Cisco Predictive Networks To Recognise Future Network Outages, Issues

Cisco Systems is claiming that its new tech can help businesses and organisations improve the uptime of their corporate networks.

Cisco announced ‘groundbreaking technology’ that following customer trials, it has showed that IT teams can predict and avoid corporate network issues with ‘high accuracy.’

This is another interesting piece of tech from Cisco, after it unveiled in March upgrades to its hybrid work solutions in its Webex platform, as collaboration becomes a vital component in workplaces following the Coronavirus pandemic.

Cisco Predictive Networks

Cisco said that it has been building and testing predictive software engines over the past two years; and “early customer trials show Cisco’s technology can predict issues with high accuracy, helping IT teams to drastically improve connected experiences.”

Indeed, Cisco tested the technology with about 15 customers, including Phillips 66 and Schneider Electric.

The networking giant said that to date, it has been difficult to build networks that can predict problems before they happen, but a step forward has been taken with ‘Cisco Predictive Networks.’

Cisco said it brought together “new predictive technologies with its broad portfolio of observability, visibility and intelligence technologies to improve reliability and performance across all operational scenarios.”

The networking firm said that over the past two years, it has been working on a predictive analytics engine, which it has tuned and tested with customers across a variety of industry segments. The solution incorporates “advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to enable greater precision and ease of use.”

The way the Cisco predictive networks works is by gathering data from a number of telemetry sources. Once this data is integrated, the solution learns the patterns using a variety of models and begins to predict user experience issues, providing problem solving options.

Customers can apparently decide how far and wide they want to connect the engine throughout the network, giving them flexible options to expand as they need.

Self-healing networks

“The future of connectivity will rely on self-healing networks that can learn, predict and plan,” said Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO of Cisco.

“Our research for predictive networks has been tested and developed with customers, and early adopters are seeing major benefits saving them time and money.”

This, Cisco hopes, will help overburdened IT departments that are already struggling with managing cybersecurity threats, hybrid work, hybrid cloud etc.

At the same time IT departments are expected to deliver the best networked experiences for employees and customers.

And this means that 24/7 uptime is vital.