Cisco has introduced capabilities and technologies to drive a more unified and integrated approach to managing and securing networks.

IT organisations are looking to their technology providers to help address three core priorities in their network operations: security, automation and a unified digital experience for their end users, things and applications. As these same companies look to deploy AI-powered technologies, the need has grown to have a deep understanding of the end-to-end experience.

“As a market leader in both networking and security, and with visibility into over one billion endpoints, Cisco is in a unique position to build the industry’s premier AI-driven, secure and simple networking management platform, Cisco Networking Cloud,” said Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president at Cisco. “Whether it’s autonomous operations or simply delivering a trouble-free experience to an end user, endpoint and network data are key to AI-driven intelligence. The best data produce the best result, and Cisco has the best data.”

Users require secure networking that delivers a shared view across their entire network, and a scalable way to enforce security policies everywhere, without compromising their always-on, optimised user experience. To address the needs of their users, Cisco introduced networking cloud innovations at this week’s Cisco Live in Amsterdam (blogs.cisco.com/networking/delivering-simplified-operations-the-latest-from-cisco-live-amsterdam).

It introduced deeper integrations between its networking and security cloud platforms. These innovations with Cisco Secure Access deliver a unified approach to networking and security management, and automated monitoring of the digital experience, providing insights from network, device and application performance metrics. These integrations are available with Catalyst SD-WAN and ThousandEyes.

Industrial organisations can now use the Security Posture report for comprehensive details on OT asset inventories, top vulnerabilities and highest cyber risks to help reduce the attack surface. These features are available with Cisco Cyber Vision and available as part of its hardened industrial-grade routers, switches and firewalls.

Users can now view select Catalyst wireless devices in the Meraki dashboard. This capability gives them a complete, cloud-managed view of their access networks. Cloud monitoring for Catalyst wireless supports the Catalyst 9800 wireless controllers and most Catalyst Wifi 5 Wave 2, Wifi 6 and WifFi 6E access points.

Cisco is continuing its journey to a single, unified hardware architecture with the Catalyst 9300-M switches, which will be managed natively from the Meraki dashboard. This is the first step in the evolution towards full cloud management for the Catalyst switching portfolio.

Cisco is also unveiling technologies to help users accelerate the adoption of AI by providing the right infrastructure for the right use cases. An extension of Cisco’s UCS X-Series modular system, the X-Series Direct is built for environments where users need connectivity and compute power at the edge to support more applications with less infrastructure.