What I Learned at Cisco Live

New product highlights and existing product updates.

Cisco Enterprise NFV (Network Functions Virtualization)- Helps lower costs while increasing efficiency and business agility. Just as server and desktop virtualization transformed the way we view the data center, network services can now be virtualized and deployed in minutes from a centralized console and be automatically pushed to the branch. Also known as SDN (Software Defined Networking), virtualized services are run alongside traditional routing services using a platform such as the Cisco ISR-4k. Rather than purchasing additional hardware to run wireless controller, WAN acceleration/caching, firewall and advanced threat appliances can now be run as virtual instances natively on the router platform’s own hypervisor. Cisco is even opening up the platform to allow 3^rd party NFV to run in the environment. With Enterprise NFV you can scale up network resources in advance of seasonal demand, add network automation, deploy new branch services in a consistent manor, lower hardware costs, save on rack/power/cooling needs, all while meeting the business demands.

Cisco Defense Orchestrator (CDO) - This is a new solution from Cisco that provides a single pane of glass for policy creation and enforcement of Cisco firewalls, FirePower and OpenDNS solutions. Security administrators now have a single console to access for security across a distributed enterprise. Quickly detect one-off and misconfigured devices and ensure a consistent security posture for all the points of entry into the network. Delivered via the cloud, CDO is very easy to install and manage.

Cisco Tetration Analytics – Mapping out and understanding all of the network and application and system interdependencies that exist in a modern data center can be a daunting task. Continuous development of applications and services has only compounded the problem. Described as a DVR for the data center network, Cisco Tetration Analytics is designed to operate at line speed, capture every session, every process and packet to provide highly detailed view of the communications that run inside the data center. With both server agent and network based collection points, data is fed back into the Tetration platform where deduplication occurs before data is written to disk. Because Tetration is capturing everything that happens inside the data center and not just sampling data, you are now able to turn back time and apply what-if scenarios to the network to see the outcome of a potential policy change, all without actually pushing changes into production. By making use of this technology, organizations are able to clearly see the outcome of what a policy change would actually do to the network and applications with an impact assessment, minimizing downtime and risk. The data can be used to analyze past events from a single host or IP address, even alert when new events or network flows occur outside of the normal pattern for a server. Be it for general network security, compliancy, or a migration to a cloud platform; Tetration can peel back the layers of complex servers, applications and network components and expose what is actually occurring with an intuitive dashboard, while enabling search capabilities of billions of records in seconds flat.

Cisco AnyConnect and Endpoint Security – With over 130 Million installations, Cisco AnyConnect is an extremely popular enterprise SSL VPN solution. But, providing secure and reliable VPN access to employees and remote workers is not the only function Cisco has built AnyConnect to serve. Cisco’s new AnyConnect release 4.3 includes a number of additional features, such as the ability to now update automatically client side software directly from Cisco.com. More importantly, AnyConnect can now be coupled with multiple services including Web Security with Cisco CWS, AMP Enabler, Posture and Endpoint Compliance, Network Visibility, and troubleshooting modules. Also, new is the ability to roll out DNS protection to the mobile workforce with the OpenDNS Umbrella roaming client. Loaded modules as part of the base product, AnyConnect’s add-ons reduces the number of required software packages and running agents on the endpoint, so you spend less time troubleshooting. AnyConnect is lightweight and has low overhead on system resources even with all these modules loaded.