Cisco ANZ VP Ken Boal upbeat on division outlook as ‘world is changing the network’

Cisco Australia and New Zealand VP Ken Boal has used his keynote speech opening the firm’s Melbourne IT summit to provide an overall upbeat outlook for the ANZ unit, outlining a strategy driven by digital disruption, the dazzling uptake of applications and concomitant pressures on networks and the need for more secure and robust platforms to support this shift.
"In 25 years the network has changed the world and now the world is changing the network," said Boal. "Every organization is under enormous pressure of disruption, and now networking and digital infrastructure has to evolve to support this change."
Indeed, going forward the ANZ division’s brief included the building of highly secure and resilient platforms. "’Outages hurt, they stop business and they affect your brand," Boal said. "We’ve launched new business critical services combined with current and up to date software."
A new approach is needed to address this challenge," said Cisco. Specifically, the firm billed its Tetration platform - to which it has just added a new range of capabilities - as a core example of such a resilient infrastructure. Its aim is to offer an improved level of workload protection for multi-cloud data centres.
Speaking to Telecom Times on the sidelines of the Cisco Live event, the firm’s Director of Data Centres and Cloud Sales Rodney Hamill explained in greater detail how the Tetration platform operates. Whereas once, most data center operators were more or less limited in their scope to securing its data assets and traffic flows behind four walls, now increasingly they faced challenges around providing a secure infrastructure to underpin the sharp uptick in usage of applications without jeopardizing agility.

"Those four walls are not there anymore," Hamill said, adding that it had now become crucial to take on this challenge using a model that didn’t rely on securing network traffic behind a facility’s perimeters.
Rather, he added, by adopting a multi-dimensional workload-protection approach, the Tetration offering could seriously cut back an organisation’s attack surface, minimize lateral movement during security incidents, and detect so-called indicators of compromise much faster.
Hamill noted that even today, most data centers were designed featuring traditional perimeter-only security, which he said was wholly insufficient.

Leave a comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s