As usual, Cisco Systems Inc.‘s annual user conference, Cisco Live EMEA in Amsterdam, serves as a platform for the networking giant to release the latest innovations across many of its product lines. Although this event is considerably smaller than the U.S. Cisco Live, it’s important for the company as Europe, the Middle East and Africa is a highly diverse region spread out across 120 countries.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result, it might be time to stop trying to get servers to do something they’re not designed to do. Servers are effective at many things but were never designed for the rigors of software-defined networking, storage and security.
The networking industry has been going through a major shift – the transition to the cloud. The term “cloud” was once foreign to network managers, but an increasingly dynamic and distributed workforce accelerated by the pandemic has forced network engineers to do things differently. The cloud removes the burden of managing the network box-by-box by decoupling control from the hardware and centralizing it.
The rise of hybrid work and distributed applications has created a problem that’s not so new but has been exacerbated. On-premises security has been the de facto deployment model for decades, but as businesses have become more distributed, on-premises have struggled to meet security demands. The pandemic-induced hybrid work model underscores the difficulty of putting corporate-grade security wherever a user is.