Cisco Introduces New Hybrid Work Innovations for the Enterprise at Partner Summit 2021

At their 26th annual Partner Summit conference, today announced new technologies designed to give customers and partners the ability to manage the complexity of a hybrid workforce.

As organizations around the world embrace more flexible ways of working – with employees in the office, on the road and at home – they face increasing challenges ensuring all employees have secure and reliable access to the applications they need to be productive.

With more people accessing applications outside the office, and many of those applications now sitting in different clouds, the networks connecting all of these things have grown beyond the enterprise perimeter. Today, Cisco is announcing new technology solutions designed to give customers the ability to effectively deal with this complexity and support their hybrid workforce.

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.

“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 Todd Nightingale, EVP and GM, Cisco Enterprise Networking & Cloud. “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.”

ThousandEyes Expands Its Unprecedented View of the Internet

Today, ThousandEyes is announcing the addition of Application Outages to its Internet Insights platform, giving IT operations instant insight into SaaS applications on a global scale. Without any deployment requirements, IT teams will now have a real time and historic view into the availability of the SaaS applications employees rely on. Customers can quickly correlate user-specific issues to broader application issues to proactively alert their workforce an app is unavailable, while also escalating the issue with the SaaS provider — often before the SaaS provider even acknowledges the issue publicly.

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

The internet affects every employee and consumer alike. To give users real insights into real disruptions impacting the services they rely on, ThousandEyes is also making available the first live view of business-critical SaaS application and Internet outages based on actual performance data. Unlike sites that solely rely on user-reported issues, which can be misleading and inaccurate, the Cisco ThousandEyes Internet Outage Map is powered by billions of daily measurements across thousands of global vantage points to put the power of real-world data in the hands of every user and employee.

Extending visibility to the most important applications and environments

In addition to the public internet, visibility across collaboration applications and cloud environments has emerged as key to delivering great digital experiences for users. Collaboration applications have become the lifeline for many remote workers, so ensuring they are always working is a top business priority. In fact, between May 2020 and August 2021,  collaboration apps became the #1 most monitored application type by IT teams, indicating that the delivery of collaboration experience is deemed critical by businesses in hybrid work. In addition, managing users, branches, clouds and the internet requires a simpler, more intuitive approach to SD-WAN.

To address these challenges, Cisco has recently announced new innovations to enable an even better hybrid work experience. 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 is offering greater interconnection with Cloud and SDCI partners, enhanced multitenancy support, and 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 turn to trusted partners to help them navigate major technology transitions like today’s current shift to hybrid work. Cisco’s focus on enabling and empowering hybrid workforces has provided an opportunity for its channel partners to play a pivotal role in helping their end customers address this transition. With a partner-first mindset, Cisco is committed to providing solutions that simplify complex environments, which extends to simplifying how customers can buy and manage their technology investments.

Cisco’s innovation advantage combined with new simple and flexible buying models are designed to set partners up for success.

“At Denali, we see that all of our customers are building a strategy for the new paradigm of work,” said Clayton Daffron, Director of Solution Architecture, Denali. “Cisco’s innovation – with both technology and consumption models – are key to our customer’s ability to scale, secure, and transform the future of work to provide an enterprise experience, anywhere.”