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Is Cisco Borderless Networking at last set to deliver the truly seamless enterprise? Are we finally realising IT’s long-envisaged dream of networking sans frontiers?

Today’s IT organisations are being are being pulled in opposite directions by two equally demanding business imperatives. On one hand there are all the commercial realities and expectations: with IT expected to manage larger and more complex projects with the same, or even less, resources and headcount. On the other, heightened by consumerisation, are user expectations: rapidly introducing a whole new risk landscape that IT must manage and balance.

The problem is that businesses have little option than to try and make the best of both these very different worlds. The needs and expectations of the enterprise must, of course, take overriding precedence. But IT consumerisation carries with it new tools and opportunities to boost productivity and efficiency that – harnessed properly – are simply far too powerful and compelling to ignore.

This, says Vijay Mistry, UK Business Development Manager at Cisco, presents the average firm with a familiar and perennial problem. The need for a networking infrastructure that is open, but secure; stable but flexible; right-sized but instantly scalable. In other words, he says, a network optimised to meet the everchanging demands of both enterprise and user.

“As people embrace new technologies as part of their daily lives, a new generation of customers and employees is emerging; one that’s tech savvy, socially connected, and that brings highly mobile, portable multimedia devices into the business. Such people expect the network to be able to deliver the bandwidth hungry applications like video via which they interact with their employees, customers, and partners.

“As such, IT is now being forced to deal not only with new devices and usage models, but also with changing business practices that place huge new demands on the core infrastructure.”

The answer, says Vijay, is Cisco Borderless Networking – latest generation networking architecture that helps IT balance the demanding business challenges and changing business models promoted by the influx of consumer devices into the business world. It’s a new way of thinking about networking that helps the IT function evolve its infrastructure to deliver seamless, secure access in a world characterised by all manner of new and shifting borders.

Indeed, the borderless network is the backbone of the borderless enterprise: a globally connected ecosystem that spans time zones and firewalls to establish a common, collaborative commercial platform from which to tackle new markets and geographies; a network that enhances the potential of your ecosystem to optimise profitability and time to market.

But what’s so wrong with traditional network thinking? If it’s not broken why fix it? These days primary business resources like datacentres, applications, employees, and even customers, often fall outside the traditional business perimeter, thereby stretching the borders of the business and placing a greater burden on IT resources. This, explains Vijay, makes it tougher than ever for IT to scale its offerings – a whole new networking philosophy is required.

“IT simply can’t scale when every project starts falling outside traditional IT design and management practices: especially when users may be using virtually any device to access almost any application, from virtually anywhere in the world.”

This is where Cisco’s Borderless Network Architecture comes into its own, he says. Empowering IT to efficiently manage access from multiple locations and devices, and applications located anywhere, it promotes a culture of partnership and collaboration, helps the business to share capabilities and resources and maximise global talent, and to drive an end-to-end governance model.

But it’s actually as much about changing your attitude as changing the network, he says. “For instance, research firm In-Stat estimates that by 2012 more than 1.3 billion Wi-Fi devices will have reached the market; a dramatic shift toward ubiquitous wired and/or wireless access. However, many organisations still treat wired and wireless networks as separate entities.

Cisco’s Borderless Network Architecture provides the framework to unify wired and wireless access, including security, access control, and performance management across many different device types.

“Another shift is in how and where users access information. In the past, data and applications were housed on premise and so, generally, were users. Today, many firms have talent pools all around the world who may be tapping into applications perhaps hosted off-site or even in the cloud.”

“Traditional IT still treats these crucial resources as internal entities, but with Cisco’s Borderless Network
Architecture it’s different. The approach is unified to securely deliver applications in these kinds of highly distributed environment, the crucial element being a policy-based architecture that allows IT to deploy centralised access controls with enforcement across the network, from server, to infrastructure, to client.”

This new technical architecture is based on three key principles, explains Vijay: decoupling the hardware from the software, unifying computing, storage, and networking, and having end-to-end unified system policies.

Then – extrapolated through innovations across its routing, switching, wireless, security, application optimisation, and network management solution families – Cisco advocates a five-phase plan to deliver seamless, secure, reliable connectivity between literally any device, location, or resource.

“The first phase establishes critical borderless network services as a foundation for advanced collaboration and rich-media applications. These might include medianet and Cisco EnergyWise, connection management, and resilience and control services.”

“The second phase focuses on borderless user services, including mobility services, security services,
and application performance services. Such services simplify and create a seamless user experience while simultaneously enhancing IT’s underlying control over the device infrastructure.”

“The third phase implements borderless policy, enabling IT to implement a unified plan to govern how users access the network from different devices and locations. The fourth provides a borderless integration framework to extend network services to third-party devices and systems through open APIs and partnerships.”

“The fifth and final phase delivers the borderless ‘experience’. The key here is the combining of user and network services, policy, and integration in order to realise the anytime, anywhere experience that is the truly borderless network.”

Addressing a huge spectrum of business and IT challenges and enabling companies to embrace new
business models and processes with confidence, the benefits of Cisco Borderless Networking, are manifold says Vijay.

Among these are transparent mobility with location services for anytime, anywhere communications.
Security for both local and distributed devices. Sustainability and reduced energy costs. Optimised
application performance for video and Web 2.0 services. Policy-based access control and identityaware
networking to enable access and collaboration while protecting business-critical applications. And
compliance with current and future government and industry regulatory requirements.

“Adopt a Cisco Borderless Networking Architecture and you also get the peace of mind of working with Cisco of course”, smiles Vijay. “It remains a business that delivers solutions tailored perfectly to the needs of just about every major industry there is; de facto, industry standard solutions tested to destruction.”

Add the strength of Cisco’s technology partnerships into the equation and the offering becomes even
more compelling, he says. “Together, Cisco and its partners really do deliver the lot: planning, design, and implementation services plus award-winning technical and optimisation expertise – all ensuring the network ticks all the right boxes for today and tomorrow.”

“In short, working with Cisco means removing the limitations from your network, the compromise from your security, and the shackles from your business.”

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