A Look Back at the Highlights from Cisco Live! 2024

For professionals and executives who either work for technology companies or handle IT for their organizations, there is perhaps no event that more completely examines contemporary IT trends than Cisco Live.

The 2024 event, held June 2-6 in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay, featured panels and keynotes on a wide variety of topics and exciting innovations exhibited on the trade show floor. Several overarching trends and concepts, however, seemed to be common threads that touched almost every corner of the conference, including:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Cisco showcased the acquisition of Splunk, which was featured prominently in all keynotes. Splunk is renowned for its industry-defining monitoring and observability solutions, earning its place among the top 20 players in this competitive field. 

Cisco plans to integrate log analytics and incident response into its existing observability solutions, unlocking new levels of monitoring and troubleshooting across your entire enterprise. With AppDynamics and Splunk now available on Microsoft Azure, you can leverage the platform’s comprehensive data features and capabilities.

The enhanced full-stack observability (FSO) portfolio combines Splunk Observability Cloud, IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), and AppDynamics. A single sign-on feature will streamline access and enable seamless workflows across these platforms, reducing logging friction.

In other words, you’ll now have a robust powerhouse for observability, application troubleshooting, detailed granularity, and comprehensive log ingestion from networks across your entire infrastructure.

Security Improvements 

Security was a major focus at the event, with Cisco highlighting updates on its collaboration with Microsoft, the upcoming HyperShield architecture, and the new Secure Firewall 1200 series, set to replace the 1100 family. Cisco also announced plans to integrate these elements with Security Cloud Control.

HyperShield Architecture: This solution offers distributed exploit protection and micro-segmentation for both public and private workloads.

As the time between threat announcements and weaponization has decreased, quickly deploying response solutions has become more difficult. HyperShield addresses this by acting as an intrusion prevention system (IPS) for your virtual workloads, applications, microservices, Kubernetes, and other environments.

HyperShield employs AI-native enforcement and Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technology to learn what traffic should ingress and egress from nodes, automatically implementing fencing and segmentation. During updates, code upgrades, or application changes, HyperShield dynamically adjusts the security fences based on its understanding of the changes. This significantly reduces the complexity of security segmentation.

Wrapping Up 

Cisco Live 2024 showcased significant advancements, with a clear AI strategy and a forward-thinking vision that promises to be transformative for businesses. The innovations and integrations unveiled are poised to be game-changers, and we encourage you to take full advantage of them.

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