Section 1 IT Leaders must keep their organization running and productive, at speed and scale.
Executive Perspective
by Todd Nightingale SVP and General Manager, Enterprise Networking and Cloud
This past year transformed our lives in so many ways – from buying groceries and educating our children to providing healthcare and working from home.
Technology groups had to find ways to keep critical services running, connect team members working from home, and leverage technology to keep everyone safe, healthy, and productive. At Cisco, we focused on making sure CIOs around the world had the technology and support they needed to transform their infrastructure, reimagine their applications, secure data, and empower their teams.
This rapid response has now given way to focus on how we deliver the technology required for an inclusive recovery. We need to be able to both react to sudden changes, and also use technology to drive transformation. Digital agility will be essential, not just for our return to work but also for the new normal of hybrid work, digital collaboration, and a cloud-first operating model.
To deliver this kind of agility, we need to focus on three key areas: accelerating our cloud transition with full-stack observability and cloud automation, connecting users with a network built for the cloud and hybrid work, and providing monitoring and assurance from user to application.
Applications and access to data have become mission-critical and core to how organizations work today. Through the pandemic, we’ve seen teams accelerating their transition to the cloud because their businesses needed more agility. DevOps teams need to deploy apps in the most flexible way, meet geographical and regulatory constraints, optimize for performance and cost, and scale up and down quickly.
To remain agile, Cloud Operations teams are leveraging a hybrid cloud architecture with multiple public and private cloud nodes. That’s why a real focus on cloud-neutral, multi-cloud orchestration is the key to successful delivery. Full-stack observability can help prevent surprises that might slowing down or disrupting our users’ application experiences. Powerful automation can keep our teams productive and strategically focused.
As we think about returning to the office, Cisco is building on a new hybrid work model. This means rethinking the way we connect users to applications. Working from home will no longer mean second-class IT service. Every user, everywhere, needs to enjoy one network, one policy, and one amazing experience. It is why we’ve focused so closely on delivering a secure, agile network architecture built for the cloud and hybrid work. Cisco’s SASE architecture is the most complete and most flexible in the industry. By moving network security to the cloud and natively connecting our SD-WAN fabrics to that gateway, we can provide a truly agile, secure networking experience for every user, regardless of where they are.
We also need to provide even better visibility and insights, no matter where the users or the workload. Frequently these workloads will be in IaaS or SaaS clouds. Frequently the users will be working from home or on the road. Regardless, our technology teams require the ability to monitor and troubleshoot their users’ experience. In order to deliver this, true internet intelligence is needed. Only a system monitoring private infrastructure and the public cloud can provide the visibility needed in this new cloud first, hybrid work world.
All of this needs to be done in a simpler, easier to consume way. We are driving our products onto a core set of platforms to enable you to leverage all the power of Cisco technology. And soon, you will be able to consume them as a service.
In a new Cisco survey, 70% of IT decision makers had already adopted cloud-based as-a-service solutions, citing greater flexibility, utility, productivity, and speed of innovations as top drivers. I believe that number is too low. All organizations need to drive towards cloud solutions that enable the insights and the automation necessary for the new normal.
Delivering powerful technology in a simpler way will enable us to reach more people.
If we want to truly power an inclusive future for all – and an inclusive recovery - we need to put this agility into the hands of every IT shop and user – from investment bankers to family services agencies and healthcare providers around the world.
CIOs and IT decision makers (ITDMs) are making additional expenditures to optimize investments made for business resilience during the pandemic.
To maximize their investments made for business resilience, in 2021-2022 they’ll invest in:
