Proactive and Preemptive Infrastructure Management Helps Navigate Digital Disruption

The onslaught of digitization is sparing no industry. Digital competitors continue to disrupt traditional markets. I have the privilege of closely watching this nonstop transformation unfold at my clients in industries across the value chain from retail to high tech.

Let us take an example from one of my clients (large grocery retailer). The $13.7 billion Amazon-Whole Foods deal earlier this year shook grocery retailers nationwide. Groceries retailers like my client must find profitable ways to revive the in-store experience while enhancing online options. With several parts of the customer journey in the grocery business being transformed by digital, my client is looking to rapidly enhance and deliver a differentiated digital experience to its customers. Likewise, another client in the High Tech industry is moving rapidly to reinvent its business model to drive seamless integration and collaboration with customers, suppliers and partners.

In this new era, as businesses are becoming more and more digital, their dependence on IT infrastructure is increasing exponentially. To be an enabler for digital transformation, the infrastructure needs to be simple, agile and reliable.

Reliability is paramount in the digital world where downtime stops sales and leads to customer churn. My conversation with clients regarding “reliability” is now more about “avoiding outages” as compared to “restoring service faster”. The conversation is about simplifying & standardizing the infrastructure, integrating application performance & infrastructure analytics; making the support model proactive & predictive by leveraging Analytics and Artificial Intelligence to detect potential problems and providing fixes for bugs or security vulnerabilities before they impact business. Some clients have really leaped forward on this journey and are ready even for the next level of “preemptive” capabilities which leverage cognitive computing and artificial intelligence for automated remediation of issues before they impact business. For example, one of my High-Tech customers is asking for capabilities to detect and programmatically disable rogue access points.

Within Cisco Services, we bring together people, process & technology to measure, analyze and optimize availability & performance across the whole stack – application, data center and network and make real this promise of a proactive and predictive network. This is no simple feat. For example, our network analytics solution collects data from around 23,000 devices across a grocery retailer’s network, analyzes all this information including around 2 million Syslog messages every day from these devices, correlates it with our intellectual capital & data from 2.7 million devices in networks across the world and provides real actionable insights which help the customer avoid outages in mission critical services.

Want to learn more? Please review the short video below regarding the innovation we are driving within Cisco Services to help enterprises and service providers maximize value from infrastructure analytics.

https://youtu.be/7bQ41ecd4rg