In photo: From left, Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM, Cisco Enterprise Networking and Cloud, and Karrie Ilagan, Managing Director of Cisco Philippines
By Victoria “NIKE” De Dios
Gone are the days when huge enterprises buy huge servers to store the precious data that also occupy huge space and inevitably jack up the electric consumption due to the 24/7 use of air conditioners to keep the hardware safe and to keep them running and avoid overheating.
As technology evolves, so as computing and this is the reason why cloud computing’s demand has been growing rapidly.
While there are many companies that offer cloud services and technology, not all clouds are created equal. This is what Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced, the new ways it is helping customers accelerate digital transformations as they move more resources to the cloud.
The hyper-connected, distributed world we live in now relies on cloud more than ever, and IT teams are facing challenges to provide people with optimal digital experiences wherever and whenever they need access. As a result, businesses are migrating to a cloud-driven operational model based on speed, insight and control to bridge the greater distribution of applications, users and tech staff.
“The future of work is hybrid, but in the Philippines, that is already happening now,” said Karrie Ilagan, Managing Director of Cisco Philippines. “With lockdowns still in place, technology has become a necessity for organizations to be as agile and flexible for their distributed workforce to succeed, which can only be delivered through a cloud-first environment.”
Enabling Customers to Realize Better Outcomes from the Cloud
Cisco has made multi-billion-dollar investments over the past six years to build cloud into every aspect of its business, focusing on helping customers build complete cloud strategies with confidence across five key areas: Continuity, Insights, Security, Connectivity and Operations.
During the company’s ‘Future Cloud’ event, Cisco showcased how it is advancing its cloud strategy across several of these areas to help businesses connect, secure and automate to deliver seamless digital experiences in today’s hybrid cloud world.
“Today, a simple, intuitive user experience is how to achieve success in a digital world,” said Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM, Cisco Enterprise Networking and Cloud. “We are focused on helping our customers be cloud smart to advance their digital operating models to securely deliver new types of apps that live across on-prem, multiple clouds and the edge. From infrastructure teams to the app developers, only Cisco can provide the level of observability and insight they need to orchestrate and manage applications and workloads no matter where they reside.”
New hybrid cloud innovations announced today include:
- Hybrid Cloud Operations:
- Introducing the new Cisco UCS® X-Series: Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) is used in data centers by more than 50,000 customers worldwide. Fully integrated with Cisco Intersight, UCS X-Series is a first-of-its kind system designed for hybrid operations from the cloud and across the clouds. Blending the best of rack and blade systems and featuring revolutionary UCS X-Fabric technology, it’s built for workload versatility today and comes future-ready for the next decade of industry innovation in processors, accelerators and computing interconnects.
- Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: Provides a low-code, easy-to-use automation framework that simplifies complex workflows, so IT Ops can easily orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and accelerate delivery of services.
- Intersight Workload Engine: A powerful platform for modern, cloud native workloads. Built on an open-source Kubernetes and Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) foundation using container-native virtualization, Intersight Workload Engine is a Cisco operating system for Hyperflex, featuring consistent SaaS management.
- Cisco Service Mesh Manager: A new extension to the Intersight Kubernetes Service, bringing deep observability and simplified management with policy-based security and intuitive visualization of services topologies across K8’s clusters on-prem and in the cloud.
- Cisco Cloud ACI: Available on AWS, Azure and now on Google Cloud with general availability in the Fall of 2021. The Cloud ACI common policy and operating model drastically reduces the cost and complexity of managing hybrid and multicloud deployments.
- For more information on additional new products supporting hybrid cloud operations visit here.
- Observability and Insights:
- Integration of ThousandEyes internet and cloud intelligence with the Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Series for SD-WAN and Cisco Nexus 9000 switches for data centers to provide customers with valuable insights on network health and application performance, monitoring across campus, branch, data centers and every point of the WAN network between the user and applications.
- Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator acts a single pane of glass for configuring and managing common policies across multiple on-prem ACI sites, AWS and Microsoft Azure regions and, announcing today, coming this fall to Google Cloud.
- Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: Provides a low-code, easy-to-use framework to create and automate complex workflows so IT Ops can easily orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and accelerate delivery of services.
Customer Experience (CX) Services for Cloud
- CX Business Critical Services for Cloud provide advisory services plus expertise to architect, deploy, secure and optimize digital transformations.
- CX Intersight Workload Optimizer Services enhance the resource consumption of applications in the cloud.
- CX Advanced Services for ThousandEyes and SD-WAN deliver the best application experience for cloud solutions, providing expert design and integration to reduce project complexity and speed transformation.
- Custom Quick Start Solutions provide services for end-to-end automation and infrastructure-as-a-code (IaaC).
Industry Response:
“As organizations increasingly rely on cloud applications sitting in multiple clouds, operating these hybrid IT environments becomes overwhelmingly complex. IT teams must monitor and optimize application experiences, working alongside developers. IT executives should view Cisco’s latest hybrid cloud innovations as a bold effort to position the company as a cloud-neutral enabler for businesses and addressing customers’ challenges by providing hybrid cloud solutions that help make it easier to execute their cloud strategies.” — Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps, IDC
“KBR takes a cloud-agnostic view for our customers and our own internal IT operations, ensuring that we place workloads in clouds where it makes the most sense for the customer, our business and the bottom line. Cisco’s new hybrid cloud innovations align closely with our views on cloud, our goals for IT automation, monitoring, infrastructure modernization, and elevating our sustainability with smaller carbon footprints.” — Jeff Hawks, KBR Information Technology, Director of Compute and Communications
“Kaleida Health counts on Cisco for critical hybrid cloud technologies to help deliver high-quality care to patients, and to provide secure network access to electronic medical records, telehealth and other applications across nearly 80 sites. The latest innovations from Cisco, including UCS X Series, Cisco Intersight, Nexus Dashboard, and Nexus 9000 and ACI, will enable us to accelerate our digital initiatives as we expand to the cloud for elastic capacity and build a common operating model across our hybrid cloud environment.” — Tom Hull, CIO, Kaleida Heath
“Cisco has been a valuable partner in our launch of Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native mobile network in Japan. Leveraging Cisco’s high performance 100G and 400G Nexus cloud infrastructure, network automation and observability, we are driving towards our goals to not only deliver the best mobile connectivity experience for our customers in Japan, but also to telco, enterprise and public sector customers through the Rakuten Communications Platform globally.” — Tareq Amin, Chief Technology Officer, Rakuten Mobile
