Cisco Has A Trust-First & Security-First Approach: Thimaya Subaiya

Cisco is a worldwide leader in IT and networking, which helps companies to transform how people connect, communicate, and collaborate. What were the driving forces which made the firm reach this stage at a global level?

At a global level, if you think about the history of Cisco, we've been pivotal to creating one of the basic needs that the entire Global community has right now, which is the internet. From that perspective, where a company starts off on that front, it needs to build trust. Cisco has always had a trust-first approach, followed by a security-first approach. In today’s world, security is extremely important. With a trust-first mindset, we made a big difference in terms of the way we approached our customers, the way we approached our partners, and the way we approach our employees. And I think that has been one of the secret sauces for Cisco's growth and how we've expanded. The second thing is the innovation that we've driven. If you think about it, at Cisco, we drive innovation on our products and couple it with a truly driving customer transformation with our customer experience. And that has been a significant key sauce for us because it's not only about the products that we bring to the table, but it is also about how we get our customers to their business value, faster. We are across the globe. We are in multiple countries and can proudly say that India is our second largest base for customer experience outside of the US and it is going to continue. So, for Cisco, we are looking at India to be the driver for CX growth globally. And the people that we've brought into the ecosystem have been extremely crucial in terms of the growth that we've seen. Its not only the people that we brought in, but it's also the culture that's been created, which is one of the key drivers behind Cisco growth globally.

Can you elaborate on some of the innovative solutions being provided for customer adoption acceleration?

If you think about it, customers and the experience that they expect has changed. It's changed pre-COVID, during COVID, and post-COVID. The way one goes into a retail store and buys, let's say, an iPhone is the same experience that one expects while visiting a restaurant and ordering food.  It is the same experience that one expects when coming to Cisco and buying technology for the entire network security portfolio. Hence, there's no differentiation between the consumer mindset and our business mindset. But yes, there is one thing that they always tell us which is, as you digitise, don’t miss out on the human connection. So, from an integration perspective, we digitised and brought a consumer-first approach, where we not only make it easy for the customers but they can also get proactive in terms of things like Artificial Intelligence and automation. These two areas are where we have made significant investments. Everybody says that they have AI, but what I say is that AI is a baby. With Cisco, we have years of experience, years of data. We've collected all this data and looked at every little customer situation that we've had. From that perspective, our AI is already a teenager. It's not a baby anymore. Being able to expose that to our customers, to be much more predictable in terms of any kind of outages that they may have and the way we have built dominancy has taken it all to the next level. Simultaneously, being sustainable, carbon neutral, or net zero are also some of the things that are on top of the mind for most of our customers. We have also focussed on it. For example, power consumption within the data center. We are able to track which server within which rack is consuming extra power as normally compared to the rest. We are able to create redundancy for it, backup via that redundancy, bring that server down, figure out what the root causes are, apply the patch and update it while bring that back online. Hence, being able to innovate in these fronts, helping our customers reduce operational costs while at the same time having them be significant in where they want to go has made a big difference for us in terms of expansion.

With easy internet access today, and the increasing relevance of the digital space which includes phenomena like Metaverse, NFTs, and Cryptocurrencies, how does Cisco plan to revolutionize its solutions in the coming times? 

I look at this space as advancing technology and there are certain emerging technologies that are going to create even more opportunities within these emerging technologies. Let me give you the prime example of 5G. 5G is top of mind for almost all companies, but I say the explosion of 5G is going to create other technologies like Internet of things or IoT with a lot of scope of investments. If you look at IoT, it has not taken off the way it should. It has unbelievable potential. With the emergence of 5g we are going to see an explosion in IoT. And over a period of time IoT is going to become a bigger industry primarily because 5G enabled it. With IoT also comes another adjacent technology, where you are collecting billions of rows of data. Hence, with an aggregation of data, one would not have to store billions of rows of telemetry. If you look at our data center and how we are leveraging some of the newer technologies in this space, we are continuing to be enablers of emerging technologies, not only today but also in the future. So, I'd say when you think about where Cisco is going, it is making big impacts and is going to continue to innovate and have significant impacts in the future. It is going to be around areas like IoT, data center. It is emerging as an enabler for 5G globally.

Can you elaborate on some of the pertinent security concerns and how to deal with them?

If you think about security, up until a few years ago, most businesses thought of it as one of the additional things that they need to add on. But the world has changed, where every single CSO or chief security officer has a security-first approach. There are two extremely critical things when it comes to security. Number one is policy and segmentation, which means you clearly defined guardrails in terms of what can be done and what cannot be done. The second one is what I call zero trust. Zero trust is another area that you see Cisco playing a huge part in, especially around all the different security protocols, whether it's at your data center level at the server level, or all the way to your end across the entire stack. Cisco plays a significant role in being able to bring that zero trust environment into the same corporate environment, and we are going to continue to innovate in this area. But once again, we've got a lot of our customers say, don't just leave us in the hands of software. So what we've also done is over a period of time, we built an amazing team and a lot of that team sits out in our data center. We call it the incident response team. Think of this entire team globally, just monitoring. It's basically threat detection and monitoring. And they're doing this on a regular basis, and hence you have the human intervention. It's not only about what we're getting attacked, but it's also about how do you create the policy so that way it flows through to the entire ecosystem of your customers.