See how Cisco can help you work independently in a cloud-native microservices environment, where you can — use your favorite tools and fly through coding, leaving you plenty of time to innovate. Simplify your cloud. Deploy your services faster. Cut your Costs. When it comes to cloud, public, private or hybrid, Cisco’s got you covered. Learn more at Cisco.com/Go/Cloud ... View more

Increased Cloud Adoption Brings Increased Business Value According to a recent IDC study, the greater the level of cloud maturity, the better the business outcomes, including increased revenue and more strategic allocation of the IT budget. However, only 3% of the organizations surveyed have optimized cloud strategies in place today. > Login to see the infographic or Select View from the menu below. ... View more

Cloud adoption is an expanding part of IT organizations’ strategies, and IT architects are growing more sophisticated in how they think about cloud. As of 2016, enterprise adoption of cloud has truly moved into the mainstream, with 68% currently using public or private cloud for more than one to two small applications, a 61% increase over last year’s figure. On-premises and hybrid cloud are a critical part of the mix, with 73% pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy and on-premises private cloud spending projected to grow by 40% over the next two years. ... View more

Written by: Rajesh Kharya The present day challenges in containerizing application environment are Large scale container deployment is not as mature as compared to VM-based infrastructure Networking option is fairly limited and as such advanced security features, multi-tenancy, isolation and monitoring Security in terms of compute network and storage access isolation Scale of application container deployment Cisco’s infrastructure platform with Contiv addresses most of these challenges by integrating software and hardware components. Cisco addresses these challenges by offering highly compassable hardware infrastructure in the form of Cisco UCS for compute and storage access while Cisco ACI offers platform for programmable networking which is application driven. Contiv, an open source policy framework to provide predictable, secure resource acquisition of compute, network and storage resources for containerized applications. Coniv components like Contiv Cluster, Contiv Network and Contiv Storage stitches infrastructure needs together and integrates well with Cisco Infrastructure products – Cisco UCS, Cisco Nexus and Cisco ACI platforms. While Cisco UCS offers predicable and predefined compute infra in terms for logical service profile that can move across Cisco hardware platform and thus provide an option of highly compassable and stateless computing offering. Cisco ACI provides programmable networking infra where Contiv drives policy framework right in to the fabric from host originated by application need. Cisco is excited to be at DockerCon to offer demos of tech preview of the integrations via demos that will walk you through how Contiv integrates Docker components with Cisco UCS and ACI infrastructure. Figure 1: Cisco ACI and Container Integration with Contiv Figure 2: Cisco UCS+Nexus and Container Integration with Contiv Theme of the demo at Cisco booth at DockerCon is focused around how Cisco Infrastructure Integrates well with Docker via Contiv to offer a platform to run containerized application. Contiv provides policy based framework for the application containers to access network and storage resources. The demo will show the complete work-flow how policies get created and applied for application tiers and also gets populated on fabric. Through the policy construct how we change the application access behavior. Demo will also show how Contiv enable container applications running on compute host on Cisco UCS using network fabric which is either Cisco Nexus or Cisco ACI platform are able to communicate with other application containers running on multi-hosts. Additional Resources: Project Contiv http://contiv.github.io/ Cisco UCS  http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/servers-unified-computing/index.html Cisco ACI http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/data-center-virtualization/application-centric-infrastructure/index.html Cisco ACI & Docker Container with Contiv http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/application-centric-infrastructure/white-paper-c11-736314.html ... View more

Interesting data from the Cloud Index forecasting the growth of global data center and cloud‑based IP traffic. How many cloud services does your company use right now? Is your company struggling with Shadow IT where internal groups are using public cloud services without looping in IT? I have to say, I am guilty of using marketing and social media public cloud tools without telling IT.  (Not at Cisco, but another employer  .) There are so many marketing and social tools and file sharing tools that it is easy to use them without understanding the security risks. ... View more

Employees and business groups are increasingly going around IT to get the cloud services they need to do their job.The phenomenon, dubbed shadow IT, is growing exponentially and becoming a major headache for IT leaders. Recent analysis by Cisco reveals the average large enterprise now uses 1,220 individual cloud services. That’s up to 25 times more than estimated by IT.  And the average number of cloud services has grown 112 percent over the past year, and 67 percent over the past six months. Using the new Cisco Cloud Consumption as a Service, software-as-a-services product, customers can reduce financial and security exposure by identifying risky cloud services, cloud use anomalies, and compliance issues.  They can also cut cloud costs by finding ways to consolidate redundant services. Perhaps most importantly, the ability to discover and monitor cloud usage helps IT team better understand the needs of employees and internal teams. When combined with industry benchmarking, this critical information helps IT teams formulate a more strategic cloud strategy for their organization. Join the Hybrid Cloud and Shadow IT Discussion: Ask questions to experts and your peers. Cisco.com Resources http://cs.co/9008BngEC Partner Blog: http://cs.co/partnerblog Cloud Blog: Cisco Cloud Blog Partner/Customer Reference: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/success-stories/docs/aqueduct.html http://www.cisco.com/web/about/success-stories/docs/citymd.html PowerPoint: http://cs.co/ccaasppt Press Release: http://cs.co/ccaaspr ... View more

