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Leah Kintai heard there have been birthing caves utilized by forest elephants in her group’s territory round Mount Elgon in Kenya however had by no means seen them herself.  Leah is a member of the Ogiek group, a bunch Indigenous to the Chepkitale area of Mount Elgon who’ve lived in concord with the forest for generations. Nonetheless, their lifestyle and land rights have been repeatedly impacted by efforts to create nationwide reserves and timber farms – plans that may hurt the native atmosphere.

In response, the Ogiek group developed a land administration system to doc their ancestral connection to the land and ecosystems they defend. Recognizing the significance of know-how on this effort, they started utilizing CoMapeo, a panorama mapping instrument developed by Awana Digital. Since 2021, Leah and different group members have been mapping key ecological websites, such because the salt caves shared by goat herds and forest elephants, and recording environmental destruction attributable to logging.

Ladies particularly play a significant function on this work. “We’re wealthy in information which is essential to the group,” Leah explains. “We all know the place to collect firewood and greens and discover particular soil for adorning our paintings. We ladies additionally know extra concerning the historical past and conventional rituals that occur in caves.” It was by this mapping use that Leah lastly witnessed elephant moms and calves within the caves, deepening her appreciation of the significance of preserving the land by CoMapeo.

Why Consumer-Centric Mapping Instruments Matter

Indigenous communities just like the Ogiek steward 80% of the world’s biodiversity. But, they usually lack the infrastructure, assets and instruments to sustainably handle their landscapes. Most present mapping applied sciences are inaccessible — depending on web connectivity, obtainable solely in English, and managed by centralized databases that exclude native possession. Getting applicable assist to make knowledgeable selections for panorama administration is crucial on the group stage in addition to on the world stage.

The Cisco Basis has supported two community-led instruments that allow native leaders to conduct panorama mapping: Awana Digital’s CoMapeo, and Tech Issues’ Terraso, developed by community-led design processes, with the goal of supporting efficient decision-making by native leaders.

Awana Digital: Constructing Decentralized Know-how

Awana Digital works with frontline communities to make use of know-how to guard their atmosphere and human rights. They companion to co-design and co-develop instruments they’ll use to guard crucial ecosystems and Indigenous cultures, working towards a world the place all folks can take part within the selections that govern their lives.

The Cisco Basis funded Awana Digital in 2023 to construct the CoMapeo instrument, designed in collaboration with Indigenous communities, just like the Ogiek, to make it simpler to securely map their territories and construct a database with out ever needing web connectivity.

In 2024, Cisco prolonged the funding, and launched Awana Digital to the Equinix Basis who additionally prolonged funding. Then this yr, Cisco and the Equinix Basis got here collectively funding the enhancement and progress of CoMapeo in new methods. This peer-to-peer database permits native knowledge possession and offline workflows in order that customers can seamlessly collect knowledge in distant places. Whereas most knowledge assortment apps are form-centric, CoMapeo makes use of a map-centric strategy to make knowledge assortment intuitive and straightforward to study for non-technical customers.

The Ogiek group now makes use of CoMapeo to maintain their land use maps updated; since 2021, the group mapping workforce have mapped and actively monitored 80,000 hectares of their territory, benefitting the 4,000 members of the Ogiek group.

However the Ogiek’s imaginative and prescient goes past mapping. They’re dedicated to displaying how their stewardship results in higher conservation and biodiversity outcomes. With assist from Oxford College, Forest Peoples Programme, and Awana Digital, the Ogiek are implementing a biodiversity monitoring undertaking to collect proof of their efficient community-based conservation. This knowledge might assist them reclaim rights to extra of their ancestral land and enhance stewardship practices.

One thrilling new characteristic of CoMapeo is its audio recording perform, which permits the Ogiek to seize birdsongs within the forest. Elders can then determine these species, enriching the information with native ecological information and protecting observe of biodiversity in these lands.

CoMapeo can be utilized freed from cost and is designed to be user-friendly and adaptable, making it simple for anybody to get began with mapping and monitoring their land or environmental initiatives.

Tech Issues: Tech Options That Serve Humanity

The Cisco Basis additionally helps Terraso, an open-source mapping and storytelling instrument developed by Tech Issues to assist communities acquire, retailer, and share panorama knowledge. Designed with native companions, Terraso is accessible and cost-free – making it particularly useful to nonprofits and grassroots organizations that may’t afford costly, business alternate options.

In India, Paani Earth confronted a major problem: Bangalore’s rivers had been quickly deteriorating, but the final inhabitants lacked consciousness of the town’s hydrological programs. The issue was compounded by the absence of a dependable, built-in river knowledge system which might compromise decision-making and result in mismanagement of water assets.

To handle this, Paani Earth used Terraso to create an accessible, interactive map of the area’s river programs, compiling knowledge from authorities businesses, impartial research and satellite tv for pc sources. With the platform’s Story Maps characteristic, they created an interactive, visible narrative combining knowledge, photographs and movies. Cofounder Madhuri Mandava explains the transformation: “Our previous web site – folks known as it very tutorial. Folks stated, ‘I don’t see why I ought to care.’”

