300-730 teaching - Implementing Secure Solutions with Virtual Private Networks Updated: 2023

Defense personnel are often unsung heroes—potentially putting their lives on the line to serve their communities. Giving back to those who choose to serve, or are transitioning out of the armed forces, is clearly the right thing to do. We’re proud that Cisco Networking Academy partners with organizations around the world looking after the unique needs of current and former military service people.

Training-up down under

Soldier On is a not-for-profit organization delivering support services that enable current and former Australian Defence Force personnel—and their families—to lead meaningful civilian lives. It does this by providing psychology support services, employment support, education programs, and community-building activities.

Amy Cooper, CEO of Soldier On, is particularly aware of those needs—her father-in-law and partner are respectively former and current Australian Defence Forces personnel. Amy also sits on the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide reference committee, which gives her an even greater insight into the challenges facing current and former veterans and their families.

In Australia, a Royal Commission is a public hearing, independent of government, with broad powers to summon witnesses or seize documents and receive public submissions. The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide was established in 2021 to inquire into systemic issues and risk factors relevant to veteran deaths by suicide, or other lived experience of suicide risk factors, and to provide a systemic analysis of the contributing factors. To date, the Commission has received more than 4,000 submissions.

Unique challenges

“One of the interesting pieces that have come out of the Royal Commission is the fact that around 80 percent of the veterans go on to have really successful civilian lives,” says Amy. “Unfortunately, 20 percent face really significant challenges.”

She says this is significant because an increasing number of service people are transitioning out of the armed forces. “Those numbers have traditionally tracked around the 5,000 mark,” she says. “This year it’s anticipated it will be closer to 7,000 people making that transition, and that number has risen over the last three years.”

“We’re also seeing trends with younger veterans discharging, so from an increased number from 25-year-olds right up to mid-30s, which changes the nature of the support that might be required for transitioning veterans.”

Soldier On is supporting around 11,000 service people, veterans, and their families this year, with programs designed to aid with health and wellbeing, employment support, and education, as well as helping make connections within the community.

Values-driven

“What attracts people to serve their nation is often very values-driven,” says Amy. “It’s about being able to serve and support the community and often they’re looking for roles that have that same altruistic service or are an intrinsic value to them.”

“Cisco Networking Academy is a strong part of our mission, particularly for our veterans and family members to thrive,” she says. “It is really focused on that positive aspect of being able to offer practical support through a range of education opportunities that the partnership provides… the courses have been a great opportunity to get many of our participants into the IT industry.”

“The very nature of the program, being very skills directed, provides good options for participants as they balance serving, or starting to think about that transition time, which is often a very busy time with relocating,” says Amy. “I think that’s a tremendous investment in veterans and their families.”

Helping veterans around the world

Soldier On is not alone in its mission to help veterans transition into new careers. In the UK, TechVets is another Cisco Networking Academy partner that helps more than 20 people per month to start new careers in IT. TechVets was founded to address a fast-growing skills gap with the rise of tech, and a national issue with unemployment and underemployment within the British Military Forces community.

And in the US, Cisco—which has consistently been recognized as a Top 10 Military Friendly Employer—has a range of veteran programs to assist veterans transitions into meaningful IT careers, including Onward to Opportunity, a program run by Syracuse University’s D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) to help service members, veterans, and spouses on their journey to meaningful employment after military service.

IVMF is also a Cisco Networking Academy partner, dedicated to serving military personnel and part of CyberVetsUSA, a fully-sponsored “veterans-first” workforce development initiative, do amazing work helping veterans transition into in-demand tech jobs.

Cisco also runs CX Apprenticeship Programs in the US and India to develop networking skills for non-traditional candidates leading to the opportunity to interview for the highly technical, customer-facing role of a Technical Consulting Engineer in Cisco’s Customer Experience organization. Around a third of the current cohort are veterans.

Cisco Networking Academy success stories

In France, Arnaud found he wasn’t academically-inclined and joined the Army, where he realized that his colleagues’ lives depended on reliable communications. After serving his country, Arnaud knew his future was in IT, and after undertaking Cisco Networking Academy training now works for a French ISP as a Network Engineer.

Vanessa was in the Brazilian Army while doing postgraduate studies in Computer Networks. Unfortunately, that knowledge wasn’t required for her job. After leaving the Army she became interested in cybersecurity, eventually taking the CyberOps Associate course with Cisco Networking Academy and landing a job as a cybersecurity analyst.

Michael joined the fire service to contribute to his community, but was called up twice to serve in Iraq. An injury ultimately ended his firefighting career, leading him to pursue a career in cybersecurity incident response. Through Cisco Networking Academy training, Michael has found a new passion in the field, driven by his commitment to service and continuous learning.

