Tech Observer Tech Observer

Topic: Steadfast Security in Remote Distributed Enterprise
Speakers: In Conversation with Subramanian Udaiyappan, Regional Sales Manager – SecOps, Cisco India & SAARC and Ankush Kumar, Editor, Tech Observer

Traditionally, all users have been connected to a secure office network with multiple layers of security. However, due to the ongoing pandemic, users abstained from the secure office network and connected directly to the internet and thus remain exposed to the internet for long periods. If these user endpoints are not powered and managed by the cloud, the administrator loses visibility and control for threat mitigation and response. Addressing threats, and detecting and remediating them without affecting the user’s productivity, is where the shift from traditional endpoints to new-age endpoints can make a difference.

The sudden transformation from office to new remote working environments has distributed the business while creating a cybersecurity bubble around the workers. As the hybrid work environment continues to flourish, migration to the cloud has accelerated and an effective endpoint solution needs to be cloud-powered and cloud-managed.

The Endpoint Detection and Response Solutions (EDR) are quite autonomous in detecting complex threats that cannot be prevented and work towards remediating them manually. In today’s hybrid work environment, you need your endpoint to be your enforcement arm and move from being an EDR to an XDR. With XDR solutions like Cisco Secure Endpoints, customers would be able to integrate, correlate, automate, and orchestrate actions in an endpoint remotely to reduce the impact of attacks.

Cisco SecureX is a unified platform that integrates firewall, email, and web to help detect and respond to attacks faster. It offers a single dashboard to monitor, integrate and protect across threat vectors & integrate with 3rd party threat intel where the administrator can see all the events that are critical to their enterprise. This customizable dashboard provides an overview of events, helps in threat hunting, incident response, to orchestrate & automate responses to attacks like a SOAR. Having an integrated architecture and an enterprise security environment that proactively reduces Time to Detect & Respond is very critical.

This Podcast is published under Tech Observer Brand Solutions initiative. Connect us at contact@techobserver.in to know more.

Topic: Power your Data Center Performance with Automation
Speakers: In Conversation with Harsh Vaishnav, Head of Sales, Cloud Infrastructure and Software Group, Commercial and Small Business, Cisco India & SAARC and Ankush Kumar, Editor, Tech Observer.

The rules of business are being rewritten in the digital age. To support this, it is essential to ensure one thing diligently and that is ensuring application performance and customer experience. Helping customers achieve this, Cisco has helped to build and implement an intuitive and smart data center strategy across core, edge, and cloud. Data centers, which are the epitome of heterogeneity are now able to provide reliability, stability, scale, and speed to businesses by ensuring workplace ubiquity, performant applications, and most importantly have brought applications to the center stage.

To support workforce transformation by giving users what they want, when they want, and securely on a device of their choice, the underlying infrastructure plays a pivotal role. Through platforms like Cisco Hyperflex, a world-class offering of hyper-convergence and unified computing system with 3-tiered architecture, customers can engage for near-term, mid-term, and long-term solutions. Secondly, data centers can now support workload transitions and reduce complexity. An application-centric infrastructure with the ability to offer deterministic workload performance tracking and deliver performance applications is helping customers to reduce costs and undergo transitions smoothly.

This is also a phase where remote management of data center infrastructure is critical and requires a differentiated approach. It requires a SaaS-delivered, AI-enabled management engine that provides performance benchmarking and predictive analytics. Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer provides 100% visibility into the deployed infrastructure and allows customers to remain agile, flexible, efficient, and compliant, allowing them to save costs by up to 30%.

To provide an unwavering experience along with a coexistent, intuitive, and secure operations system, the ability to scale has become a theme for cloud providers. In the fast-evolving data center sector, organizations are now focusing on the adoption of automation, using the power of analytics, and delivering a non-compromised experience with a layer of machine learning.

Due to the given situation that directly influences profitability, functionality, and customer experience, the operations management tools assisted by AI are seen as an extremely savvy way to leverage speed and dexterity. Cisco is driving the data center landscape with a product portfolio of unified computing systems that offer data analytics to deliver meaningful and contextual outcomes.

This Podcast is published under Tech Observer Brand Solutions initiative. Connect us at contact@techobserver.in to know more.