That modified with Terraso.

The Story of Forgotten Rivers was featured in an area museum exhibit. Its closing chapter included a name to motion – inviting folks to hitch a WhatsApp group devoted to river walks and native cleanup occasions.

“That group now has dozens of members,” says Madhuri. “We stroll to a close-by river to start out rebuilding that connection. We make artwork and poetry, and focus on how we will take motion to guard this house.”

Paani Earth plans to broaden its use of Story Maps in future initiatives. With continued assist from Cisco and others, Tech Issues is actively enhancing the platform, primarily based on actual consumer suggestions like Madhuri’s.

Terraso stays free and open-source, and organizations in all places are inspired to make use of it to inform their place-based tales, advocate for change, and have interaction their communities.

The efforts of communities just like the Ogiek present that when native leaders are geared up with the appropriate instruments, they’ll defend biodiversity and reshape the way forward for their landscapes. Platforms like Awana Digital’s CoMapeo and Tech Issues’ Terraso — backed by the Cisco Basis and the Equinix Basis — are serving to make this attainable. As these applied sciences proceed to evolve, they provide highly effective examples of how place-based innovation can defend the atmosphere and profit native communities.

For extra data, please go to the Cisco Basis’s Local weather Grants Portfolio web page.

This weblog was written with help from Anastasia Baranoff, TekSystems at Cisco.

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Everyone knows the drill: A full community outage grinds enterprise to a halt, triggering an all-hands-on-deck response. However what occurs when the community isn’t down, simply gradual? In contrast to a whole outage, delicate drops in efficiency can creep into day by day workflows, eroding productiveness and impacting the underside line with out setting off main alarms.

As we speak, expertise is the brand new uptime, and degradation is the brand new downtime. Customers count on instantaneous entry and seamless experiences, so “gradual” might be simply as detrimental as “down,” resulting in frustration, misplaced income, and missed alternatives.

Take into consideration your gross sales group unable to entry essential buyer information throughout a key pitch, or distant staff dealing with frozen screens on the worst doable second. These seemingly minor slowdowns can quietly undermine productiveness and have a measurable affect on total enterprise efficiency.

The problem for NetOps groups is pinpointing the basis trigger of those intermittent efficiency points, particularly in at the moment’s advanced, distributed campus and department environments. Rising applied sciences like AI brokers solely make this tougher, introducing new calls for for resilience and strong assurance.

And with 64% of corporations anticipating a expertise scarcity by 2026, the strain to do extra with much less is just rising. Assembly this problem calls for instruments which are clever, proactive, and constructed for scale. That’s the place AI-powered proactive assurance is available in—serving to NetOps groups keep forward of points, streamline operations, and ship constant efficiency throughout advanced environments.

The hidden price of community complexity

Trendy campus and department networks are the spine of at the moment’s companies, supporting an more and more numerous vary of essential interactions. However managing them is way from easy. A number of key components are quickly escalating community complexity—creating each operational complications and strategic challenges for IT leaders:

• Distributed sources: The shift to cloud and SaaS places essential companies outdoors your direct management—which means the digital expertise now will depend on networks and purposes you don’t personal.
• Distant and hybrid work: Supporting a hybrid distributed workforce means coping with unpredictable house networks, ISPs, and VPNs—environments the place IT has little to no visibility and management.
• BYOD and IoT: The surge in private and IoT gadgets has created a sprawling, numerous panorama of endpoints to handle and safe—including considerably extra complexity for IT groups.
• Safety: Trendy safety architectures, whereas essential, can obscure site visitors paths, making it inherently troublesome to hint and troubleshoot points impacting customers’ digital expertise.

This rising complexity creates visibility gaps that make it onerous to pinpoint the basis reason for efficiency points. Is it the SaaS software? An ISP outage? A VPN downside? Or one thing on the person’s machine? Intermittent points like these can flip troubleshooting into a major drain on IT sources.

Trendy WAN complexity requires end-to-end visibility

From firefighting to forward-thinking IT

Even when customers don’t report each minor problem, the cumulative impact of suboptimal community efficiency can nonetheless have an effect on productiveness and enterprise outcomes—from diminished buyer satisfaction and reputational injury to misplaced income. In keeping with ITIC, community downtime can price corporations greater than $300,000 per hour, and in some circumstances, exceed $5 million.

To mitigate these dangers, NetOps groups should proactively establish and resolve even minor and intermittent points earlier than they affect customers. Nevertheless, many organizations nonetheless depend on legacy monitoring instruments which are merely not geared up to deal with the calls for of at the moment’s advanced networks. These instruments typically function in silos, lack end-to-end correlation, and are poorly suited to fulfill the size and velocity calls for of AI-driven infrastructure.

An AI-powered, automated, and proactive method is crucial to beat these challenges and ship constant, high-performance community operations.

The strategic position of assurance

That’s the place trendy assurance turns into important. Managing complexity, supporting AI-driven operations, and bridging expertise gaps calls for greater than conventional monitoring instruments.