You can't manage what you can't see! Internal groups bypass IT and access public cloud services which causes Shadow IT and security risks for the organization.  Cisco announced today Cloud Consumption as a Service, which is software that can monitor and discover all cloud services in your organization. In addition, this one portal can provide data security tools for hybrid cloud services and alerts for new cloud services that are launched. > Check out this infographic that also includes customer case studies How is your company managing Shadow IT and hybrid cloud services? Share your experiences. ... View more

The Cisco Cloud Consumption software as a service allows your company to identify all cloud services & security risks. With this tool, you can understand who in your company uses public cloud services & which services are redundant, therefore, reducing costs for your department. You can also identify public cloud services and the security risks. Evaluate cloud providers and identify the right cloud service for your business. Learn more: http://cs.co/9008BngEC . ... View more

Hello Everyone, For those of you who attended our Cisco Unified Communications Release 9.0 Technical Briefing on July 24, we thank you for your interest!  We hope you find this list of resources helpful as you continue your education.  If you want to know more about this briefing and watch the replay:      •  Go to the Cisco Collaboration Community's Virtual Experience space: www.cisco.com/go/virtualexperience      •  Select "July 24 Cisco Unified Communications Release 9.0 Technical Briefing Replay" from the "Register/Watch" dropdown box      •  Scroll down to register and watch. Access the Briefing Replay On Demand The webcast replay will be available on demand on July 24 after 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time. Here are instructions to access:      •  Go to the Cisco Collaboration Community's Virtual Experience space:  www.cisco.com/go/virtualexperience      •  Select "July 24 Cisco Unified Communications Release 9.0 Technical Briefing Replay " from the "Register/Watch" dropdown box and scroll down on the page to  register. Important Notes:   If you are displayed a browser security warning message upon entry to the page, then please read the message carefully and choose to display ALL the content within the page or the form will not appear. You should be automatically connected to the Cisco WebEx Event Center console via a pop-up window.  If it does not automatically connect you, then scroll down past the "Register/Watch" dropdown and click on the "View Now" button. Please make sure pop-ups are enabled in your browser. If you are having challenges registering or accessing the webcast: Please email virtualexperience@cisco.com with a description of the problem, screenshots and type/version of browser. We are ready to assist. Download the Briefing Presentation and Q&A Below, we have attached a PDF of the  briefing presentation slides and we will post the Q&A within two weeks. ALSO VIEW FOLLOW-ON BRIEFING After the live briefing, Dan recorded an additional presentation on CUP integration with Cisco Unified Communications Manager. Please also view this presentation on replay (no registration is required to view) now:  https://cisco.webex.com/ciscosales/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=62754332&rKey=9ec1738064553f30 Continue to Ask Questions on the Collaboration Community The Cisco Collaboration Community is here for you to learn about using collaboration successfully in your business and to learn about collaboration technologies and solutoins.  Our goal is to connect you to your peers and to the Cisco product and marketing teams.  We encourage you to continue to post your questions to Cisco product experts.   Note: This is not a technical support community. For IT installation, implementation and debugging questions, visit the Cisco Support Community (formerly NetPro) and Cisco.com support area. Key Web Page To learn more about Cisco Unified Communications Release 9.0, here are some additional resources:      • www.cisco.com/go/voice  ... View more

Collaboration in business is changing. The traditional workforce that is reliant on PCs in offices is rapidly evolving into a mobile workforce choosing to do its work on a variety of devices and demanding rich collaboration experiences, applications, and support. Unifying your voice, video, data, and mobile applications through a core collaboration platform is crucial to delivering a new collaboration experience in this mobile, social, visual, and virtual post-PC era.  Please join the leaders from the product management team on June 26 from 9 to 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time for the Cisco Collaboration announcements webcast. Learn how state-of-the-art advancements in Cisco’s core collaboration platform offer flexibility to fit your business, bridge systems, and protect your existing investments.  Agenda: 9–9:10 a.m. Pacific Time: Cisco Collaboration strategy and announcements  9:10–9:30 a.m. Pacific Time: Demonstrations of new solutions You will also have the opportunity to ask questions directly to Cisco product experts, who will respond to your questions in real time through the discussion forum. After the webcast, you can continue learning from our product experts through blogs, deep dive technical briefing, product resources, and discussion forums on the Cisco Collaboration Community's Virtual Experience.  Go to the Cisco Collaboration Community to REGISTER NOW! ... View more

Murali Sitaram, VP/GM, Cloud Collaboration, will discuss how to implement an enterprise social collaboration platform with standards-based interfaces that plug into existing technology investments such as content management systems like Microsoft SharePoint and EMC's Documentum, while allowing you to handle a wide variety of business and application use case scenarios. > Back to Virtual Experience ... View more

Laurent Philonenko, Cisco VP and GM of Clients and Mobility, talks about how Cisco is helping organizations provide an anytime, anywhere collaboration experience with Collaboration applications that provide advanced presence, IM, voice, video, voice messaging desktop sharing, and web conferencing. > Back to Virtual Experience ... View more

Thomas Wyatt, VP/GM of Cisco’s Collaboration Infrastructure Business Unit, talks about how Cisco’s integrated infrastructure will power the way people work with the next-generation Collaboration Experience. Wyatt will detail how infrastructure plays the key role for collaboration across unified communications, video, and TelePresence solutions. > Back to Virtual Experience ... View more