Given current economic uncertainties, South African organisations are under pressure to mitigate against the risks of unplanned downtime and network outages. These not only significantly disrupt employee productivity and customer service but result in lost revenues for the business.
To help overcome this, Cisco has introduced its predictive network technology to help IT teams avoid these costly disruptions.
For the past two years, Cisco has been working on a predictive analytics engine that has been tuned and tested with customers across a variety of industry segments, incorporating advanced analytics and machine learning techniques, to enable greater precision and ease of use.
Cisco predictive networks work by gathering data from a variety of telemetry sources. Once integrated, it learns the patterns using different models and begins to predict user experience issues, providing problem solving options.
“Being able to rely on self-healing networks that can learn, predict, and plan, will empower local technology leaders with the environments essential for business success in a digitally-driven landscape. Cisco’s research for predictive networks has been tested and developed with customers, and early adopters are seeing major benefits saving them time and money,” says Conrad Steyn, chief technology officer of Cisco South Africa.
According to the Cisco 2022 Global Networking Trends Report, 45% of IT leaders surveyed cited responding to disruptions as the top network challenge. Beyond outages, the experience people get from their network connections has become business critical.
People and businesses use and rely on applications for just about everything, and often an app is the critical first impression for customers. The App Attention Index 2021 survey has found that 57% of people say brands have one shot to impress them and that if their digital service does not perform, they will not use them again.
“If local companies are to deliver on the full promise of what a digital business can deliver, they need to embrace a way to better predict network issues, proactively avoid issues, and ensure the best possible experience,” says Steyn.
Cisco predictive networks will enable technology leaders to avoid issues before they happen, help network operators prevent outages, safeguard networks against attacks, and elevate the user experience, all while helping to increase network performance.
“Cisco is planning to deliver this predictive technology across its portfolio in integrated, easy-to-use software-as-a-service solutions. This will make Cisco predictive networks accessible to companies of all sizes and help South African organisations focus more on growing their business and less on managing network issues,” says Steyn.