2022 marked the first full-fledged, in-person Cisco Live! conference in over two years. Sentinel was thrilled to be back among other Cisco partners and customers out in Las Vegas for the event last month, which was packed with educational seminars, information sessions, major announcements, keynote speeches, and fun social activities. A special thank you to everyone who showed up to Sentinel’s Cisco Live! Happy Hour, stopped by the Sentinel booth, or just generally spent some time chatting with any members of the Sentinel team. It was wonderful connecting and re-connecting with so many folks, and we hope to keep the lines of communication open in the coming weeks and months.

While there was so much to learn and experience at this year’s Cisco Live! (as there is every year), perhaps the most important part of the annual conference are the many announcements revealed by Cisco. These are always introductions or previews of new technology solutions, or significant changes/upgrades to current ones. We care deeply about these details because it affects our customers and their IT environments. In our mission to help you remain Always Leading, every change or innovation can further elevate your presence and enable you to build a stronger foundation for growth. Cisco made several major announcements at their conference this year, and we’re excited to share some of those highlights to make sure you’re aware of what’s coming down the pipeline.

Cloud Management for Cisco Catalyst

If your organization is using Catalyst network switches, wireless controllers, and/or wireless access points, you’ll soon be able to monitor and manage them through the cloud-based Cisco Meraki dashboard. This enables you to connect to your network from anywhere and see everything. You’ll be able to receive insights into your network, including every connected client and port-level configuration. That means more information about traffic flow, plus the ability to identify, isolate, and resolve issues with troubleshooting tools. The simplicity of the Meraki Cloud should make it easier than ever to operate your existing Catalyst switches!

Nexus Cloud

Speaking of switches and the cloud, Cisco is taking its popular Nexus data center switches and transforming the brand into a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering. The data center used to be the epicenter of all things IT for an organization. As time and new technologies have emerged, assets are now spread across the public cloud, colocation centers, SaaS, and more spaces. This has created challenges to ensure the availability, security, and performance throughout all of these platforms, services, and endpoints. Powered by Intersight, Nexus Cloud aims to make it easier than ever to deploy, manage, and operate your cloud network. This next generation of Nexus is poised to deliver world-class programmability, performance, and power efficiency to unify and innovate your network under a single platform.

ThousandEyes WAN Insights

The internet has become more important than ever to organizations, as many employees continue to work remotely, utilize cloud-based applications, and collaborate with co-workers on a regular basis without any losses in productivity. This increased reliance on the internet means applications and networks need to deliver a great user experience with minimal disruption. Cisco’s Predictive Network Vision aims to create a new level of performance by helping organizations anticipate certain application and network issues before they occur. ThousandEyes WAN Insights is a key step in making this a reality. It extends internet visibility into SD-WAN health, allowing for a closer look at your top applications, specific user experiences, and how those experiences can be improved by studying past behaviors. WAN Insights provide recommendations to fine tune your SD-WAN deployment, and take a proactive rather than reactive approach to minimize problems before they start and increase overall user satisfaction.

Cisco+ Secure Connect Now

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a cloud-based network infrastructure model built around a combination of network and security services. The goal is to ensure your organization’s devices and users can securely access critical systems and applications at any time from anywhere. As the popularity of SASE continues to increase, Cisco has released Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, which is a simple and unified turnkey SASE solution. The goal is to deliver an incredibly smooth and powerful user experience that takes very little effort to seamlessly and securely connect to branches, things, and applications. It is essentially an out-of-the-box SASE solution that’s easy to deploy and manage so organizations can lower costs, reduce complexity, facilitate digital business, as well as improve worker efficiency and productivity. All while using Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to keep security threats off the corporate network.

AppDynamics Cloud

Cisco AppDynamics is a leading provider of Observability and Application Performance Monitoring technology. With the announcement of AppDynamics Cloud, Cisco intends to deliver an exceptional digital experience by correlating telemetry data from across any sized cloud environment. It utilizes cloud-native observability to remediate application performance issues with business context and insight-driven actions. In short, it continually optimizes cloud applications in order to optimize both business outcomes and customer experiences. Intelligent operations can help detect and resolve any performance issues before they can impact an organization. The platform enables collaboration across teams to make it easier for them to achieve common objectives and performance goals. AppDynamics Cloud pulls in metrics, logs, events, and more from your network, databases, storage, containers, security, and other cloud services to make it easier to understand your entire IT stack all the way to the end user. From there, your organization can take informed actions to lower costs, maximize revenue, and ensure users and organizational data remains secure.

Bluescape for Webex

Cisco announced numerous enhancements that will be coming to the Webex application in the coming months. One of those includes a partnership with Bluescape, a virtual workspace app capable of enhancing collaboration during virtual meetings. Bluescape for Webex allows remote and/or hybrid teams to share documents, images, video, and other files in a more secure canvas. There are also whiteboard, draw, and diagram tools available to make it easier to include fresh ideas and comments. Such features, so common at traditional offices, have now been adapted to more easily include those working from home or in other locations. The goal is to deliver a powerful and more dynamic alternative to screen sharing.

Webex Calling Local Survivability

While on the topic of Webex, one of the biggest reasons many organizations have been hesitant to move their phone system into the cloud has been a concern over how to stay connected in the event of an internet outage. The healthcare industry in particular often deals with life or death situations on a daily basis and cannot sacrifice even a moment of unavailability from their phone system. So Cisco has added local survivability to its Webex Calling solution to help ensure there is always a router or desk phone fallback available for those moments when your network may have failed. By being less reliant on internet connectivity, industries that require highly dependable communications services can feel much safer about migrating their phone system into the cloud.

Panoptica and Calisti

Panoptica and Calisti are two new additions to Cisco’s suite of API-first solutions and tools. They are designed to provide faster application development cycles, and enable organizations to achieve the sort of modern application connectivity, security, and observability that results in high quality digital experiences. These tools make it easier to manage and secure distributed application architectures so developers can programmatically discover, connect, secure, and observe APIs, applications, and workloads throughout their cloud journey.  

Panoptica enables developers and engineers to incorporate cloud-native security during the application development process. It has the ability to scale across multiple clusters with an agentless architecture, integrates with CI/CD tools and language frameworks across multiple clouds, and provides a single interface for comprehensive container, serverless, API, service mesh, and Kubernetes security.

Calisti simplifies connectivity, lifecycle management, and security for microservices in complex, multi-cloud environments. It’s an enterprise-ready Istio platform that makes it easier for application teams to focus on application logic, site reliability engineers to control and scale, de-risk upgrades, find root causes, and monitor service-level objectives.

Panoptica and Calisti are available for free.

Cisco U.

Last but not least, if you’re looking to engage in learning and training for a particular technology certification, role, or solution, Cisco has introduced a new platform to achieve those goals called Cisco U. Its purpose is to construct a custom learning program based around the individual user’s preferences and skill level. The process begins with assessments and goal setting to best determine your specific needs. AI-driven recommendations and personalized feedback are then provided so users can map out the strongest path toward growing their skills and achieving more with them. That means targeting only the courses and content relevant to your goals in order to reduce repetitive learning and complete things faster. There are solution-based learning paths centered on Cisco and related technologies, as well as project-based learning paths centered on specific topics. Cisco U. includes both Cisco learning content as well as training from select third-party providers.

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As you can see, there are plenty of exciting new technologies and developments that have either just been released or are in the pipeline for Cisco later this year. At Sentinel we are staying on top of all the latest innovations, and are eager to share more information about them in the coming weeks, months, and years. In the meantime if you would like to know more, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will get the conversation started!