Mobility and new devices accelerated the Cisco Any Device strategy, and a third factor quickly emerged: How to integrate acquisitions and manage offshore and offsite outsource relationships.
During the past several years, Cisco has
acquired numerous companies, whose integration caused challenges for Cisco IT
and security organizations. Every acquired company had its own devices and
security policies and standards, which were often quite different from those
used at Cisco. The Cisco Information Security team was responsible for ensuring
that endpoint devices met Cisco policy and standards. There were only two
feasible solutions, each with its own set of challenges. The first was to
replace acquisition devices with Cisco IT-provisioned and -supported devices,
and train workers on their use. This process would result in a costly and
lengthy transition that affected productivity for weeks or months. The second
option was to keep existing devices in place, but risk lowering the security
posture of the entire enterprise. Another solution had to be found.
Corporate policies were also strained by the
shift to outsourcing. Fifteen years ago, outsourcing was limited to simple
tasks. Today, it occurs in most parts of the organization and can touch many
business processes. The current Cisco contingent workforce is greater than
45,000, with 17,000 performing daily activities from 350 third-party locations.
Cisco also maintains outsourced partner relationships with more than 200
different third-party companies.
To date, most of the on- and
offsite contingent workforce has been provisioned with Cisco IT-supported
devices that comply with Cisco policy. For offshore and offsite outsourcing,
Cisco IT maintains an extranet infrastructure that supports all third-party
network connections. Cisco IT manages 70 percent of all extranet connections
end to end, including devices, WAN connectivity, and the remote network at the third-party
location. However, because Cisco outsourcing has increased in volume and
complexity, this model no longer meets the time-to-capability and TCO business
expectations.
Desktop
virtualization, together with the network security capabilities described
earlier in this paper, will help overcome these challenges while providing
significant benefits (refer to the sidebar “Benefits and Challenges of Desktop
Virtualization”). Cisco projects that desktop virtualization will result in a
potentially greater than 20-percent cost savings and a 40- to 60-percent
increase in time-to-capability for acquisitions and offshore and offsite
outsourcing locations. This centralized, fully scalable, location-independent
service will also improve data security and device compliancy. Cisco already
has begun a desktop virtualization pilot with 2,000 users in the United States,
and other global locations will follow later in 2011.
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