Foresee the Unpredictable at Cisco Live Europe

(No superpowers required)

In this hyper-connected world, the speed of change has never been faster, the risks have never been higher and success has never been more challenging. Sometimes, it feels as if you need to see into the future to be successful.

But, the superpower of foresight may not be as impossible as we once thought…

In our everyday lives, we use our experiences to determine what we should and shouldn’t do. Using pattern-matching triggers in our brains, we can identify and associate scenarios with past experiences, aiding in our critical-decision making.

To put it in simpler terms, we can recognize situations we’ve encountered previously and adjust our behavior accordingly. For example, if we’ve slipped on an icy path before, we might adjust our behavior (our shoes or how fast we walk) when we notice the weather temperature dropping. We build up a bank of experiences, use them to recognize patterns in the world around us and change how we approach situations to avoid problems.

But what does this have to do with your IT network?

When it comes to IT, you know what has worked well in the past – and what hasn’t. You typically remove or repair problematic devices, software versions, etc. after a short time, but you remember what was risky about them (like the icy path). You know to be careful if the same situation arises, and avoid it, you are unlikely to repeat risky situations.

But what about threatening situations in your network that you haven’t seen before? How can you pre-emptively know if one of your network components is faulty before it causes problems? Much like your brain, you cannot respond to a situation if you’ve never experienced it.

This brings us back to the power of foresight. Cisco makes it possible to foresee the unpredictable using tools like machine learning, and the power of Business Critical Services. No superpowers required…

How do we do it? We accumulate the intelligence of millions of devices and systems connected to networks across the globe. Combining machine learning and predictive modelling (analytics used to predict outcomes), we can uniquely identify, scan and monitor each and every device or system configuration across a customer’s network, identify outliers and assign a global risk factor based on patterns over time. By capturing and anonymizing the set of features associated with the problem, we build a knowledge base of known risks in networks. We call this capability Fingerprinting, and it is available as part of our Business Critical Insights.

If you’d like to learn more about Fingerprinting and Business Critical Services, tap into our expertise at Cisco Live Europe in Barcelona next week. If you’re onsite:

1. Attend my Customer Experience Innovation Showcase on Wednesday, 30^thJanuary at 16:00 CET.
2. Chat with our experts in the Cisco Customer Experience Showcase space as well as the Unlock the Power of Data showcase. Open Monday – Thursday.

If you’re not in Barcelona, you can still join us via our livestreaming events:

1. Watch the Innovation Showcase session and hear from our experts, live on Cisco TV, starting on Wednesday, January 30^that 3:55 PM CET.
2. Head on over to our Cisco Services Facebook page, where we’ll be hosting a series of live broadcasts, including one for Business Critical Services on Thursday, January 31^st at 10:15 AM CET.