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We need machines on our side, says Cisco

By Lesley Stones
Johannesburg, 20 May 2019
Osama Al-Zoubi, Cisco CTO for MEA.
Osama Al-Zoubi, Cisco CTO for MEA.

The pace of change as businesses try to digitise all their activities has become so rapid that humans can't handle it alone.

We now need to have robots on our team, because our ambitions have grown so grand that only artificial intelligence and machine learning can help us implement them.

Creating a world where everyone is connected and data is available on any device from anywhere is now a key goal for businesses, delegates at the Cisco Connect 2019 conference in Sun City heard today. But we need the intelligence of robots to protect those communications and to keep our data secure from the bad guys - or from the bad robots.

Network security is no longer a task for mere mortals, with Cisco detecting more than 20 billion attacks on a daily basis on networks around the world. "That's 250 000 every second," said Osama Al-Zoubi, Cisco CTO for Middle East and Africa. "We can't do this manually. It has to be automated with the capabilities of machine learning. If you are a pessimist, you will think robots are taking over our world and taking over our jobs. If you are an optimist, you are going to think robots are augmenting our abilities and making humanity super-human," he said.

Every industry is being disrupted by digitisation, but it's not only businesses that are being affected. "The future is going to be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, and these technologies will solve many of the grand challenges that are facing our continents and society, like healthcare and education," Al-Zoubi said.

Business leaders want to know how they can accelerate internally to survive externally, and Cisco believes the answer lies in the multi-domain architecture it has developed.

"It's not about connectivity, it's about bringing people, processes, data and devices together to enable business outcomes. This multi-domain architecture securely connects any user on any device on any network to any app, to access any data," Al-Zoubi explained.

To power that ability, Cisco has had to transform and reinvent every aspect of its solutions, he said.

"Security is everywhere, because as we increase our dependability on technology it's imperative that we have intelligent, automated security."

Software-oriented networks

People had expected apps to move into the cloud, but it turns out that entire enterprises are expanding into the cloud. And not just one cloud, but into multiple private, public and hybrid clouds. Data centres have also become anything but central, Al-Zoubi said.

That requires networking solutions that can cope with multiple clouds, and can move and position the workload to wherever it needs to be.

To achieve that, Cisco has reinvented its technologies and made security the fundamental building block for everything, said Ivan Duggan, director of enterprise networks for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia.

It also flipped its thinking by developing software-oriented rather than hardware-oriented networks. One of its innovations is Encrypted Traffic Analysis technology, which can identify potential malware without decrypting it. Cisco is the only company that can do that, Duggan says.

People had expected apps to move into the cloud, but it turns out that entire enterprises are expanding into the cloud.

He reminded CIOs in the audience that their ability to change their organisations has never been as powerful as it is now. "The challenge is that the skill sets we have now are not what we need to bring us into the future," he warned.

During the keynote addresses, Cisco made a commitment to expand its Network Academies in Africa and to train 125 000 young Africans in cyber security. It also pledged to open more Edge Centres, where small businesses can gain Cisco skills and collaborate with its engineers and technicians to develop solutions for their customers.

This is the first time Cisco Connect has covered Sub-Saharan Africa as well as South Africa, and almost 1 000 delegates are attending the event in Sun City, with the theme 'Say Hello To The Future.' About 50 deep-dive technology sessions are on the agenda, while an exhibition area is showcasing the technologies developed by Cisco partners and customers.

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