During a hybrid event, with some journalists present and others connected remotely, Cisco provided an update on the situation for the current year, as well as announced its forecast for 2022. 15 billion in the current fiscal year, and invested heavily in digital training, as well as improving hybrid working tools, paying attention to face-to-face and remote collaboration solutions.
To demonstrate the attention paid to current events, the general manager Gianmatteo Manghi participated in the event remotely, in the form of a hologram. “The first nine months of my tenure focused on three things: people and community, cloud transformation, and software.Manghi pointed out. “That is why we have also opened Cisco spaces in innovation centers such as the Talent Garden in Milan, at Federico II University in Naples and very soon also in Florence. In terms of cloud and software transformation, we confirm our position as one of the best companies in the world with revenues of $15 billion in fiscal year 2021, while in Italy we signed an important partnership with Noovle, the cloud company of the TIM group, in the development of cloud activities for businesses and public administration“.
Before greeting the audience, Manghi took the opportunity to talk about sustainability, highlighting how Cisco has invested a lot in this direction, setting itself the goal of net zero emissions by 2040, 10 years ahead of schedule.
2022 according to Cisco: a new Internet, the cloud, cybersecurity, new forms of work and environmental sustainability
According to Cisco, four trends will characterize 2022, starting with a new internet. What does it mean? In practice, smart grids, which adapt their performance according to the type of traffic and service used, giving priority to the essentials, and shifting loads to the most “ecological” routes, those where the least natural resources are consumed for processing. “The real difference will be in the ability of the networks to understand what we are doing online: for example if the traffic to be managed comes from smart working or from a banking transaction, and to adapt accordingly to always guarantee performance. necessary“, explain Paul CampoliHead of Global Service Provider, who continues the discussion by talking about networks on demand .“Already today, very large operators offer their business customers connectivity services to access the cloud with on-demand models, and this also implies a profound transformation of networks by telecommunications operators, who will have to become increasingly more programmable and integrated to operate in this cloud perspective. In particular, it will be a network orchestrated and managed efficiently to move workloads to where they consume the least, created with basic technologies such as chips or optical fibers, which require less and less energy, as with Cisco’s Silicon One technologies.“.
The second trend identified by Cisco is thecloud evolution. The topic of app economy is gaining more and more importance and companies are now digitizing all kind of interaction relying on the cloud. The problem is that the cloud creates fragmentation and an excellent internet connection is not enough to guarantee adequate performance: bottlenecks can hide anywhere and therefore it will be necessary to be able to control the whole stack (the applications, the infrastructure they rely on, and the network they use) to ensure adequate performance for users and customers. A concept defined as Full Stack Observability.
The third trend is that of cyber security, but this is not surprising. It is now known even to those who do not work in the sector how much the number of cyberattacks has increased during the pandemic and if the trend is to rely more and more on the Internet, it is essential to do so. securely.
The philosophy must necessarily be that of Zero Trust: each access must be constantly monitored and authorized, definitively abandoning the notion of trust, i.e. the systems or devices considered to be reliable. And that must also be true for IoT devices, which can represent an entry point for attackers. Second Fabio Florioresponsible for the Italian Cybersecurity Center of Cisco, “the future of authentication will be passwordless, i.e. a world in which access to systems, services and applications is controlled by identification and behavior parameters and not by lost codes , stolen or found to be ineffective. Access will therefore be permitted by security keys or biometric recognition“.
Last among the trends identified by Cisco are the environmental sustainability and inclusiveness.
“We believe the role of digital technologies is to foster a more sustainable world“, explain Enrico Mercadante, Head of Architectures Cisco Southern Europe. “We see the world moving from a linear economy, where products are used and then thrown away, to a circular economy that makes better use of natural resources. Digital technologies will increasingly be used as platforms to foster more sustainable businesses. Digital sustainability is a team sport. New ecosystems are being created to solve complex problems digitally.”