Cisco Celebrate 30 Years of Business
Cisco are currently celebrating 30 years of business. Over the years they have evolved from their beginnings as a 2 person startup delivering routing devices from a garage to a multi-billion corporation employing 75,000 people worldwide, and covering almost all aspects of IT. Here at Atomos, we use Cisco products on a daily basis. Lets take a look at some of their offerings.
Routers
Routers are Cisco Technologie’s forte and what their business were built on. They started with their first remote upgradable router in 1992 with the Cisco 3000 series router. They have continually evolved this product line and have expanded into the ASR (Aggregation Services Router) series routers. Initially a routers only job was to “route” traffic between separate subnets. Now Cisco routers can perform various functions from voice services and can now even run Ciscos UCS-E (Unified Computing System) series modular servers on their latest ISR (Integrated Services Router) platform. Here at Atomos we use the Cisco ASR 1002 series routers in our Data Centres to provide enhanced throughput and MPLS services to customers.
Switches
Cisco entered the switching arena following their purchase of Crescendo Communications Inc. in 1993 and shortly afterwards began the rollout of their Catalyst series product line. These switches come in a variety of flavours available from their 2900 series for SMBs all the way up-to enterprise and data centre. Cisco have continued to develop the Catalyst switches with the latest 6800 series providing slot capacity up-to 880 Gig and expanded their portfolio with their Nexus product line. We use the 4500 series catalyst switches in our Data Centres to provide services to our customers. In our office we’re running on the Cisco 3750-X series switches coupled with Cisco Meraki AP’s.
Telephony
Telephony took off for Cisco following their acquisition of Selsius Systems in 1998 and their Call Manager product. For the techies out there if you’ve ever wondered why the device name for a configured phone starts SEP it stands for Selsius ethernet phone. Initially running on a Windows platform this catapulted Cisco into the forefront of VoIP where it has continued to remain. We use Cisco telephony in-house employing a Combination of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM), Unity Connection, and Presence server for our main telephony setup. CUCM is paired with our Cisco 2900 series router that has SIP trunks direct to our telephony provider and provides the main point of calling. Unity Connection provides our voicemail handling and out of hours IVR (Interactive Voice Response). We use presence server so that we can view and communicate with one another regardless of location using the soft phone offering. It also integrates quite nicely with outlook for dialing direct from the address book.
We’ve only scratched the surface of what Cisco Technologies solutions can bring to the table and we are looking forward to continuing to work with them for the next 30 years.
Intrusion Prevention
We offer a range of industry-leading intrusion prevention systems (IPS). We can deliver this as standalone or as a part of your next generation firewall solution and it can be unmanaged or as a fully managed service. The latter really comes down to your budget, but our focus is to assist in protecting your company at all times.
Web Applications
Our partner, Incapsula, provide a PCI-certified Web Application Firewall (WAF) product that ensures your website or application is protected from attacks. This solution is cost-effective and can be set up in no time at all. If you’d like more information or a free trial, simply get in touch using our contact form
VPN
Flexible working is now very much more the norm and your personnel need seamless and offsite secure access to your network. This area of network security is a priority for many businesses. It's not just about protecting productivity. A secure VPN solution can also be used in an emergency or an unexpected crisis. We offer a range of secure VPN options - for flexible working - or to keep your business operating under unexpectedly trying conditions.
Firewalls
We treat the business of network security very seriously indeed. We're experts in this field and along with security vendors like Check Point, we view security as a business process which requires significant consideration and investment (if the scope so requires). We can provide you with world-class firewall products, all of which are next generation. Since we’re not a ‘one size fits all’ IT consultancy, we ensure that the firewall product we recommend meets the exact network security needs of your business.