Stages of the Cisco Any Device Journey

Stages of the Cisco Any Device Journey

Stage 1: Internal Access

The past 15 years have brought a significant change in the way users access the Cisco network. As the last millennium came to a close, all IT devices resided within corporate locations and employees had to be physically in an office for internal access to IT resources, as shown in stage 1 of Figure 1.

Stage 2: Anywhere

Over time, laptops and VPNs gave workers mobility, and an increasingly globalized workforce made more flexible work patterns necessary. Stage 2 depicts how work environments and regular office hours no longer restricted productivity, as a more mobile workforce accessed corporate IT resources from anywhere, such as a customer site, home, café, or hotel. This dissolution of location borders enables users to access resources from anywhere with IT-managed assets

Stage 3: Any Device, Anywhere

In recent years, the commoditization of smartphones, tablets, and laptops—in addition to outstanding new features, upgrades to functions, more efficient form factors, and shortened device lifecycles—has resulted in employees wanting to use their own devices to do everything from accessing the company email and intranet to using corporate business applications. These factors all came into play in a relatively short timeframe that challenged corporate IT support. Employees who joined Cisco through an acquisition already had been using and wanted to continue to use their own devices for work. Thousands of Cisco extranet partners also required access to certain applications, and providing Cisco IT-managed endpoints was a solution with high capital and operating costs.

Cisco IT recognized the need to embrace the instantaneous use of these next-generation technologies to enable productivity, rather than using the typically historic approach of limiting and managing the deployment of new technologies as they enter the workplace. Further, this rapid adoption of new client technologies has led to the advent and implementation of other enterprise approaches, tools, and technologies that have created communities of users and allowed a transformational change in how IT provides support and end users are able to use the knowledge of peers to solve common problems.

Cisco IT’s role within these communities is not to own, but to be part of and contribute as another peer. For example, the introduction of Apple products within Cisco was led initially by users who brought these devices into the environment as their preferred tools and platforms on which to conduct business. An estimated 3,000 Mac users were within Cisco before IT officially made these tools available to the greater population. Independent of IT, Mac users initiated a new effort to provide the required setup, use, and maintenance assistance through email aliases, wikis, intranet, and video content. When Cisco IT began offering the Mac as an option as part of its PC-Refresh policy, IT adopted and supported the self-support model without disrupting or changing the Mac community. IT has embraced this foundation and used it to develop more self-supporting services.

Together, these factors signaled the need for a new corporate device strategy that answered the fundamental yet imperative question: As device borders dissolve, how can we enable people to access corporate resources from any device, and from anywhere?

Not every worker requires the same level or type of access into the corporate infrastructure. Some need only mail and calendaring services on their smartphones, whereas others may require greater levels of access. For example, Cisco sales professionals can access ordering tools from their smartphones, increasing their ability to close a sale. Cisco extranet partners can use their own workstations to access a virtual desktop environment, allowing Cisco to maintain greater control over our corporate assets.

Stage 4: Any Service, Any Device, Anywhere

Cisco currently allows users to access corporate resources housed on-premises. In the future, the consumerization of services—applications, storage space, and computing power—will offer greater flexibility and cost advantages compared to in-house IT services. Some devices and scenarios already require access to external cloud services for corporate transactions (refer to Figure 2). Although this emerging application and service borderless trend is beyond the scope of this paper, the Cisco Any Device strategy is a sound foundation upon which future Any Service, Any Device, Anywhere architectures and eventually the Virtual Enterprise can be built.

Stage 5: Virtual Enterprise

The Virtual Enterprise is a logical evolution from stage 4, where an enterprise becomes increasingly location- and service-independent, the enterprise has a mature identity model that allows for granular access control and external collaboration, and the full extent of security controls and capabilities is being applied to the enterprise data. The Virtual Enterprise will be addressed as we progress further toward this future state.