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Cisco Adds Assurance Capabilities

Cisco announced assurance innovations across its intent-based networking portfolio that will help IT teams shift from reactive to proactive.

It will address the 43 percent of time IT spends troubleshooting, while making IT operations more proactive, agile and automated.

The software innovations represent significant advancements in mathematical modeling and contextual insights, accelerating Cisco’s strategy to reinvent the network for the digital era.

Cisco is introducing its second wave of intent-based networking innovation, with powerful assurance products spanning the networking portfolio.

- In the data center, the Cisco Network Assurance Engine uses continuous verification of the entire network to help keep business running as intended, even as the network changes dynamically.

- In campus and branch networks, Cisco DNA Center Assurance is delivering a new level of insight and visibility to dramatically reduce the time and money IT spends troubleshooting across wired and wireless environments.

- And, for customers with distributed IT operations, the new Cisco Meraki Wireless Health reduces mean time to remediate wireless issues with rich analytics and insights.

“The network has never been more critical to business success,” said David Goeckeler, EVP, Networking and Security Business at Cisco. “We’re reinventing the network ground up to deliver a secure and intelligent platform for digital business. Today, we are taking another major step toward that ambitious goal with intent-based networking innovations designed to deliver contextual insights and assurance that will help transform IT from reactive to proactive.”

In the data center network, Cisco is enabling always-on assurance through the Cisco Network Assurance Engine. By combining mathematically accurate models of the network with more than 30 years of codified domain knowledge, Cisco provides IT teams the ability to instantly pinpoint why and when the network is not acting as intended, then offer suggestions on how to address the issue. This comprehensive view into their network helps enable IT teams to:

- Predict the Impact of Changes: Make changes to the network faster and with more confidence, catching human configuration errors before they cause problems.

- Continuously Verify Network Behavior: Proactively eliminate network outages and vulnerabilities by continuously analyzing the state of the entire network.

- Assure Security Policy and Compliance: Reduce risk by assuring that security policies are being applied consistently across the network, and ensure policies are compliant with business requirements—every minute of every day.

With ACI and Tetration, Cisco provides the ability to translate application intent and activate those policies across the network. Now, with the Network Assurance Engine, Cisco is delivering the final element of intent-based networking – the assurance of intent.

In the campus and branch, Cisco is enabling "everything as a sensor" and aggregating intelligence from the network, application, client and things to help provide IT with full context. These capabilities will dramatically reduce the 43 percent of time that IT spends troubleshooting and improve the experience for employees and customers.

Cisco DNA Center Assurance provides a 360-degree contextual view that connects all the relationships of who, what, where, when, how. Spanning wired and wireless environments, it delivers a complete picture of what is happening between users and applications with real-time, historical and predictive capabilities. DNA Center Assurance helps IT teams address three major issues:

- Problem Isolation: Get to the root cause in minutes—not days or weeks—by isolating where exactly the issue happened.

- Problem Replication: Go back in time to when an issue occurred. IT can view a complete 360 snapshot of the status of the network, user, device and application at the exact moment the issue arose.

- Problem Resolution: Proactively fix the issue through guided remediation.

With Cisco Meraki Wireless Health, IT also gains visibility and rich analytics to troubleshoot wireless issues faster and deliver a better user experience. Cisco Meraki uses a cloud-managed IT model to automate operations, simplifying the complexity of IT. Now, Meraki Wireless Health allows IT teams to quickly identify wireless anomalies, find poorly performing access point and clients, and provide actionable insights to improve the wireless experience.

The Cisco Network Assurance Engine and Cisco DNA Center Assurance are available now.

Cisco Meraki Wireless Health is expected to be available in early 2018.

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Cisco Adds Assurance Capabilities

Cisco announced assurance innovations across its intent-based networking portfolio that will help IT teams shift from reactive to proactive.

It will address the 43 percent of time IT spends troubleshooting, while making IT operations more proactive, agile and automated.

The software innovations represent significant advancements in mathematical modeling and contextual insights, accelerating Cisco’s strategy to reinvent the network for the digital era.

Cisco is introducing its second wave of intent-based networking innovation, with powerful assurance products spanning the networking portfolio.

- In the data center, the Cisco Network Assurance Engine uses continuous verification of the entire network to help keep business running as intended, even as the network changes dynamically.

- In campus and branch networks, Cisco DNA Center Assurance is delivering a new level of insight and visibility to dramatically reduce the time and money IT spends troubleshooting across wired and wireless environments.

- And, for customers with distributed IT operations, the new Cisco Meraki Wireless Health reduces mean time to remediate wireless issues with rich analytics and insights.

“The network has never been more critical to business success,” said David Goeckeler, EVP, Networking and Security Business at Cisco. “We’re reinventing the network ground up to deliver a secure and intelligent platform for digital business. Today, we are taking another major step toward that ambitious goal with intent-based networking innovations designed to deliver contextual insights and assurance that will help transform IT from reactive to proactive.”

In the data center network, Cisco is enabling always-on assurance through the Cisco Network Assurance Engine. By combining mathematically accurate models of the network with more than 30 years of codified domain knowledge, Cisco provides IT teams the ability to instantly pinpoint why and when the network is not acting as intended, then offer suggestions on how to address the issue. This comprehensive view into their network helps enable IT teams to:

- Predict the Impact of Changes: Make changes to the network faster and with more confidence, catching human configuration errors before they cause problems.

- Continuously Verify Network Behavior: Proactively eliminate network outages and vulnerabilities by continuously analyzing the state of the entire network.

- Assure Security Policy and Compliance: Reduce risk by assuring that security policies are being applied consistently across the network, and ensure policies are compliant with business requirements—every minute of every day.

With ACI and Tetration, Cisco provides the ability to translate application intent and activate those policies across the network. Now, with the Network Assurance Engine, Cisco is delivering the final element of intent-based networking – the assurance of intent.

In the campus and branch, Cisco is enabling "everything as a sensor" and aggregating intelligence from the network, application, client and things to help provide IT with full context. These capabilities will dramatically reduce the 43 percent of time that IT spends troubleshooting and improve the experience for employees and customers.

Cisco DNA Center Assurance provides a 360-degree contextual view that connects all the relationships of who, what, where, when, how. Spanning wired and wireless environments, it delivers a complete picture of what is happening between users and applications with real-time, historical and predictive capabilities. DNA Center Assurance helps IT teams address three major issues:

- Problem Isolation: Get to the root cause in minutes—not days or weeks—by isolating where exactly the issue happened.

- Problem Replication: Go back in time to when an issue occurred. IT can view a complete 360 snapshot of the status of the network, user, device and application at the exact moment the issue arose.

- Problem Resolution: Proactively fix the issue through guided remediation.

With Cisco Meraki Wireless Health, IT also gains visibility and rich analytics to troubleshoot wireless issues faster and deliver a better user experience. Cisco Meraki uses a cloud-managed IT model to automate operations, simplifying the complexity of IT. Now, Meraki Wireless Health allows IT teams to quickly identify wireless anomalies, find poorly performing access point and clients, and provide actionable insights to improve the wireless experience.

The Cisco Network Assurance Engine and Cisco DNA Center Assurance are available now.

Cisco Meraki Wireless Health is expected to be available in early 2018.

The Latest

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...