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Molaprise, represented by Petra V, Head of Marketing and Digital Innovations, directly engaged job seekers and talented professionals. The feedback so far has been remarkable. 

Additionally, the presentations on Cisco’s Networking Academy and building a successful personal brand sparked stimulating conversations online and in-person. 

The real fun was getting headshots at the Cisco headshot booth, connecting via the event app, and earning points in the game for a chance to win amazing prizes! 

A big shoutout to Cisco for a well-executed event! Special thanks to everyone involved in making it happen.

For those who missed the event or want to revisit the sessions, the resource link is available here: https://lnkd.in/eG8raCHu 

We’re excited to keep attendees engaged through the event app and Cisco’s TalentBridge platform (open until August 1st). Explore Molaprise’s open positions, connect directly and keep the 2024 Cisco talent expo momentum going beyond the event itself. 

The post A Mola Perspective Of The 2024 Cisco Talent Expo appeared first on Molaprise.

Reduced Efficiency: Outdated systems hinder efficiency, turning your business into a high-speed race car brought to a crawl. 

Increased Downtime: Old infrastructure leads to increased downtime, disrupting operations and eroding productivity. 

Security Vulnerabilities: Outdated security exposes your business to cyber threats, weakening the fortress protecting your data. 

Lost in the Past: Incompatibility with modern software becomes a barrier to progress, hindering seamless integration. 

Scalability Shackles: Hindered growth due to the inability to accommodate expanding needs. 

Frustration Unleashed: Poor user experience directly impacts the morale of your workforce. 

An IT infrastructure upgrade is a cost effective way of addressing multiple the issues that come with old systems. Your infrastructure is the brushstroke that can paint a vivid future or consign you to the shadows of the past. 

Why Modernize Your IT Infrastructure? 

Infrastructure modernization is the linchpin for transformative success, offering benefits such as:

Efficiency Symphony: Modernized infrastructure harmonizes operations, amplifying productivity and performance. 

Security Shield: Fortifies your business with the latest security protocols, protecting against cyber threats. 

Agility Empowerment: Navigates change with grace, fostering agility as you scale operations and adapt to industry trends. 

Innovation Hub: Transforms your workplace into an innovation hub, cultivating a culture of creativity. 

Seamless Collaboration: Facilitates the effortless flow of ideas among team members, fostering collaboration. 

Future-Proof Strategies: Anticipates challenges and proactively shapes your business’s destiny. 

Redefined Customer Experience: Personalized interactions and streamlined services position your business as a paragon of customer satisfaction. 

In essence, infrastructure modernization is a transformative journey, contributing to elevating your business to unparalleled heights. 

What are some IT upgrades that could Enhance your Business?  

Four pivotal elements constitute the backbone of modern infrastructure: 

Cloud Computing: Offers unparalleled scalability and accessibility, optimizing costs and enabling dynamic, efficient, and collaborative operations. 

Cybersecurity: Stands as the guardian of the digital fortress, ensuring the integrity of business operations and customer trust. 

Internet of Things (IoT): Connects the business ecosystem, enhancing operational efficiency, providing valuable insights, and fostering innovation. 

Automation: Drives efficiency and precision, streamlining workflows, reducing errors, and contributing to a more agile and responsive business environment. 

Embracing these elements is not just a technological upgrade but a strategic decision to enhance efficiency, security, connectivity, and operational excellence. As businesses navigate the complexities of the digital age, the integration of these technologies becomes a catalyst for growth and innovation. 

The post Why Your Business Needs an IT Infrastructure Upgrade  appeared first on Molaprise.

While flexibility has become king, many people may also miss in-person collaboration, and will want to meet with others in the office on an ad hoc basis. Businesses will need to be ready for this future of work, and empower their employees to easily conduct their roles from the office, home, coffee shop, or anywhere in between.

While it may sound daunting, it doesn’t have to be. With the right strategies and technologies in place, hybrid work can afford an organization many opportunities. It can introduce enhanced levels of agility and resilience for better company performance. It can help businesses attract skilled professionals in a competitive market. And it can also lead to cost savings, greater operational efficiencies, and improved environmental sustainability.

Of course there will always be challenges. One such challenge is cybersecurity, and hence, security resilience. With more assets to keep track of in more places, hybrid work can lead to gaps in visibility and control, providing attackers with additional ways to get in. But while attackers work hard to get into your network, Cisco continues to innovate to keep them out, no matter where your devices or users may go.

Key security architectures for safeguarding hybrid work 

Many of the core security architectures we have been building and offering for the past several years will help to ensure a smoother transition to hybrid work, as well as greater security resilience:

• Cisco Zero Trust delivers a comprehensive solution to secure all access across your applications and infrastructure, from any user, device, and location. Having visibility and control over who and what is accessing your environment — and what they are doing once inside — is a critical component of a successful hybrid work strategy. Unlike traditional security, the protection offered by zero trust is not based solely on location. That way, you can make sure that only the right people and devices have permissions to access specific data at specified times.
• Cisco Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) leverages the cloud to enable seamless, secure access to applications from anywhere users work. By converging security and networking functionality into a single, cloud-delivered service, SASE improves operational efficiency and performance while also strengthening threat protection for the hybrid workforce.
• The Cisco SecureX platform harnesses the power of integration to automate and accelerate threat detection and response for a distributed environment. SecureX provides extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities and more. It brings together technologies from both Cisco and third parties for a unified view and defense across the network, endpoints, cloud, and applications.

