Hybrid cloud is the new reality for enterprises  

Excerpts: Nivedan Prakash

How does Cisco deal with the complex new hybrid cloud networking reality? 

With the global pandemic, there has been an upsurge in demand for remote healthcare, distance learning, hybrid work, and eCommerce. Hybrid cloud is the new reality for almost all enterprises, irrespective of the sector or size, as today, workloads are distributed across on-premises, edge, and public clouds. According to Gartner, more than half of enterprise IT spending in key market segments will shift to the cloud by 2025. 

To manoeuvre the new hybrid cloud networking reality, one needs operational capabilities to obtain a unified correlated and comprehensive view of the infrastructure, gain the ability to respond proactively across people, process, and technology silos, and deliver the speed of business, without increasing operating costs and tool-sprawl. However, enterprises need to address stringent location-dependent requirements such as low latency, regional data compliance, and resiliency for seamless operations of hybrid cloud applications across distributed environments. 

At Cisco, we made multibillion-dollar investments over the past six years to build cloud into every aspect of our business, focusing on helping customers develop complete cloud strategies with confidence across five key areas: Continuity, Insights, Security, Connectivity, and Operations. 

Cisco offers flexible Hybrid Cloud Networking with Cisco Nexus Dashboard, the newest of Cisco’s cloud networking platform innovations which helps IT simplify the transition to hybrid applications using a single agile platform. Besides bridging the gap in tooling, one of the significant capabilities of the Nexus Dashboard is enabling a flexible operational model for different personas like NetOps, DevOps, SecOps, and CloudOps—across a plethora of use cases. 

How do you obtain a unified correlated, and comprehensive view of the infrastructure? 

With the ever-increasing scope of the roles of NetOps and DevOps, an automation toolset is needed to accelerate hybrid cloud operations and securely manage the expansion from on-prem to cloud. Through Cisco Nexus Dashboard, we want to focus on simplifying the overall experience for IT infrastructure. We want to provide the IT teams with observability, insights, and automation to be truly cloud smart. 

Therefore, one of the key features – Nexus Dashboard One View helps IT with a unified management and observability entity in managing the network and associated entities in on-premise, private or multi-cloud. A Single-Pane-Of-Glass design gives the ability to login once with authorized credentials and detects all the anomalies of all the Networks being managed that require immediate attention. 

Nexus Dashboard One View supports Single Sign On (SSO) and Role-Based Access controls (RBAC) capabilities, enables operators to consume insights, advisory, and assurance stack as a unified offering to address prevention, diagnosis, and remediation. This means IT Ops can solve the issues from one screen without having to login to different entities. Moreover, it also provides a context-driven portal into network controllers and orchestrators for deep troubleshooting, and the innovative One-Click Remediation can help identify issues in a single dashboard and resolve them with just the click of a button. 

How to gain the ability to respond proactively across people, processes, and technology silos? 

We, at Cisco, are on a mission to transform IT operations by delivering a simple, intuitive operating model for a hybrid cloud that drastically reduces time to innovation. The intuitive Cisco Nexus Dashboard platform provides services such as Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator, Cisco Nexus Dashboard Data Broker, and a single operational view of your geographically dispersed multi-cloud environments. 

Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator allows operators to push policies and templates and set up intersite connectivity at scale. It enables the separation of fault domains, federation of data-center and cloud networks, and business resiliency at a global scale. Most importantly, it allows end-to-end change management workflows, centralized fabric management and upgrades, multi or hybrid cloud connectivity, normalized segmentation, and security policies across the data center, SD-WAN, and enterprise branch and campus networks. 

Cisco Nexus Dashboard OneView correlates application performance to the network performance with deep integration between Nexus Dashboard and AppDynamics. 

And Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights allows operators to consume the entire insights and assurance stack and helps them to take advantage of the integrated services to set up automated workflows such as Upgrade Assist and Automated Splunk SIEM integration. It incorporates a set of advanced alerting, baselining, correlation, and forecasting algorithms to give a deep understanding of network behavior. 

The Insights service and AppDynamics are tightly integrated to pinpoint an application issue originating from a network perspective – this means IT can now predict the impact of the intended configuration changes to reduce risk. They can test and validate proposed configurations before rolling out the changes, take proactive checks to prevent compliance violations while minimizing downtime and Total Cost of Ownership, and provide continuous assurance to address compliance and security posture. 

How do you deliver the speed of business without increasing operating costs and tool sprawl? 

In this world of accelerated digital transformation and business resiliency, a large amount of data is generated every second, making networking infrastructure more complex and distributed than ever before. According to Gartner, end-user spending on public cloud services in India is forecast to total $7.3 billion in 2022, an increase of almost 30% from 2021. To seize the opportunities of the hybrid world, enterprises must keep their network operations teams armed with the right tools to avoid costly downtime, meet business SLAs, and address scale for geographically distributed data centers. 

In IT operations, network automation is the key to simplifying hybrid cloud complexity, meeting KPIs, and increasing ROI. Cisco Nexus Dashboard delivers the simplicity expected by IT operations teams to become a trusted partner in their digital transformation journey. 

With Cisco Nexus Dashboard, one can improve the experience, reduce the time to value for powerful operations capabilities with a consistent UX and a single pane of glass for all native and fabric-agnostic applications, and increase cost savings and revenue. It helps reduce the overall network Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by scaling on a uniform operations infrastructure, reducing management screen sprawl across data center sites, and ensuring business continuity and compliance by quickly debugging and resolving root-cause issues.