Where can find information on how cisco adopted to cloud computing?

sram

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 30, 2007
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Hi to all,

Don't know if this is a good place to ask for this but let's just do it:

I want you please to direct me to the appropriate channel. I'm doing a research paper on migration to the cloud or switch to the cloud for businesses and its security challenges, and I would like to have some information about how cisco switched to the cloud. What were the challenges, and how did they solve and overcame them. In other words, I want some information on cisco success story when it comes to the switch to cloud computing. When I search in google, all I get is how cisco envisions the migration and their suggested strategy to other companies on how to switch as they are themselves a cloud provider. I couldn't find anything on how cisco itself switched to the cloud.



What are your suggestions? Where can I dig for this kind of information? Can I contact them directly ?
 
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talk to cisco directly?!
I have been trying to reach their local office with no luck. I always get directed to sales reps. It was hard but I was able to find some links that talk about cisco when it comes to cloud computing. The way they adapted is by actually coordinating with cloud providers to help them deliver their services in a more secure way, and who is better at networking and networking security than cisco? So instead of losing to it, they facilitated it for others and benefited itself from every entity migrating to cloud. That's what I was able to find. So, correct me if I'm wrong if somebody knows better.

I'm thinking maybe I can come across a cisco employee here who can help me.

Thanks.
 
Cisco UCS was a horrific failure around the early pivot to public cloud 2013/2014.
Like VMware and Oracle, they were slow on the uptake.
You aren't going to be able to pick the brain of a Cisco employee for your 1:1 chat.

If you were to ask for the component and software underpinnings of a providers public facing solution, you wouldnt get specifics. That would be like a Citrix employee giving you specifics about the Xen specific tweaks of Azure and AWS.

Can I buy Cisco solutions on public cloud providers?
Yes, is that what you are driving at?
 
Cisco Select Certified Partner here.

The honest advice is that your question just isn't appropriate to a highly technical and complex enterprise as large as Cisco.

You are never going to get a straight answer as to how Cisco 'switched to the cloud' because this is a fictional scenario and I'm surprised you think it exists.

With 75,000 employees across the globe in many geographic regions and with an immeasurable quantity of systems, this is something that would have happened organically for each business area over time (and will stil be ongoing).

Likewise, as a cloud provider in many cases these shifts would have been fluid, bespoke, and completed on a hybrid basis over time.

Bear in mind that Cisco do still have (and use) a monstrous amount of static infrastructure. Whether it would be considered 'cloud' if it is their own infrastructure in their own datacentre is also a complex question.

The best you would get is a case study where a specific business unit in Cisco moved a specific system to a platform they considered 'cloud'. You're not going to get something organisation-wide where the Cisco CEO said 'we've gone cloud now' on a Tuesday. It simply didn't happen that way.

If you are writing a research paper on the challenges (Security and otherwise) of switching to the cloud, then you need to focus on an organisation where this is a clear and deliberate action and has a tangible and demonstrable demarcation point before/after.

Find a decent-sized SMB, a midmarket entity, or even an enterprise that uses a finite quantity of systems and can verbalise that transition. There are many case studies out there. Cloud providers love to talk about them.

Don't pick a provider that uses, manages, and sells, thousands.

What you are attempting to do is the functional equivalent of asking Michael Phelps to identify every water molecule he pushed out of the way to win an olympic medal, and explain the process, reasoning and challenges for each one.

I hope this advice is taken in the spirit that it is intended.
 
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Cisco Select Certified Partner here.

The honest advice is that your question just isn't appropriate to a highly technical and complex enterprise as large as Cisco.

You are never going to get a straight answer as to how Cisco 'switched to the cloud' because this is a fictional scenario and I'm surprised you think it exists.

With 75,000 employees across the globe in many geographic regions and with an immeasurable quantity of systems, this is something that would have happened organically for each business area over time (and will stil be ongoing).

Likewise, as a cloud provider in many cases these shifts would have been fluid, bespoke, and completed on a hybrid basis over time.

Bear in mind that Cisco do still have (and use) a monstrous amount of static infrastructure. Whether it would be considered 'cloud' if it is their own infrastructure in their own datacentre is also a complex question.

The best you would get is a case study where a specific business unit in Cisco moved a specific system to a platform they considered 'cloud'. You're not going to get something organisation-wide where the Cisco CEO said 'we've gone cloud now' on a Tuesday. It simply didn't happen that way.

If you are writing a research paper on the challenges (Security and otherwise) of switching to the cloud, then you need to focus on an organisation where this is a clear and deliberate action and has a tangible and demonstrable demarcation point before/after.

Find a decent-sized SMB, a midmarket entity, or even an enterprise that uses a finite quantity of systems and can verbalise that transition. There are many case studies out there. Cloud providers love to talk about them.

Don't pick a provider that uses, manages, and sells, thousands.

What you are attempting to do is the functional equivalent of asking Michael Phelps to identify every water molecule he pushed out of the way to win an olympic medal, and explain the process, reasoning and challenges for each one.