Just as the workplace has evolved, so has the threat landscape. To make things even easier, we have put together the Cisco Secure Hybrid Work solution to provide exactly what you need to keep your business safe in this new work environment. All of our security technologies are backed by the superior threat intelligence of Cisco Talos, so customers can quickly adapt to detect and combat the latest risks. Talos also offers robust incident response services to help companies prepare for, respond to, and rapidly recover from attacks.

New hybrid work innovations 

We continue to innovate to make sure our customers are prepared for what’s next. Most recently, we launched the Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 Series, which is specifically designed for hybrid work. The new firewall supports more remote workers with up to six times faster VPN performance, and also delivers a strong video conferencing experience. Cisco Secure Firewall enhances visibility and threat detection even in encrypted traffic, and helps strengthen your zero trust security posture. It also integrates with Cisco SecureX for rapid incident response.

Additionally, we recently unveiled the Cisco SecureX device insights feature. Device insights allows organizations to collect and correlate data from multiple sources to determine which devices are in an environment, where they are located, who is accessing them, their security status, and more. With so many new machines connecting to corporate infrastructure, this level of information is crucial for safeguarding the future of work.

Powering the future of work with Cisco 

In addition to security, Cisco’s broad hybrid work portfolio spans collaboration, networking, and IoT. With a nearly 40-year history of providing secure connectivity around the globe, we are well-equipped to empower workers to perform their best from anywhere.

“Security has always been a high priority with our extensive and intricate network but was even more critical once the pandemic began,” said Lukene Berrosteguieta, head of security operations at energy company, Repsol. “[Cisco] Business Critical Services has supported our efforts every step of the way to enhance and maintain network security across our entire infrastructure to ensure the safety of our customers and workers.”

According to Dan Turner, CIO at Per Mar Security Services, “Once COVID-19 hit the United States…we leveraged our existing infrastructure to spin up virtual workspaces for all our employees within a week so that they could work from home…. Our Cisco systems and security frameworks allowed Per Mar to move quickly and safely to support our employees.”

The way we work has forever changed, and will continue to evolve. We must enable our teams to be productive and competitive no matter what comes next. Learn how you can boost your organization’s security resilience for the years ahead.

Reference: Your employees are everywhere. Is your security? – Cisco Blogs

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Cisco IT started implementing SASE architectures well before Gartner coined the term.
SASE has provided efficiency, security, and flexibility to our global network.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) has quickly become one of the hottest topics related to cloud, networking, and security architectures. As Cisco engineers, we have seen hesitation and confusion among some customers on what SASE really means. We hope to answer most of those questions here.

What is SASE, and how is it related to the Cloud Edge, Zero Trust, and SD-WAN? SASE has positively impacted how we run our IT organization, and how we envision Enterprise IT customers will run theirs. To accurately explain what SASE is, and why SASE came to be, we must look at the evolution of how data is stored and transported within an enterprise.

Our journey started inside the data center

A decade ago, many of us lived in a data center-centric world, and security was simpler to implement.  Here at Cisco, we were moving data inside the four walls of our data centers, and  we assumed complete trust. The corporate office, the MPLS circuits between sites, and the Cisco data centers were all within a trusted environment, which enabled us to meet our security and compliance requirements.

Move to hybrid cloud and hybrid work

However, while many enterprises still focus on data center-centric applications for their core business needs, the world is shifting towards cloud-based application development. This enables faster and more efficient deployment of software and services to meet ever-changing business needs.

IT organizations have also shifted from a model of only managed devices (PC or laptop) for use within the trusted corporate network to allowing users to work on multiple devices from just about anywhere. The emergence of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) as well as remote work had already been gaining traction in the industry over the past few years, and this trend significantly accelerated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, employees are expected to be able to work from anywhere, and any device. Combined with the distribution of resources across on-prem networks and the cloud, Hybrid Work presents a significant security problem as business users and application providers are no longer fully controlled by the IT organization.

To address security concerns in the interim, network architects designed a model where all user/cloud interactions were routed back, or backhauled, through a data center — i.e. the trusted entity — prior to being redirected to the cloud application. While meeting the security needs, this model has performance and cost challenges.

Arriving at SASE

To improve security and efficiency, a SASE-like architecture was developed internally by Cisco IT. The model we used for the architecture provides every user with a security profile tailored to their access privileges and uses a Zero-Trust approach to identify and authenticate users and devices before allowing a direct connection between the cloud and the access edge.

Ultimately, SASE is the convergence of networking and security functions in the cloud to deliver reliable, secure access to applications, anywhere users work. The Cisco SASE model works by combining SD-WAN for network, with cloud-based security capabilities such as Secure Web Gateway, Firewall as a Service, Cloud Access Security Broker, and Zero Trust Network Access into one, single, integrated cloud service.

CloudPort and the evolution of SASE at Cisco 

Cisco’s SASE journey started with CloudPort, which was a hardware-based, on-prem, self-managed Cloud Edge platform, delivered at Colocation data centers around the world. While CloudPort provided a single platform that delivered network and security, it also brought cost challenges, used a traditional perimeter security, and required both agility to scale up/down as well as specialized skillsets.

To address these challenges, we first modernized the on-prem CloudPort solution, and put in motion a plan to move from on-prem to as a service or hosted SASE capabilities. The Customer Zero team, which deploys emerging technology in real life environments to provide critical feedback to the BU early in the product lifecycle, created a strategy to move to SASE, testing do-it-yourself and as-a-service models. The findings from the Customer Zero internal testing have guided our external offering strategy.

During this testing period, Cisco IT has moved from a ‘do-it-yourself’ model to a Cisco hosted/managed solution. Learn about the evolution of these solutions and Cisco’s future SASE vision by staying tuned for parts II and III of this blog series.

Learn more about Cisco IT: Cisco IT Blogs

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