Cisco launches new hybrid work innovations at Partner Summit 2021

Cisco unveiled new solutions geared to help clients and partners manage the complexities of a hybrid workforce at their 26th annual Partner Summit conference.

“Cisco has long been a leader in networking, security, and collaboration, giving us a unique opportunity to address challenges and concerns of a hybrid workforce end-to-end,” said Reem Asaad, Vice President, Cisco Middle East, and Africa.

He added, “Visibility into the applications and networks that sit beyond IT’s control has become a critical success factor for IT teams as they support a hybrid workforce across a variety of new digital experiences.”

Organizations worldwide are facing increasing problems in ensuring that all employees have secure and dependable access to the apps they need to be productive, as they embrace increasingly flexible methods of working – with employees in the office, on the road, and at home. The networks connecting all of these items have spread beyond the company boundary as more people access applications outside of the office, and many of those applications now reside in multiple clouds.

Now, Cisco is announcing new technology solutions designed to give customers the ability to deal with this complexity and support their hybrid workforce effectively.

Since the home has become the new micro-branch, this also increases the need for a new approach to security. Through new hybrid work innovations, Cisco will help customers understand where, when, how and why user-impacting issues are occurring and will continue to provide zero trust solutions making it easier to ensure secure access to any application, over any network, anywhere users work.

ThousandEyes Expands Its Unprecedented View of the Internet

ThousandEyes has announced the inclusion of Application Outages to its Internet Insights platform, which will provide IT operations with worldwide visibility into SaaS apps. IT staff will now have a real-time and historical perspective of the availability of the SaaS applications that employees rely on, without any setup requirements. Customers can swiftly link user-specific difficulties to larger application issues to notify their workforce that an app is inaccessible while also raising the issue with the SaaS provider — frequently before the SaaS provider publicly acknowledges the issue.

The addition of Application Outages to Internet Insights Network Outages will provide customers with global insight into all the networks, services, and now SaaS applications that impact digital experience, thanks to ThousandEyes’ collective intelligence based on billions of ongoing measurements across thousands of global vantage points.

Every employee and consumer is affected by the internet. ThousandEyes is also making public the first live view of business-critical SaaS applications and Internet failures based on actual performance data to give users real insights into real disruptions impacting the services they rely on. Unlike services that rely exclusively on user-reported difficulties, which can be deceptive and inaccurate, the Cisco ThousandEyes Internet Outage Map is driven by billions of daily measurements from thousands of worldwide vantage points, giving every user and employee access to real-time data.

Extending visibility to the most important applications and environments

Visibility across collaborative applications and cloud settings, in addition to the public internet, has emerged as critical to providing exceptional digital experiences for consumers. Because collaboration software has become a lifeline for many remote workers, ensuring that they are always productive is a critical company concern. Collaboration apps became the #1 most monitored application category by IT teams between May 2020 and August 2021, demonstrating that delivering a collaborative experience is judged vital by enterprises in hybrid work. Furthermore, managing users, branches, clouds, and the internet need a simpler, more intuitive SD-WAN method.

Cisco has recently announced new innovations to enable an even better hybrid work experience to address these challenges. These innovations include:

• Cisco SD-WAN has recently announced new enhancements for greater access and visibility across more clouds, with visibility to deliver superior experiences. With these innovations, Cisco offers greater interconnection with Cloud and SDCI partners, enhanced multitenancy support, and a better user interface for more intuitive management. This includes the availability of new integrations with Equinix, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
• Recently at WebexOne, Cisco announced greater visibility into the performance of Cisco Webex through ThousandEyes and Cisco Meraki. Now, Meraki Insight automates root cause analysis and specific remediation steps across the local network, in the WAN, or in a SaaS provider’s cloud. Available December 1st, IT can also leverage new ThousandEyes Webex Agents for bi-directional visibility between user locations and Webex services.

Cisco Gives Partners the Advantage in Hybrid Work

Many Cisco customers rely on trustworthy partners to guide them through big technological shifts, such as the current trend to hybrid work. Cisco’s focus on enabling and empowering hybrid workforces has given its channel partners a chance to play a key role in assisting its end customers with this shift. Cisco is dedicated to creating solutions that simplify complicated situations, which includes making it easier for clients to buy and manage their technology investments. Cisco’s advantage in innovation, combined with new simple and flexible purchasing approaches, is meant to help partners succeed.