Cisco Any Device: Planning a Productive, Secure, and Competitive Future



What You Will Learn

As the traditional corporate network perimeter continues to dissolve and the enterprise becomes more of a borderless environment, smartphones, tablets, other endpoint devices, and web applications are irreversibly changing the way people work and play online. Cisco has embraced the “Any Device” vision, which allows for greater employee choice in devices while maintaining a common, predictable user experience that maintains or enhances global organizational competitiveness, productivity, and security.

Enterprises and large organizations must decide whether to allow or deny certain users, devices, and locations access to company networks, data, and services. Based on real Cisco experiences and results, this white paper discusses the steps and business decisions that information and security officers, enterprise information technology, and information security architects should consider as they begin the journey to Any Device.

Introduction

Every day, 80,000 workers at a global enterprise turn on a range of Windows devices, 17,000 log on to Macintosh computers, 7,000 use Linux machines, and 35,000 check their calendars and email on their Blackberries, iPhones, and Androids1. The company is Cisco Systems, Inc. Our 70,000+ employees and 30,000+ global contractors, consultants, and business partners decidedly want more choice in the devices they use to work—and where they use those devices to access corporate networks, systems, applications, data, and online services. Although a vast majority of Cisco workers use both a computer and a smartphone to access company IT services, more than 20 percent use more than two devices—and the diversity of those devices is growing exponentially.

As mentioned previously, Cisco has embarked on a long-term vision called Any Device. The goal is to allow greater choice in devices while maintaining a common, predictable user experience that maintains or enhances global organizational competitiveness and security.

The primary business reasons behind the Any Device vision include:

• Productivity: Cisco enables tech-savvy employees to use their smartphones, tablets, or laptops of choice to do company work, when and where they want, improving job satisfaction and productivity. The estimated increase in job-related productivity is 30 minutes per day.2

• Evolving workforce: Members of today’s new technology-savvy generation who are entering the workforce are used to having control of their work tools and environment, and they want to choose how they can be most productive.

• Innovation: Allowing workers to use new, next-generation devices as soon as they are released may result in further productivity gains. These early adopters often signal larger marketplace shifts, which can positively influence Cisco IT adoption and Cisco product strategy.

1. Cisco internal metrics, as of Q2CY11

2. Cisco internal metrics, as of April 2011

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2 © 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

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• Acquisition integration: Cisco’s many corporate acquisitions join the fold with their own pools of

nonstandard devices. Any Device helps to integrate new divisions quickly and minimize associated

security risks. The estimated cut in acquisition integration time is 17 weeks.

• Capital costs: Cisco employs tens of thousands of contractors and consultants in locations around

the world. It is financially unsustainable to provide laptops and smartphones that Cisco owns to this

expanding workforce. By migrating contractors and consultants to Cisco® Virtualization Experience

Client (VXC) devices, Cisco realizes an estimated 25-percent annual savings per user, based upon

our existing desktop total cost of ownership.

Other organizations have their own distinct reasons, such as data security, increased mobility, and

collaborative work environments, for the necessity of shared access to real-time data. As the choice and

number of endpoint devices increase, enterprises must consider what assets they will—or will not—allow to

access their applications and data, both within their network and outside it. Then, they need to determine

how to plan, track, account for, and enforce those policies.

This paper discusses the risks, rewards, and changes to business, IT, and security policies, the solutions

Cisco is currently implementing, and other considerations that Cisco has encountered thus far along its Any

Device journey.

 


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