Cisco re-inventing the future of networking

With billions of devices connected to the Internet, and tens of billions more coming down the pike, the pressures on our infrastructure are heading for a peak and pushing the industry to solve for some fundamental growing pains. Numerous challenges have emerged as we’ve been operating in a landscape of multiple carrier and access networks (wired, wireless, mobile), increasingly complex business processes with global reach, and sophisticated threats from new breeds of amateur, professional, and state-sponsored hackers. To handle all of these pressures gracefully, we need to refactor, and in some cases reinvent, some of the technologies, systems, and processes that we once considered fundamental to our Internet infrastructure.

For example:

To onboard tens of billions of connected devices efficiently and securely, we need reliable low-touch provisioning and secure bootstrapping with hardware root of trust.
To connect them to the network, we need to invent, evolve and pressure-test new protocols, addressing schemes, operating assumptions & methods, and sometimes entirely new paradigms for how we connect, cache, identify, and transport data.
To operate them, we need config, identity, policy, and threat detection to stretch across wired, wireless, and mobile networks; both public and private; and we need fast, secure, high-bandwidth transport from edge to core.
To industrialise them, we need seamless automation, collaboration, and programmatic interfaces across our network, business workflows, endpoints, and users.
And finally, to make them intelligent and adaptive, “cognitive,” if you will; we need to be able to collect, store, analyze, and model telemetry datasets from the network; connect them to our IT, business systems, and user data; and perform complex algorithms, train deep learning systems, and seamlessly exchange data across multiple stakeholders and networks.

And it all needs to be simple to use, with a delightful, business-driven user experience.

Only then will we have the foundation upon which we can draw insights and predictions that create meaningful business impact and outcomes, and fulfill the promise of IoT.

Cisco is at the forefront of research and development in all of these areas, and we are working with our academic partners like Curtin University to chart a course for the next generation Internet and equip the next generation of talent to innovate, design, and operate in a world in which we have tens of billions of connected endpoints, infinitely complex webs of global business connectivity (and threats), and business velocity needs that approach the speed of light.

Cisco and Curtin University are seeking a Chair to lead the newly established Cisco Curtin Centre for Networks. The Cisco Research Chair, Cisco Curtin Centre for Networks role is now open for applications. The right candidate for this role is a visionary in next-generation networking and a polymath at the intersection of networking technologies, security research, computer science, and business process automation. This leader will form and cultivate a team of researchers and software developers to shape the future of networking and set the stage for a new generation of applications.

Leveraging Cisco-supplied infrastructure, and partnering with Cisco engineers, the Centre will perform multidisciplinary technology, operational, and systems research to contribute to a growing body of academic and industry thought about our next-generation Internet. Through both specialized research and collaboration across engineering disciplines, computer science, systems, IT, user experience, human factors, psychology, and business; the Centre hopes to contribute significantly to our acceleration of new networking technologies and operations.

Additionally, the Centre will develop an intent-based network curriculum to skill and upskill Australia’s Workforce of the Future, with an increased emphasis on the roles that AI, Machine Learning, and automation will play in the implementation and operation of next-generation networks.

I invite you to come and lead this ground-breaking collaboration and be part of shaping the future of the Internet.

Read more about Cisco’s commitment to co-innovation and partnerships available under its Country Digital Acceleration Program.

References