Partly Cloudly With a Chance of Hybrid

On-Premise vs Cloud Debate: Webex Edge for Devices Make the Tough Decisions Easier

The debate of staying on-premises vs going to the cloud is getting quite old.

Customers are stuck somewhere between their investment with on-premises devices and wanting to experience the new features which may have a cloud dependency.

Here at Cisco, we want to make the tough decisions easier, and Webex Edge for Devices does just that. It allows customers to continue using their on-premises devices while being able to experience modern capabilities such as device management and analytics in a single pane of glass. There is an even greater advantage with the Webex single platform, even more features will be extended from the cloud to on-premises deployments.

How is this being done?

We have invested in Webex Control Hub to manage our cloud devices, but we thought, “Why limit ourselves to only cloud?” Webex Control Hub should be a one-stop-shop for all device deployment types.

We went out and asked customers what features were integral to end user success, and we found that monitoring, troubleshooting, and analytics topped the list. From this, we decided to release these as initial features for Webex Edge for Devices.

You want to easily identify whether a device is offline/online, or if there is an issue from anywhere in the world.

Global IT Departments service their end users around the clock, and we want to help you be proactive in being reactive to incidents before the person in the space notices it. This is where our new alerting functionality comes in. It will now be available for every device administrator.

In addition to being proactive, you can look back at how device usage is affecting your environment. Through Webex Control Hub, customers can see exactly how their devices are being used. For example, how many hours a day a device is in a call or sharing content locally. This gives IT admins the ability to see their end user adoption of devices based on physical location and not just over their entire deployment!

For the programmers or admins who like to use our APIs, we have you covered. Using Webex Edge for Devices will allow you to use Cloud xAPI which was just release to access devices which are behind private networks or unreachable from standard corporate networks. That means you can now access devices which are situated in home offices without additional VPN access.

These are just some of the initial features of Webex Edge for devices. We intend to also bring updated management capabilities in addition to cognitive features like Webex Assistant and People Insights soon!

What do you need in order to experience this?

All you need is Webex Room Devices that can support CE 9.10 when released and Control Hub Access. Once released a tool which allows customers to easily onboard bulk amounts of devices in seconds will be available. Webex Edge for Devices requires only a HTTPS connection from the on-premises device to the Webex Cloud, the connection also works through proxies.

Our goal is to make it frictionless to access these additional features. In the future, if you wanted to go fully cloud, you can with a simple one-click migration.

If you are one of our many customers who are on-premises, but feeling “partly cloudy”… be on the look out for the on prem release notes for 9.10. The initial release of features that will be available towards the end of December 2019.

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