Inside Cisco IT

Content also contributed by: Marcelo Camandona and Darron Howard The office comms room (network distribution or server rooms) can often become an “out of sight, out of mind” storage closet for old equipment, file boxes, even bicycles and other personal items. With so many vendors and employees worki…

When I first joined the Cisco IT team in 2018 after graduating from university, I was eager to see how a large, global company like Cisco can efficiently develop and deliver solutions to its customers. I quickly discovered that while Cisco is big and complex, it operates very much like an agile star…

This nugget caught my eye in Cisco’s 2020 Global Networking Trends Report, fresh off the presses in October 2019: “While only 4% of IT leaders and network strategists classify their network as an intent-based network today, 35% plan for their network to be intent-based within two years.” Those 35% a…

People are our single greatest asset at Cisco. Creating a world-class employee experience is crucial because it helps us attract and retain exceptional people and give them what they need to do their best work. In fact, employee experience is so important at Cisco that it’s a pillar of our COO’s cha…

Webex Teams is the hub for collaboration at Cisco. For every project or program, we set up a Webex space where we can meet, chat, and share content—from any device. Keeping connected helps us be productive when email is just not enough. On May 1, 2019, the user experience for collaborating on conten…

Our existing circuits comfortably handle terabytes of new Office 365 traffic with Cisco SD-WAN technology Before migrating to Office 365 in early 2019 we needed to make sure we had enough WAN capacity. At the outset we’d be transferring 500 TB of email—the equivalent of 19 years of streaming HD vide…

Agile has long been considered an exclusive software paradigm. Agility as we all know is a mindset and as the Law of Conservation of Agility states, it needs to be inculcated. Imagine that you want to go on a healthy diet, and you focus only on lunch, ignoring the dietary considerations of breakfast…

Collaboration used to be something like sharing a meal. We met in a designated space, like a conference room or someone’s office. Everyone came together at the same time. And if the meeting was in the middle of the night in our time zone, we had to make do the next morning with leftovers (notes or a…

Last evening, I had a lively discussion with my friend Paul on the state of agility in his organization, a midsize company of about 6000 employees. He mentioned that agile is the flavor of the year in his organization and that their executive Samuel had set a goal “We shall be agile by the end of th…