Cisco announced a range of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities for improving the management of users, devices and applications across an enterprise network – from campus networks and wide-area networks, to data centers and the IoT edge.
“As the pace of change and diversity of the environment continues to rapidly evolve, Cisco is committed to continually simplifying our solutions,” said Scott Harrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Business. “Artificial intelligence and machine learning can enable businesses to efficiently discern which issues to prioritize, becoming more nimble and proactive. This will have a profound effect on network operations and the IT team that run them. At Cisco, we’re future proofing our networks and the workforce through automation and intelligence.”
At Cisco Live in San Diego, company executives said Cisco platforms and security systems can already collect context-rich telemetry data sets. The new software capabilities designed to utilize deidentified and aggregated data. This enables:
- More Visibility – relevant data from local networks is correlated against the aggregate deidentified data set to create highly individualized network baselines. These baselines constantly learn and adapt as the number of devices, users and applications evolves, and as environments change.
- Greater Insights – machine learning is used to correlate the immense amount of data coming from the network against the individualized network baselines to uncover the issues that will have the greatest impact on the network. This improves issue relevancy, alerting IT of the issues that matter most. It also discovers trends and patterns, so IT can pre-emptively identify issues before they become a problem.
- Guided Actions – machine reasoning algorithms and automated workflowsa perform the logical troubleshooting steps that an engineer would execute to resolve a problem. This helps IT detect issues and vulnerabilities, analyze the root cause and execute corrective actions.
Cisco is introducing new integrations with its multidomain intent-based architecture across campus, branch, WAN, IoT, data center and cloud:
- Network segmentation: The integration of SD-Access with SD-WAN and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) makes it easier for IT teams to consistently authorize, onboard and segment users and devices across branch, data center and cloud networks, even when users and applications change. Because of this segmentation, IT is able to safeguard against unauthorized access to sensitive data and critical applications.
- Application experience: Cisco now automatically conveys application requirements between the data center and the WAN, allowing the network to select the best path and prioritize traffic even if applications move or change. This allows IT teams to dynamically elevate application performance across the enterprise and branch.
- Pervasive security: As an industry leader in cybersecurity, Cisco is leveraging its security innovations across all domains. By extending the ability to detect threats in encrypted traffic across public clouds, and by protecting the branch and WAN against threats, Cisco is providing the end-to-end security customers need.
Cisco AI Network Analytics will be a standard part of Cisco DNA Center Assurance and will be available in the next version of Cisco DNA Center, generally available summer of 2019. Cisco AI Network Analytics will be included in the Cisco DNA Advantage licensing tier.