Hello Folks, you can visit my Cisco live diaries# 1 here.

In this blog I wanted to talk about the focus for Cisco and the future of network world. Cisco inherently is a CLI based company, but now it has shifted focus from Cisco CLI based programming to controller based programming and same was the focus for each of the talks given by all of the executives and believe me if this is the focus of Cisco then it is going to be the focus for every network company out there.

Keynote by Cisco CEO covered majorly the intelligent network. Now the router is no more only a forwarding device sitting at the edge of the network hidden from the developer world. With containers coming into picture router is now capable of hosting applications and the whole industry is getting so excited about it that now we see biggest of the players venturing into container e.g. google’s Kubernetes.  Chuck has announced partnership with google for making container based services more efficient.

Beyond containers the major focus was also network intuitive, you must have seen Cisco’s advetisements featuring  Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister, GOT star 🙂 ) and Milli bobby brown (Eleven, Stranger things Star) talking about the network  which is able to talk to human in their own language. This notion of network is called intent based networking. So now the network has more intelligence to understand and translate business intent into network policies and the continuous verification and validation keeps the network to adapt and inline itself as per the business intent in case of failures. Cisco’s DNA-C , SD-WAN, SD-Access were the main focus in this area.

There were few more technologies which caught my attention like Cisco Umbrella, Encrypted traffic analysis(ETA), Cisco Tetration for data-centre analytics etc. Specially I wanted to talk about ETA and Cisco umbrella here. These two technologies are hosted in Cisco cloud and if you opt for these services these provides huge security benefit for your network. As per Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins ,huge number of attacks in the network today are coming in the form of encrypted data. Since it is encrypted it goes unnoticed by most of the security devices. Cisco ETA now can monitor even those data and identify if it contains any malicious data and Cisco does this with the help of net flow records. The cloud based tool Stealthwatch will receive the flow records for the traffic and will be able to take decisions on the basis of the algorithms it runs. In my perspective this is a paradigm shift for securing our networks. Another cloud based technology is Cisco umbrella, I have been to umbrella booth in Cisco live and this tool looks very promising. Any website you access , the process of communication starts with DNS, and umbrella provides you security from the DNS layer itself. The DNS request gets redirected to Umbrella and Umbrella takes decision to allow/disallow the DNS request on the basis of continuously updating databases. It also provides intelligent proxy redirection in case the umbrella is unsure about the DNS request.

So if you are network engineer and reading this blog, I would say gear up for new era and start upgrading yourself.