02 Aug Pinnacle Roadshow: Cisco Live 2018 overview and key highlights
Each year, our staff experts attend several conferences hosted by some of the leading names in the technology industry, and we want to ensure that our customers and partners don’t miss out on the insights shared at these events.
That’s why we began hosting our annual Pinnacle Roadshow, providing recaps and highlights from conferences including VMworld and Pure Accelerate. Our most recent Roadshows were held in Oklahoma City and Tulsa in June, where Pinnacle Senior Network Engineer Clayton Meyer and Pinnacle Network Architect Alan Bunyard shared some key takeaways from this year’s Cisco Live event.
Cisco Live overview
The 2018 Cisco Live conference was held in mid-June in San Diego and included a theme of Imagine Intuitive. As Meyer pointed out, this event is one of the more technologically-oriented conferences, with a lot of in-depth presentations and sessions that make it worth the time and investment of attendees.
This year’s conference saw approximately 25,000 people in attendance, who had their pick of more than 1,400 sessions including hands-on labs as well as keynote sessions. Through the dozens of available session tracks, attendees customized their experiences and ensured that they attended sessions that would provide them the most insight and value.
Meyer, for instance, noted that he liked to register for events that would expand his skills and knowledge, including some that may be a bit out of his comfort zone.
Clayton Meyer and Alan Bunyard sharing highlights from Cisco Live 2018
Cisco unveilings: A focus on software
As opposed to past events where tech company hosts introduced hardware and software elements, Cisco chose to focus completely on software this year, and did not unveil a single hardware product.
As the tech giant pointed out several times throughout the event, this decision was deliberate, and was a nod to the fact that “we’re all developers now, and we’re all programming our own networks,” explained Bunyard at the Roadshow.
Network segmentation and identity management
A main thread of this year’s Cisco Live conference involved identity management and network security. With so many devices being introduced and connected to the network, the pursuit of access management and overall data protection is becoming more difficult.
As Meyer noted during the Roadshow presentation, 90 percent of organizations admit to not being fully aware of all of the devices accessing the network. Worse still, 85 percent of cyberattack victims don’t realize an infiltration has taken place until weeks or more after the fact.
In order to address these challenges, Cisco introduced its Identity Services Engine, or ISE, as well as TrustSec. ISE supports visibility into the devices connecting to the network, allowing administrators to verify and secure these endpoints. TrustSec, on the other hand, enables micro segmentation capabilities to categorize devices and apply individual access policies to ensure security.
To see more highlights from this year’s Cisco Live, check out Meyer’s and Bunyard’s presentation from this year’s Pinnacle Roadshow.
Visit the Pinnacle event page for information on our upcoming roadshows!
