouds, network providers, the internet, devices, and geographies—each with their own operational domains (see Figure 1). Without end-to-end visibility into network performance, application responsiveness, and security, it is extremely challenging for IT teams to deliver consistent digital experiences to end users.

Figure 1. Complex digital supply chain with interdependencies, increased failure surface, and unpredictability (click to enlarge)

A person working from home, for example, might run into a problem with Slack. The wireless network in their home office would be connected to an access network that would be connected to an edge router traversing a cloud network to the Slack application. Domain-specific tools can only see a small segment of this traffic. Admins without end-to-end visibility can’t see the big picture.

End-to-end visibility is foundational for SASE

A majority (51%) of organizations in our 2023 Global Networking Trends Report said that with their adoption of more software-as-a-service (SaaS) and multicloud solutions, they see investment in a solution that provides end-to-end visibility as a top priority. This may be in response to recent research by the Uptime Institute that found third-party operators—including cloud, hosting, colocation, and telecom providers—accounted for 70% of all publicly reported outages.

End-to-end visibility, analytics, and operational workflows allow admins to take decisive action to proactively remediate connectivity issues. In a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, for example, end-to-end visibility feeds the actionable intelligence used to optimize path selection to provide the best digital experience anywhere at any time. Reliable connectivity is foundational to securely connecting people and things in a SASE architecture. If connectivity is poor, the secure access experience will be degraded.

Even before an SD-WAN or a converged SASE architecture with security service edge (SSE) is rolled out, organizations can use end-to-end visibility to evaluate, compare, and optimize the network experience before and after adoption of these architectures. The performance of individual providers in different locations that each form part of a digital supply chain can be proactively tested and benchmarked, with the results used to make more informed vendor selections to ensure the delivery of always-on digital experiences.

Gaining visibility into every connection

A European airline transitioned its network infrastructure from MPLS to SD-WAN, moving many applications and services to the cloud. The company needed to make sure that services met agreed-upon service level agreements (SLAs). To do so, the IT department deployed end-to-end visibility, specifically to monitor and enhance the digital experiences of customers and employees. With this solution in place, the airline can now measure connection latency and other factors—with a specific focus on connections between its data center and the cloud provider, Amazon Web Services. They can continually monitor and prioritize network experiences by accelerating incident response times, introduce more proactive maintenance, and enjoy greater cost efficiency through streamlined troubleshooting.

RichRelevance, a customer experience personalization provider for 250 global retailers, reduced its outages by 88% and shrunk outage windows from an average of four hours to 30 minutes, all thanks to end-to-end visibility. IT service management software company ServiceNow identified network issues 95% faster for their customers with visibility across all network layers that focused on the application experience.

Enabling quality digital experiences through a networking platform approach

Cisco is pioneering end-to-end network visibility and driving exceptional experiences through operational simplicity. It’s a cornerstone of our Cisco Networking Cloud long-term vision, a unified management experience platform for on-premises and cloud operating models to reduce IT complexity.

End-to-end visibility relies on compute power to capture and analyze billions of daily measurements in the digital supply chains that comprise today’s enterprise networks (see Figure 2). It is a powerful and indispensable feature that helps organizations maintain top-quality digital experiences and move from reactive to preventative and automated operations.

Figure 2. Organizations need to leverage a platform-driven approach that drives end-to-end visibility throughout the digital supply chain (click to enlarge)

Watch the Global Networking Trends on-demand webinar:

“Securely connect people, places, and things in an ever-changing world”

Download the 2023 Global Networking Trends Report

  Cloud is the new data center, internet is the new network, and home is the new office. As infrastructure and working environments change, so must visibility into hops across the digital supply chain to ensure secure and exceptional experiences for your users. End-to-end network assurance is the key.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Addressing broadband disparities

Cisco recently participated in the biannual summit of the National Tribal Telecommunications Association (NTTA) that was held on the lands of the Gila River Indian… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Addressing broadband disparities

Cisco recently participated in the biannual summit of the National Tribal Telecommunications Association (NTTA) that was held on the lands of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.  The event was well attended by more than 200 Tribal members, representatives from State and Federal agencies, and the broadband vendor community.

The 574 federally recognized American Indian and Alaskan Native Tribes are the most underserved communities for broadband in the United States.  Indeed, FCC data indicates that broadband availability is limited to only 46% of rural American Indian and Alaskan Native lands.

Fueling change

The Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program is changing the broadband landscape in Indian Country with an injection of $3B being provided to tribal governments for broadband projects.  The capital injection has sparked the interest of the technology vendors, but the challenge is not with the broadband technology; the real challenge is ensuring the ongoing sustainability of the broadband operation to ensure the economic and social growth of the Native Nations.  Godfrey Enjady, the Chairman of the NTTA, aptly summarized the challenge as:

“It’s like we are receiving a brand-new Ford F150, but we don’t have the keys, we don’t have a license, and we don’t have any gas.”

The main issues that we’re working to solve as we left the summit are:

What are the broadband services that will drive the social, cultural, and economic development of the Tribe?
How do the Native Nations build a broadband-savvy workforce that can ensure the sustainability of broadband operations for the generations to come?
Can we overcome the social injustice and trust concerns by building shared risk vehicles to ensure a long-term commitment to providing every Tribal member has access to affordable broadband service?

Beyond connectivity

Regarding broadband services, a sustainable broadband network is not just about the connectivity to Netflix or social media.  Broadband is about access to proper healthcare, education, and the critical services that tribal governments provide, as well as the services that private industry provides.  Broadband is about job creation and removing boundaries so Tribal members can work globally from anywhere in Indian Country.  It is about enabling Native Nations to share, learn, trade, and grow in a global marketplace.  To capture the full broadband opportunity, Tribal Governments need to work with their communities and take a holistic approach to service creation across all aspects of Tribal life.

Bridging the gap

A report dated December 2022 from the US Government Accountability Office highlights a workforce shortage of 34,000 broadband engineers and technicians.  This shortage is even more acute on rural Tribal lands.  Alleviating this challenge are workforce development programs and “build-operate-transfer” models.  Cisco provides free workforce development programs through its Network Academy.   These programs provide entry-level courses through to professional certifications.  Build-Operate-Transfer models provide a period in which a private company will operate the broadband service while training the Tribal members before handing over the full operational control to the Tribe.

Building sustainable broadband future

There is a natural hesitancy for Tribal members to question the long-term commitment of technology vendors to the sustainability of broadband operations in Indian Country.  Revenue-share models may help overcome the match-funding and credit requirements of the federal programs and ensure a long-term commitment.  Recruiting and developing an American Indian and Native Alaskan workforce will also help the technology vendors develop empathy and understanding to build the strong relationships needed for mutual success.  Cisco’s Native American Network is already working with many Tribal non-profits focused on sustainable broadband and is actively recruiting through the American Indian Science and Engineering Society.

Explore pathways to sustainable broadband on Tribal Lands, and please reach out to tribalbroadband@cisco.com to engage Cisco is supporting your journey to provide an inclusive future for all Tribal members.

  A digital revolution is reshaping Tribal communities with sustainable broadband solutions, bridging gaps and fostering empowerment. Learn more about Cisco's involvement in the biannual summit of the National Tribal Telecommunications Association (NTTA).  Read More Cisco Blogs