The hallmark of resilient leadership is getting technology and the data infrastructure to support business decision-making. Resilience in the new normal is nothing but recovering and adjusting to complexities. The CIO is tasked with maintaining relevant security protocols and keeping productivity intact. IT departments of almost all organizations effectively helped them transition to remote working scenarios in a short duration. This transition, most often aided by networking solutions from Cisco has proven beyond doubt that technology is an enabler and the future belongs to innovators.

After several internal implementations and working with over 5000 customers here in India, Cisco has put all the learnings into a new architecture framework called “Resilient Distributed Enterprise” or RDE. This complete blueprint and infrastructure are free for all Cisco customers, and they can customize which part they want to implement.

The network architecture in RDE is integrated, automated, and intelligent. Cisco provides the common framework in which customers can plug in 165 third-party products and security solutions with built-in API where they can integrate tools of their choice. It is an intelligent system that picks up trends, informs about the security breach, and keeps automating as per policy defined by the customer.

Technology has broken many myths in the last 10 months. Going forward is important to Reimagine yourself. While it might be easy to go back to old ways of working, one must be cognizant of the new technologies and innovations that have improved our way of working. Secondly, we must Unlearn to learn. A lot of new opportunities have emerged and it is the responsibility of technology to align with the business and make it better with automated intelligent solutions that bring unimaginable efficiencies as AI gets build into it.

Cisco is committed to transformation, and results are already here with SecureX, RDE, and Webex which just announced 51 innovations. The philosophy of Cisco is that customers can focus on their business and leave the complexity of integrating various tools, putting an implementation layer, monitoring layer, and solutions to us.

This Podcast is published under Tech Observer Brand Solutions initiative. Connect us at contact@techobserver.in to know more.

Way back in March 2022, the government had to announce a lockdown due to the wide-spread of Covid-19, and that changed the way we all used to envisage our offices. Over the last 10 months, most of us have been working from home, and now there is a growing understanding that the future of the work environment is likely to be more hybrid in which some of employees might be working from home and some from offices.

To understand these changing trends and how modern solutions like Webex can empower organizations in Hybrid Work Environment, Tech Observer Editor Ankush Kumar talks to Pankaj Agrawal, Director, Collaboration Business at Cisco India & SAARC in a special Podcast.

According to Agrawal, 2020 has taught employers and employees that offices may not be a necessity to drive productivity, as work is an activity and not a place. Hybrid work and hybrid workplaces are location agnostic scenarios that enable employees to be productive irrespective of where they are working. We can be sure that the workplace has changed, not just for now but for the foreseeable future – with clear benefits for both organisations and employees.

Modern-day tools like Webex empower organisations and employees to be productive in secure remote work scenarios, with applications like video conferencing, meeting, and messaging, with thoughtful novelties like background noise cancellation and efficient functioning despite low internet bandwidth. 

Packed with powerful, intuitive modernisations like displaying member details by moving the cursor to the person during meetings and live polling for gauging audience comprehension where results are presented graphically for quality engagement by the speaker, Webex aims to make remote meetings 10X times better than face-to-face meetings.

IT industry was an early adopter of remote and hybrid work. During the lockdown, banking, finance, insurance, educational institutions, and even manufacturing, pharma, and public sectors like judiciary and police have adopted Cloud and remote work solutions. Travel to multiple offices/factories is now replaced with remote solutions and seamlessly integrating existing portals with Webex for continued productivity.

Upcoming innovations include Unified Webex Applications where meeting, messaging, video conferencing can happen from a single interface with AI-driven real-time translation for inclusive collaboration for global participants. 

To improve productivity, the AI-based Webex Assistant will take notes and share the summary of the meeting; self-learning Webex Highlights will prioritise more important messages based on past behaviour; or Webex Graph, which can provide insights about individual time consumption for appropriate course correction. 

Cisco believes that opportunities are evenly distributed around the world, but the human potential is not. We believe Webex drives inclusive participation. Using remote collaboration, we help in making these opportunities available to people with potential.

This Podcast is published under Tech Observer Brand Solutions initiative. Connect us at contact@techobserver.in to know more.