The digital era has brought everyone closer together. According to one estimate by IDC, there will be up to 80 billion devices connected to networks, transmitting and exchanging data, both crucial and trivial, fueling not only industrial and business operations, but humanity as we know it. Connectivity (and lack thereof) will determine the relevancy of an enterprise, and an individual in this modern era.

However, aside from the obvious benefits of this new development, there are also clear risks of companies becoming overwhelmed by the complexity of a modern IT environment that a digital business requires.

For example, some companies may have adopted a cloud platform to fulfill their computing and storage needs, while some may have opted for a hybrid, multi-cloud provision to enable continues operations via distributed networks.  The increasingly connected network could expand the attack surface for bad actors, and with more endpoints than ever, IT departments may not have complete control of their systems and be easily overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the topology. To make matters worse, companies often engage multiple vendors to secure a multi-faceted infrastructure, so when a breach happens vendors end up blaming each other.

According to Naveen Menon, President at Cisco ASEAN, when it comes to network security, it is all about trust. In his keynote address at ASEAN Cisco Connect 2019, Menon and his colleagues shared how Cisco’s trusted solutions could transform an overwhelmed enterprise to an empowered one in the face of complex digital environments.

Security is foundational

“At Cisco, security is foundational, and it is hugely important. When we look at all other architectures within Cisco, whether it be data center, collaboration or enterprise networking, we’re building security into the foundation of everything we do,” said Kerry Singleton, Director, Global Security Sales Organization (GSSO), Cisco ASEAN.

Source: Cisco Connect 2019

Singleton, who joined Menon on the stage, went on to explain that Cisco’s approach to cybersecurity is fundamentally baked into its solutions, with a strong focus on integration and sharing data and telemetry between different systems. For example, if it detects a threat at the email gateway, the risks will be neutralized at the point of detection, and the threat intelligence is shared across all of Cisco’s products, protecting them from the same threat.

Businesses can leverage automated monitoring and behavior-based analysis across their enterprise network, said Singleton, and in the event of a compromise, the scalable solutions are equipped to determine the scope of the damage, remediate it and restore operations to normal as soon as possible.

Intelligent infrastructure powered by analytics and automation

Menon said that the business world is currently undergoing what he refers to as “daily data deluge,” where 2.5 exabytes of data is generated every day. He added that there must be a way to extract intelligence out of this data.

Cisco uses the massive amounts of data to create an intelligent underlying digital infrastructure that helps companies achieve high operational efficiency, accelerate business agility and drive a digital transformation agenda, according to Shashank Luthra, Director, Services Sales at Cisco ASEAN.

Via its acquisition and continued development of AppDynamics, Cisco is now able to offer best-in-class application performance monitoring and unprecedented operational visibility that enables continued application and business intelligence.

Source: Cisco Connect 2019

“And at scale, visibility alone is not sufficient,” said Luthra, who added that with Cisco’s application-centric infrastructure, many actions on the network such as adding more computing capacity or storage and even setting up a full virtual machine, could be automated based on network performance data.

Further, Cisco’s Business Critical Services offerings take into account all available information from analytics and automation to generate actionable insights, and enable businesses to achieve maximum network uptime.

A platform that brings all together

Over the past 10 years, companies have taken the “best-of-breed” approach whereby companies acquired the best technology within a specific space, otherwise known as silo buying. This has led to increasingly complex systems, little to no integration and worst of all, very limited system visibility, according to Ronald Tan, Director, Enterprise Networking Cisco ASEAN.

“Cisco Architecture platforms plan to solve all these complex issues and provide a single pane of glass for end-to-end solutions. From data centers to campus switching and collaboration, everything in one platform,” said Tan.

Focusing on three main elements (intent-based SD networking, automation and end-to-end security), Cisco builds its platform to inform by context, power by intent and drive by intuition, whereby the more it’s used, the wiser it becomes, thanks to its machine learning capability.

ASEAN Cisco Connect 2019 showcased all of Cisco’s innovative solutions that help businesses to not only take on the challenges of the future, but thrive in it. To view this presentation in its entirety and learn how Cisco innovations make the future possible, visit www.cisco.com/my/connect2019.