Crises usually strike without warning - atleast not all the time. Every major organisation has sufficient crisis management expertise to foretell the signs of impending difficulty and accordingly, contingencies are made. Its not often that businesses encounter an event like COVID19, widely referred to a black swan event. While there aren't official numbers of this just yet, its safe to assume the extent of the impact of the pandemic have been largely damaging. However, for those who prefer seeing the glass half full than empty, it is a prime opportunity to accelerate and fortify digital capabilities. Thankfully, with companies like CISCO, businesses have answers and solutions quite readily. The IT major is at the forefront of developing AI-driven solutions across capabilities and domains to address remote work. 

Jumping Into A Crisis Prepared 

CISCO, a global leader in IT & networking, has been developing an arsenal of tools, solutions and technologies primed to bear the weight of a sudden crisis like COVID19. Patil, who leads CISCO's India pre-sales teams for solution and architecture design, emphasises on the necessity to pivot quickly using technology. Currently, the stay-at-home economy has only accelerated the need for businesses to continue operating without the requirement of physical human presence at a certain location. The only way this can be done is through automation – Artificial intelligence and machine learning play a big part in improving the efficiency and accuracy of this endeavour. Cisco has been integrating AI and ML across its portfolio, with a focus on improving uptimes, predicting and preventing failures proactively, gaining deeper insight and visibility into operations, improving security posture and enriching customer experience. 

Patil explains, "Cisco DNA Assurance leverages the power of AI to define required performance parameters for optimal user experience on the network, while AI Network Analytics reduces noise and false positives while accurately identifying issues that have the greatest impact. AI is also a core aspect of our smart city digital solutions – which are being leveraged by the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) to manage lockdown protocols in real-time."

Recently, Cisco conducted its virtual event Cisco Live 2020, attended by more than 80,000 people. Some of the key takeaways was Cisco emerging as a major player in the AI/ML space. With the pandemic accelerating the adoption of digital alternatives, new-age technologies like AI, ML, robotics, 5G, etc. are becoming mainstream. Patil says Cisco is uniquely positioned to help customers and partners leverage these to emerge stronger in the new normal. "At Cisco Live US, our flagship event held entirely virtually this year, we announced key enhancements to offerings across our collaboration, networking and security portfolios. Cisco Webex, which has been instrumental in helping people, businesses, and government bodies stay connected at this time, comes with an AI-powered assistant, which allows participants to control the meeting through simple voice commands," he said. 

In addition, CISCO is making distributed network smarter, simpler to manage, and more secure through AI and ML. For example, AI Endpoint Analytics and problem-solving capabilities through which the Cisco DNA Center can identify previously unknown endpoints at scale, then use various contextual sources to group them logically. With this information, IT can create the basis for scalable, automated policies. To simplify security for the increasingly borderless enterprise, the IT major also announced enhancements to its security portfolio, which leverages AI, ML, analytics, etc. to offer unified visibility, automation, and strengthened security across network, endpoints, cloud, and applications. 

"We are using AI/ML technologies in various enterprise IT offerings to enable organizations to make better decisions, offer an enhanced employee and customer experience, and augment human capabilities, " stated Patil. 

Cisco Webex Emerges As A Friend In Need During COVID19

Ever since various parts of the world started going into lockdown, with businesses having little idea of when the health situation would improve, it became quickly evident that interactions would have to become virtual and very quickly. One of the many platforms that rose to the challenge was Webex - Cisco's teleconferencing offering. According to a report in ET CIO, the platform drew a record 324 million users in March 2020 alone. 

"At the onset of the crisis, as we saw the spurt in demand for our collaboration technology, we took conscious and proactive measures to expand our capacities to cater to the unprecedented volumes. Today, Cisco Webex is supporting three times the normal volume at a global scale. We expect this preference for virtual collaboration to only rise. In the office of the future, technology will play a central role in enabling productivity and true collaboration and keeping the social element of work intact. " 

Physical and virtual workplaces will merge, which will necessitate the integration of features such as virtual whiteboards, AI-enabled video conferencing, AI meeting assistants, etc. To this end, Cisco has been leveraging the power of AI and ML to enable cognitive collaboration. Through features like people insights, facial recognition, and Webex Assistant, cognitive collaboration is transforming the virtual team experience. Recently, Cisco also introduced key Webex enhancements such as industry-leading security and compliance capabilities, and intelligent and actionable insights to deliver consistent user experiences. 

Network Analytics Made Smarter with AI 

Network analytics helps manage various aspects of a network - right from hardware to software and cloud-based apps, providing valuable insights on assets, and the business overall. Cisco is leveraging enterprise network analysis, augmented with machine learning and applied artificial intelligence to automate the analysis of trillions of bytes of telemetry, radio fingerprints, and network access points to uncover patterns in the chaos and turn these findings into actionable insights. Recently, the company introduced new capabilities through Cisco AI Network Analytics, an application within Cisco DNA Center that leverages AI-driven anomaly detection, AI-powered baseline analytics, advanced machine learning techniques, and an advanced cloud learning platform to identify critical issues within the network and provide rich information so organizations can quickly troubleshoot issues, pinpoint their root causes, identify trends and patterns, and obtain relevant comparative perspectives. "With Cisco AI Network Analytics, another layer of intelligence is added to intent-based networking, making networks even smarter, simpler to manage, and more secure. Distributed teams will now have more visibility, greater insights, and guided actions that will help them address vulnerabilities in real-time, thus mitigating damage or downtime," says Patil 

Leading the Way in AI for Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity has emerged as one of the primary challenges in the contactless economy. As a result, security leaders are increasingly looking to AI and ML to fortify their defences and enable secure remote collaboration. Advanced capabilities in AI/ML can be used to help to mitigate security threats and help secure the business against hackers by processing large volumes of data in near real-time to discover critical events. With online activity for shopping, entertainment, and transacting rising, AI/ML can help keep people safe while browsing by predicting "bad neighbourhoods" online to help prevent people from connecting to malicious websites. AI-based security tools are also gaining popularity to protect data in the cloud, and help identify malware activity with high certainty even with encrypted channels, without the need for decryption or inspection of the traffic payloads. 

Making Enterprise IT Smarter & Remote Work Seamless With NVIDIA 

The partnership between CISCO and leading chip maker NVIDIA has certainly elevated the user experience globally. Together, the two companies have built solutions that accelerate AI and ML workloads, uplifting the entire lifecycle from development, testing and inferencing. "We have been focused on easing the challenges faced by IT organizations and data scientists through our machine learning computing solutions. Our partnership with NVIDIA is aimed at simplifying the current era of big data by leveraging AI. We are using an architectural approach wherein we securely connect all the points where data is generated, curated, and processed so that customers can extract more insights from the available data. We provide solutions for graphics-intensive data centres to elevate organizations and deliver unparalleled manageability and world-class support. We are also enabling enterprise environments to easily run powerful machine learning/deep learning-based analytics on infrastructure that fits seamlessly into on-premise data centres," says Patil.