シスコは次に誰を買うのですか？ゼロトラストセキュリティ、アプリを考える

シスコの最高戦略責任者であるアヌジカプールの言葉では、「2020年の初めに向かって最も頻繁に使用される言葉」であるにもかかわらず、デジタル変換の必要性は約100日前に大変なものになりました。Despite being “the most overused word heading into the early part of 2020,” in the words of Cisco’s Chief Strategy Officer Anuj Kapur, the need for digital transformation became painstakingly real about 100 days ago. During a Cisco Live panel this week about the vendor’s vision for the enterprise, Kapur said digital transformation became a necessity right around the time that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, corporations around the world closed up shop, and sent their employees home to work remotely. He also hinted at future merger and acquisition targets to satisfy Cisco’s seemingly endless appetite for smaller technology companies. “What this crisis has demonstrated is that, to the extent that you were further along the transformation journey, you had digitized processes — employee facing, partner facing, and customer facing — you were just more prepared to deal with the reality that you faced heading into this crisis and more agile in your response,” he said. Case in point: Disney Plus. Before November 2019, Disney’s business model required customer interactions in physical settings including theme parks, cruise ships, and movie theaters. The new streaming service, however, “gave them an avenue to be able to have revenue protection that they wouldn’t have otherwise had,” Kapur said. “With Disney Plus, they were able to have a transactional relationship with their end customer to the tune of 50 million subscribers signing up,” he continued. “That is the emblematic example of an industry that has embraced digital philosophies with regards to creating a direct channel to its customer that was able to survive and thrive during this pandemic. It serves as a lesson for a lot of industries that were perhaps hesitating in their approach over the last few years.” Three months into the pandemic as enterprises struggle to recover from the economic upheaval it caused and accelerate their own digital transformation efforts, Cisco wants to work with its customers on two major initiatives: zero-trust security and application performance, Kapur said. “Cisco has always been about secure connectivity and secure collaboration. And zero trust was something we believed in as a company,” he said, noting its Duo Technology acquisition. Zero-trust security assigns rules and policies to workloads, virtual machines (VMs), or network connections, and then only allows necessary actions and connections in a workload or application while anything else gets blocked. It provides high levels of assurance that only the correct users and devices are accessing what they need without requiring physical access. And while this approach to security has been around for over a decade, it’s received a lot of attention lately because of the pandemic and related spike in remote workers. Even post-pandemic, execs including Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins say the future of work will be hybrid with a more distributed workforce. This requires that companies extend their security controls beyond the campus, corporate data center, and company-issued devices and into employees’ homes where they are likely working on an unmanaged network, accessing the software-as-a-service applications on a public cloud. “Customers need a security model to bridge both of those realities and create commonality, efficiency, predictability, control, and governance,” Kapur said. “We are going to see an acceleration of a [zero trust] trend. The demand curve told us [zero trust] was really a 2023 event, which we increasingly believe will be a 2021 event.” While zero-trust security remains “the single biggest factor” for Cisco customers, there’s a second thing that’s top of mind among C-suite executives, Kapur said. “The other one is around application centricity,” he said. “The application is the atomic unit of transformation. It’s the barometer by which [customers] view their transformation efforts.” Cloud-native companies and those that had already pushed their applications — internal, partner- and customer-facing — to the public cloud had a more seamless transition to fully remote work, he said. Their employees’ productivity remained the same as it had when they were working in an office (or in some cases improved), and their customers had an easier time accessing goods and services, which translates to steadier product revenue. “Fundamentally, companies are starting to recognize that their primary interface with their employees, partners, and customers over the next few years will be their applications,” Kapur said. “Applications will drive 100% of their revenue. And this notion of application resiliency, application performance, and application visibility will be central.” This emphasis on applications played into Cisco’s $1 billion ThousandEyes acquisition as well. ThousandEyes provides multi-cloud network monitoring services. When Cisco announced the deal last month, Cisco SVP Todd Nightingale said that it ties the company’s networking portfolio and its AppDynamics portfolio together. During Cisco Live, Kapur said the ThousandEyes acquisition “is effectively all about recognizing that for a lot of customers, in this pandemic, and beyond, the internet is our network. And the cloud is our data center. And inevitably — if your currency from a reputational perspective is measured by the experience your application provides — you need to be able to monitor that experience for every user, every experience, every second, every day. And you need to be able to instrument that environment for faults when faults do happen or experience does go down.” These two priorities, zero trust and application performance, will likely carry over into Cisco’s future mergers and acquisitions, Kapur added. “M&A is a byproduct of the strategy we have … it will be along the lines of application centricity, moving to zero trust and secure architecture, helping customers transform the infrastructure they have, and make jobs a lot more automated, and ensuring that collaboration is that seamless across boundaries as it is in person.” In addition to providing Cisco with future acquisition opportunities, these strategies remain relevant to enterprise customers wading into the post-pandemic new normal. And as they do that, it’s important to remember business resiliency lessons learned over the past few months — and prepare for another pandemic to disrupt business in the future. “It’s gonna happen again,” Kapur said. “And we just need to be prepared for it.” And as to his biggest lesson learned in the time of COVID-19? “I probably have more trousers than I need.”