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Today, roughly 17 billion devices are connected to the Internet, and by 2030, that number will reach nearly 30 billion. Our everyday lives now depend on these devices and an ever-increasing fusion of digital and physical experiences that must blend seamlessly.
It’s a high-stakes game.
Surgeons perform remote procedures from half a world away via augmented reality. Videoconferencing tools connect colleagues in virtual offices, with everything recorded, transcribed, and shared back for reference. AI-powered robots on factory floors are becoming more efficient through machine learning, while connected fridges order more milk before you even notice you’re running low.
“It’s amazing to think how digital everything has become,” says Jonathan Davidson, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Networking, “but we’re still only at the beginning of what’s possible when we connect everything.”
All these are instant experiences supported by an endless array of sensors, cameras, devices, and data, and the resulting network functions require constant maintenance and attention. Without it, things fall apart—quickly. In February, for example, a ransomware attack against an insurance company shut down operations at hospitals and pharmacies across its network for over a week, costing the company an estimated $872 million. “If a hospital’s connectivity is down, they’re canceling surgeries and redirecting patients to other hospitals,” says Davidson. “It can literally be a life-or-death situation.”
The challenge of delivering a flawless digital experience is immense. Business outcomes depend on digital performance and IT is at the helm. Network architectures are more sophisticated and complex across more clouds and vendors than ever. IT leaders are besieged by rising cybersecurity risks, increased demand from new app and workload types, and widely distributed workforces and infrastructures.
“IT owns the digital experience—but they don’t own the network. In the past, organizations only had visibility into their own infrastructure and things within their control,” says Davidson. “But today, you’re responsible for the end user experience no matter where a problem comes from, and you need the ability to understand that the problem might be two hops away in a network you don’t own or manage.”
For companies, applications and workloads must be delivered securely across an organization’s owned infrastructure, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, third-party networks, and the public Internet to work. An employee in Mexico City might be connected to a server in Houston and video-chatting with colleagues in Toronto through a series of network providers. The connection might pass through many separate companies. And while each helps make that session possible, none is solely responsible for delivering the overall experience.
The reality is without holistic visibility of network infrastructure (across all the hops) a company may not become aware of performance issues and won’t know when customer experience suffers—and this matters. In the U.S., even when people love a product or service, 59 percent will stop using it after a series of bad experiences, according to a recent survey. And 17 percent of respondents said they’d walk away after just one bad engagement. Imagine losing a quarter of your customers in a single day because of an application error or a last-mile service disruption you couldn’t see.
However, there is hope.
“As the physical world becomes more connected to and dependent on the digital world, managing it all will get more complicated,” says Davidson. “But this complexity shouldn’t impact end users or hinder IT operations from assuring the service.”
With data and new AI capabilities, IT departments can deliver continuous insights and automate management across both an organization’s owned devices, networks, and data centers as well as third-party service providers and public clouds. “For far too long, IT teams have been trying to solve problems in silos: LAN, WAN, and cloud,” says Davidson. “In reality, they depend on one global area network of owned and unowned infrastructure. If you can see and understand everything, you can fix anything”.
Proactive Insights for a Complex Future
Cisco has been delivering visibility of a company’s owned IT infrastructure for years.
Now, they are using Cisco ThousandEyes to extend that visibility across the global area network and the entire digital journey—a first for the industry. ThousandEyes has the broadest, deepest dataset on what’s happening across the global Internet.
Any device that can run a container can feed data to ThousandEyes: laptops, home broadband gateways, switches, and routers. Cisco is collecting 650 billion points of measurement daily from millions of vantage points, including Cisco networking devices like Meraki and Catalyst. ThousandEyes also takes five billion synthetic measurements every day.
ThousandEyes applies advanced AI-native algorithms to this rich data set for continuous, end-to-end visibility, insight, and recommendations across any on-premises, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment. This fundamentally transitions organizations from reactive to proactive behavior across the global area network, even as it constantly shifts and expands.
This is how IT can assure the digital experience and how organizations achieve digital resilience.
“Our AI-native intelligence is built for business,” says Davidson. “Without this scale of high-quality data, any other AI is just a toy.”
Cisco’s ability to manage vast amounts of data can also improve security, allowing organizations to detect, investigate, and effectively respond to threats. Cisco has also recently completed the acquisition of Splunk.
“With Splunk, it’s exciting to think about bringing business context to everything,” Davidson says. “For instance, IT teams can go beyond assuring digital experiences to contextualizing operational, infrastructure, and application data with network data and telemetry. The possibilities of where we can go are exciting.”
Davidson is also excited about what’s next. “We went through the virtualization era, we’ve gone through the cloud era, and now we’re in the AI era,” he says. “AI will be essential to enabling digital resilience critical to every human, business, and government around the world.”
Cisco’s suite of technologies allows organizations to maximize the benefits of AI: Cisco has the infrastructure to power it, the data to feed it, the security platform to protect it, and the assurance capabilities to monitor and manage it in real time. Cisco is powering new levels of experiences to transform economies and societies—for today and tomorrow.
Learn more about how Cisco delivers AI-powered insights to achieve true digital resilience.