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Cisco Networking Academy

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Shares of Cisco Systems Inc. fell more than 11% in extended trading today as the company warned it will likely miss analysts’ expectations in its fiscal second quarter by a wide margin.

The company expects this to have a knock-on effect, and its forecast for the current fiscal year also came in low.

The disappointing guidance came in the wake of a solid earnings beat. The company reported first quarter earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of $1.11 per share, with revenue up 8% from a year earlier to $14.67 billion. The results were better-than-expected, with analysts looking for earnings of just $1.03 per share on sales of $14.61 billion.

All told, Cisco reported a net income of $3.64 billion for the quarter, up from $2.67 billion a year earlier.

Cisco said its problem is that it has experienced a notable slowdown in new product orders during the quarter. This is because many of its clients are currently busy installing and implementing products that were delivered recently, over the prior three quarters, Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins (pictured) said in a conference call with analysts.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company had been stuck with a backlog of unfulfilled orders caused by component shortages. But its supply chain constraints eased rapidly about a year ago as China exited its lockdown strategy, leading to a glut of product deliveries over the last four quarters. Now, customers have their hands full implementing all of those products.

“Our customers and our sales organizations have been very clear with us over the last 90 days that this is the issue,” Robbins said, though he also admitted that sales cycles are still longer than is usually the case.

According to Robbins, “customers are now taking time to onboard and deploy these heightened product deliveries,” hence the slowdown in new orders. He said it’s mainly larger enterprises, service providers and cloud customers that are facing these challenges, adding that the issue was “most pronounced in October.” On average, Cisco’s biggest customers are waiting to implement one to two quarters’ worth of shipped products, he added.

Cisco had a good quarter, but is now suffering from its post pandemic high, when it was finally able to deliver pandemic orders it could not fulfill due to supply chain challenges. Now that it has fulfilled those orders, the demand has weakened as enterprises are implementing and the channel reducing inventories. The good news is all product lines are growing, which has not been too often the case, and Cisco delivered approximately 1B more in profit on roughly 1B more in revenue, which means Chuck Robbins and team have kept costs constant and EPS per share are up a quarter. Let’s see if this trends continues.

Because of these customer issues, Cisco could only offer a much lower forecast than Wall Street analysts had been anticipating. Officials said they’re looking for earnings of between 82 and 84 cents in the second quarter, with revenue of $12.6 billion to $12.8 billion, implying a 7% decline from one year earlier. That compares very badly with the Street’s forecast of 99 cents pre share in earnings and $14.19 billion in sales.

For the full year, Cisco is reducing its revenue forecast while bumping up its view on earnings. The company now sees full-year earnings of between $3.87 and $3.93 on revenue of $53.8 billion to $55 billion. Previously, it had forecast a range of $3.19 to $3.32 in earnings and $57.0 billion to $58.2 billion in revenue. In any case, the new forecast is not great, as Wall Street is hoping for earnings of $4.05 per share on sales of $57.7 billion.

The after-hours stock decline masks the fact that Cisco delivered strong quarterly results, thanks to it finally being able to deliver pandemic-era orders that could not be fulfilled earlier, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. “But now those orders have been shipped, it is faced with weakening demand as enterprise implement those products and the channel reduces inventories,” he explained.

Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. said Cisco has been caught on one of those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations”, because it did a great job in recovering from the pandemic-related supply chain chaos and has gotten back its manufacturing mojo. However, he said many of its customers have been slower off the mark. “Many are still struggling to deploy and configure the new kit they ordered months ago, so you can’t really blame them for slowing or stopping orders to deal with the backlog,” King said. “But investors appear to be blaming Cisco anyway, for failing to live up to analysts’ consensus. That may be short-sighted, but no one ever said that life, let alone the markets, are fair.”

In the longer term, Cisco’s prospects do look better. During the quarter, it announced that it intends to buy the data analytics and cybersecurity software giant Splunk Inc. in a bumper $28 billion deal, which would be its largest-ever acquisition. The move catapults Cisco, which is best known for its networking gear as well as other data center equipment, to the leading ranks of cybersecurity providers.

Robbins said at the time the deal was announced that the combination of Cisco’s and Splunk’s data would have real value for enterprises, allowing them to “move from threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention.” He said it will enable Cisco to become one of the world’s largest software companies.

Besides its cybersecurity ambitions, Cisco has a lot of hope for artificial intelligence in the longer term. During the conference call, Robbins told analysts that his company believes it can win more than $1 billion worth of orders in fiscal 2025 for AI infrastructure from cloud providers alone. He said cloud providers are looking to move to “more of a standard, broad-based technology like Ethernet, where they can have multiple sources” to support AI networking workloads.

