Some people may still think that Cisco competes with AWS. That is not the case. The reality is that Cisco can help customers with solutions that address challenges like connectivity, security, management and analytics when moving to AWS public cloud.

In this post, I will make an analogy with millennials (Cisco was "born" in 1984) and Generation Z (AWS was founded in 2006). A millennial tends to adapt easy and fast to changes. Gen Z individuals have adopted technology from its first steps which has generated a deep dependency on it. These individuals tend to be impatient since are very used to immediate results. Cisco has adapted from traditional on prem infrastructure to software recurring revenues and cloud solutions. AWS public cloud fulfills the immediacy to get something work in a few minutes. Both companies are definitely good representatives of their generation.

So, what happened in New York?

A few key takeaways I got from theCUBE:

• Almost every enterprise has something going on in the public cloud but most of their workloads are not.
• The operational model of the cloud has created two real personas; the developers building apps and operations who are running the infrastructure.
• The cloud is a big power of innovation; machine learning and AI take advantage of that.
• We live in a world with infinite bandwidth, infinite compute and infinite storage.
• Security is everybody's problem, certainly for developers too. Maybe even starts with the developer

Ok, what's the better together story?

From a connectivity perspective:

• With our solution, CSR1000v and vEdge Cloud you are able to easily extend your on premise networks to AWS public cloud.
• CSR1000v runs Cisco IOS-XE enabling you to deploy the same enterprise-class networking services that you are used to in your on-prem networks inside AWS.
• CSR1000v allows you to access features and performance that cannot be achieved using the native routing functions.
• vEdge Cloud makes your cloud deployments just another part of your SD-WAN overlay network.
• With vEdge Cloud customers can manage their cloud infrastructure through vManage.

From a security perspective:

• AWS gives you a rich set of telemetry from many sources. With Cisco Stealthwatch, we synthetize all that together, run our analytics and point out where you may be exposed from the inside or the outside.
• We use a behavior-modeling approach that detects a threat based on how it acts on the network.
• Using dynamic learning, we can determine the role of an entity based on its behavior and then detect activities inconsistent with that role.
• Our solution consumes all sources of telemetry native to AWS, including Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) flow logs, to monitor all activity in the cloud without the need for software agents.

From an application monitoring perspective:

• With CloudCenter, previously known as CliQr, we provide multi-region governance: Control who, what, where, and how an application and/or service is deployed.
• Secure Automation: AWS Security Groups, dynamically created at deploy-time. End to end automation to account for devops, migrations, and day-2 management.
• Optimization: Turn machines/services off at night/weekends and right-size instances.

These are just a few areas where Cisco and AWS work together on your behalf to better connect your on premise infrastructure to the public cloud, protect the whole surface of attack and help you consume public cloud services in the most intelligent way.

If you want to read more about these solutions or get a free trial visit: CSR1000v and Cisco Stealthwatch.

P.S. Cisco will be present at AWS Summit in Anaheim on August 23^rdand then at AWS Summit in Toronto on September 20^th. See you there!