I hope this advice is taken in the spirit that it is intended.
I actually completely see your points. I kinda of implied it myself when I said they themselves (Cisco) are cloud providers. I'm glad I posted here and found you. Yes, Cisco is huge but I picked them because I thought it will be easy to find information on them online without the need to really talk to somebody. However, it backfired. Cisco is too huge and fragmented across the world to exactly pinpoint how they switched. The thing is that I have already gathered some articles about them, so if I change to some other company I will waste time. What I gathered from the articles is that Cisco facilitated cloud migration for businesses by providing security ideas and partnering with big cloud providers like I explained in my earlier post here. This is one of the articles so that you can see my point:

https://www.crn.com/news/networking/chuck-robbins-on-cisco-cloud-from-death-to-growth-driver

So maybe I can stick to Cisco and concentrate on finding more information similar to that found in the article, or switch to another entity like you said and see how they did the switch, but I don't know if I'll be able to find an appropriate one that fits the bill exactly. I will need to precisely explain the organizational context of the business I'm talking about, so the business better be little popular and have some information online (I don't have time to collect information by interviews). What do you think? Which way should I go?
 
Googling isn't research.

Aws Reinvent is is free this year.

Red hat has some of their content up, going to have to search for the Cisco partnered presentations.

I expect Azure content to be wonky bc their presentations are kludgy and awful.

Join a Cisco UG and talk to people.
 
Googling isn't research.

Aws Reinvent is is free this year.

Red hat has some of their content up, going to have to search for the Cisco partnered presentations.

I expect Azure content to be wonky bc their presentations are kludgy and awful.

Join a Cisco UG and talk to people.
Well, it is just easier if you can find all the information you need in the internet. The lazy in me suggests that ! I put up a question in cisco community but I still didn't receive any reply. What's Cisco UG?
 
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The thing is that I have already gathered some articles about them, so if I change to some other company I will waste time.
It's not a waste of time if you can gather all the necessary information on another company faster than you can complete your Cisco research. At this point gathering the amount of data needed on Cisco does not look feasible.

All the big cloud providers have a portfolio of success stories right on their websites. (AWS for example https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/ca...ate&customer-references-cards.sort-order=desc ) I would browse them and pick a couple you think would work well to start looking into.
 
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It's not a waste of time if you can gather all the necessary information on another company faster than you can complete your Cisco research. At this point gathering the amount of data needed on Cisco does not look feasible.

All the big cloud providers have a portfolio of success stories right on their websites. (AWS for example https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/ca...ate&customer-references-cards.sort-order=desc ) I would browse them and pick a couple you think would work well to start looking into.
I see your point, but don't you think I should just go and assume that Cisco dealt with the rise of cloud computing by becoming cloud services providers themselves and expand on this point? I mean, Cisco is not originally a cloud provider but a networking company selling routers and switches, but they did so many acquisitions and forcefully got into the cloud computing game and didn't allow it to influence them. That's how they adopted to cloud computing. The risk is that I don't know how much information I can find on this.

Your link is very nice. I found the corresponding link for Microsoft Azure : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/case-studies/

There isn't much information in each story so it will depend on if I can find more information about each case some other way. Thanks.
 
I think your concept is good. Unfortunately it being a good idea is irrelevant if you can't find enough data. A decent research paper is going to need facts, statistics, metrics, quotes, etc. If you've been working on this for two weeks, and don't have a mountain of data to condense into an interesting paper by now, I would be concerned.

The case studies won't be nearly enough information to write your whole paper, but it's a quicklist of businesses that have transitioned or are transitioning to the cloud. I would spend a day or two compiling a list of companies you think you could write an interesting paper on, see what data is publicly available, and reach out to them to see who you can get to actually talk to you. If it doesn't go anywhere you only lost a couple days of work.

Either way best of luck with your paper (y)
 
Hmmm. I'm currently surfing this page:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solut...1&flt0_general-table0=cisco#~all-case-studies

I want somebody more knowledgeable than to comment. It seems like Cisco themselves benefited from their own cloud services. I can take that as an example of how a specific unit in Cisco switched to the cloud. This is what I see when browsing their case studies. Take these two case studies for example:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solut...aged-infrastructure-hyperflex-intersight.html

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/cisco-on-cisco/fax-order-automation-machine-learning.html

From the 2nd link:
"The UCS was 200-300% faster than the public cloud platform we tried originally," says Ken Schroeder, Cisco IT principal engineer. "We knew that the GPUs we’d use for fax order automation would be idle much of the time, so we decided to build an internal solution in our private cloud that we could offer ‘GPU as a service,’ billing different departments according to their usage."

Can somebody confirm the conclusion I came up with?
 
Look up the Meraki acquisition and the success stories there. Can't get more cloud than that.

Also....I don really consider UCS cloud. Its a blade/hyperflex platform meant for premise installations (sure it can be used for infrastructure to host a "cloud").
 
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