Mueller said it’s also notable that Cisco is running a tight ship in terms of its business expenditures. “Investors can be pleased that all of Cisco’s product lines grew during the previous quarter, which has not been the case too often,” he added. “That allowed Cisco to deliver approximately $1 billion in profit on almost $15 billion in revenue. That shows Cisco has kept its cost base constant, resulting in increased earnings per share. Cisco needs to continue this trend.”

The after-hours stock decline means that Cisco’s shares are now up just 12% in the year-to-date, trailing the wider S&P 500 index, which is up 17% for the year.

Photo: Fortune GLOBAL FORUM/Flickr

NEW YORK —HCLTech, a leading global technology company, announced the launch of Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS), in collaboration with Cisco. Available on a subscription model, this solution modernizes legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

“MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualize, organize and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model,” said Rakshit Ghura, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Digital Workplace Services, HCLTech. “The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

“Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces,” said Alexandra Zagury, Vice President of Partner Managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco. “As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimized attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) published its 2023 Consumer Privacy Survey, an annual global review of consumers’ perceptions and behaviors on data privacy. This year’s survey highlights how younger consumers are taking deliberate action to protect their privacy, as 42% of consumers aged 18-24 exercise their Data Subject Access Rights, compared with just 6% for consumers 75 and older. Many say they have lost trust in organizations because of their use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and 50% of respondents look to the government to set rules and enforce privacy protections. The survey also provides early insights on Generative AI (Gen AI), revealing that only 12% of respondents identify as regular users.

Artificial Intelligence and Privacy Concerns

From shopping to streaming services and to healthcare, 48% of survey respondents agree that AI can be useful in improving their lives. A majority of respondents (54%) said they are willing to share their anonymized personal data to help Boost AI products and decision-making.

Nevertheless, 62% of surveyed consumers expressed concern about how organizations are using their personal data for AI today, with 60% saying that they have already lost trust in organizations because of their AI use. Organizations can implement measures to (re)gain customer trust, such as auditing products and solutions for bias, being more transparent and explaining how the AI works, ensuring human involvement, and instituting an AI Ethics Management Program.

“The world is watching how companies will approach AI in a responsible way,” said Dev Stahlkopf, Cisco Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer. “For Cisco, this means keeping a hurry focus on respecting privacy and human rights as we incorporate AI technology.”

Generative AI: The Privacy Contradiction

The survey also provides an early snapshot of the use of Gen AI and some of the potential risks and privacy challenges. Generative AI is still relatively new to most people. Over half (52%) of survey respondents said they were not aware of it.

Of those that use Gen AI regularly (12%), only half indicated that they were refraining from entering personal or confidential information into Gen AI applications. It is notable that the other 50% may indeed be entering personal or confidential information. This is despite 88% of respondents indicating that they would be “Somewhat” or “Very” concerned if their data entered in Gen AI were to be shared.

Young Consumers Championing Data Privacy

This year, 33% of respondents qualify as “Privacy Actives”: they care about privacy, are willing to act to protect it, and have acted, for example by switching companies or providers because of their data policies or data sharing practices. Younger consumers are the most willing to take action to protect their privacy. Forty-two percent of consumers, aged 18-34, are Privacy Actives, a percentage that steadily decreases with age.

The percentage of consumers requesting data deletions or change rose to 19%, up from 14% last year. Again, this is highly correlated with age: thirty-two percent of consumers aged 18-24 make data deletion or change requests compared to only 4% of older consumers.

Public awareness of privacy laws continues to be relatively low with 46% of respondents aware of their country’s privacy law. Those who are aware of the law are more likely to feel they can adequately protect their data: only 40% of those unaware of their country’s law feel they can protect their data compared to 74% of those who are aware of the law. Sixty-eight percent of consumers aged 18-24 feel they can protect their data, and this gradually declines to 47% of consumers over age 65 saying so.

Role of Laws and Governments

Many consumers look to the government to set the standard of care and enforce privacy protections. Half (50%) of respondents said national or local government should have the primary role in protecting data, whereas 21% said private companies should be primarily responsible for protecting data.

“As governments pass laws and companies seek to build trust, consumers must also take action and use technology responsibly to protect their own privacy,” says Harvey Jang, Cisco Vice President, Deputy General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer.

Consumers are split on the value of data localization. Most have heard about such requirements, and 76% indicated initially that data localization might be good. However, when considering the cost associated with it, thereby making products and services more expensive, only 44% were in favor of data localization.