Ahead of Cisco Live!, and after Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said the company would postpone the event due to racial tensions in the U.S., I sat down with Cisco Distinguished Engineer, Keith Griffin. He told me 2020's Live! would be different from those of the previous three decades of the company's annual developer conference. Due to the novel coronavirus, Cisco Live! was to be held online, a trend that could stick around well after the virus. We spoke about the video conferencing industry, and Griffin maintains businesses have never faced upkeeping continuity during such uncertain periods. And that reflects in the Cisco Webex platform now supporting three times the volume of traffic it normally experiences, I'm told.
That amounted to 25 billion meeting minutes in April.
Now that Cisco Live! has officially kicked off, we can spill the beans. Here's what Cisco announced at its annual developer conference, the company's first digital iteration. Direct to the devices of developers, collaboration, UC, and video conferencing industry experts, Robbins said the company made updates to its security and compliance capabilities, along with adding intelligent and actionable insights functionalities via a partnership with cloud-based content management platform Box.
Chuck Robbins
This will sit alongside the built-in file sharing capability Webex already has and give customers greater choice and flexibility, I'm told by a spokesperson. During the COVID pandemic, many companies in the video conferencing and programmable API/CPaaS arena saw an uptick in usage in areas such as healthcare, and Cisco is a beneficiary, too. Robbins said the company now integrates with Epic's medical software, which houses 250,000,000 patient records.
The partnership is poised to give patients more choices regarding how they interact with healthcare providers. He added that Cisco is extending its data loss prevention, legal hold, and eDiscovery to Webex Meetings. This provides additional protection for sensitive meeting content like recordings, transcripts, and meeting actions, Robbins continued. Making note of the status quo, Robbins highlighted that this is what he called particularly important at a time when more sensitive business activity takes place remotely.
This extension of the above features could give Cisco customers an unprecedented level of security for meetings. Making a move similar to that of Zoom, Cisco expanded its end-to-end encryption options to include AES 256-bit encryption with GCM to extend more protection for meeting data and against meeting intrusion.
Robbins also announced that Cisco had boosted the Cisco Webex Control Hub. Via the platform, IT teams can manage collaboration workloads, leverage analytics, and management tools for remote workers as well as a returning office-based workforce.