Cisco ThousandEyes delivers this contemporary method. It’s a shift from passive monitoring to proactive, clever assurance that places person expertise on the heart. As a substitute of merely accumulating information, ThousandEyes constantly analyzes telemetry throughout all the digital supply chain—spanning each owned and unowned environments, throughout each community and cloud, to each machine. From the company community to public clouds to endpoints all over the place—from routers and switches to purposes and end-user gadgets—it delivers true end-to-end visibility and actionable insights into community efficiency.

And it’s all powered by AI. ThousandEyes applies superior algorithms to detect anomalies, anticipate disruptions, and suggest actions—typically earlier than customers are even conscious there’s a problem. With its pure language interface, the Cisco AI Assistant permits groups to work together with information, troubleshoot points, and take knowledgeable actions quicker—no deep technical experience required.

Cisco ThousandEyes powers trendy assurance throughout three essential dimensions:

• Finish-to-end visibility: ThousandEyes offers visibility from any person to any software, over any community—public or non-public. This experience-first method eliminates blind spots by spanning each owned and unowned environments, serving to groups rapidly pinpoint the place efficiency is breaking down, whether or not it’s the ISP, SaaS supplier, or inner infrastructure.
• AI-driven intelligence: By combining deep community telemetry with superior AI, ThousandEyes allows clever detection of anomalies, predictive insights into the place efficiency could degrade, and contextual understanding of affect. This isn’t nearly alerts—it’s about seeing how points unfold throughout layers and domains, so groups can act earlier than customers are affected.
• Closed-loop operations: ThousandEyes turns perception into motion. Via integrations with Cisco Networking, share hyperlinks to collaborate throughout groups and third events, and Cisco AI Assistant to drive automation, organizations can simplify workflows and speed up decision. ThousandEyes is built-in into the Meraki dashboard, Catalyst Middle, Splunk ITSI, and past—empowering IT groups to reply quicker, scale back guide effort, and preserve persistently excessive efficiency throughout environments.

Main organizations, reminiscent of Perception World, depend on Cisco ThousandEyes to proactively optimize SD-WAN insurance policies, prioritize essential purposes, and enhance the person expertise. By utilizing WAN Insights and application-aware routing, the group is ready to monitor each hop, perceive their site visitors routes, and establish each service supplier concerned from finish to finish.

Because of this, the group has seen improved collaboration software efficiency and streamlined IT operations—considerably bettering end-user experiences within the workplace. Plus, with a decline in service desk tickets associated to collaboration instruments, the group may give attention to monitoring and bettering different closely used purposes inside the group.

Be taught extra about their use case on this buyer story.

Delivering distinctive digital experiences

Assembly the expertise expectations of at the moment’s customers calls for a brand new degree of cross-domain assurance—integrating capabilities like networking (LAN/WAN, Wi-Fi), observability, and AI-powered operations.

Cisco ThousandEyes is deeply built-in throughout the Cisco know-how portfolio, offering a strong resolution to guarantee dependable, resilient digital experiences throughout your networking, safety, collaboration, and observability investments. Cisco ThousandEyes delivers unmatched visibility, measuring efficiency from all over the place that really issues—from the person’s gadgets at house or on cell, throughout the web and SaaS, into the department, information heart, and even industrial networks.

And it’s not simply breadth; it’s the depth of perception that counts. Cisco ThousandEyes makes use of superior methods like real-time BGP anomaly correlation, internet-scale root trigger localization, and cross-layer correlation to provide you a whole image and pinpoint precisely the place points originate.

By proactively figuring out and resolving efficiency bottlenecks, Cisco ThousandEyes helps organizations ship distinctive person experiences throughout at the moment’s advanced, cross-domain networks—ensuring “gradual” by no means turns into the brand new “down.”

See how Cisco ThousandEyes may help you optimize efficiency, elevate person expertise, and drive measurable enterprise affect.

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As I mirror on the unimaginable power and groundbreaking bulletins from Cisco Reside, one of many overarching themes continues to resonate deeply with me: Together with our prospects and companions, Cisco is not only speaking about the way forward for work; we’re actively constructing it.  

We’re all seeing the world of labor quickly evolve. It’s changing into more and more distributed, powered by AI, and hyper-connected. This transformation, whereas thrilling, additionally brings unprecedented calls for on our networks and, by extension, on the extremely gifted IT groups who handle them. The sheer quantity of site visitors development and the emergence of recent safety issues throughout campus, department, and industrial networks are challenges that require a basically new strategy. 

That’s precisely what we achieved at Cisco Reside. The improvements, buyer conversations, demos, and trainings we unveiled characterize a really vital leap ahead for our prospects and the complete trade. We redefined the chances of community operations for this new period, prioritizing intelligence and ease … whereas remodeling the position of safe connectivity right into a foundational pillar for AI infrastructure within the office. 

AgenticOps 

Our imaginative and prescient for AgenticOps is to proactively enable you to handle and troubleshoot your networks, remodeling the way in which you’re employed by inserting AI on the very heart of your expertise. 

On the coronary heart of AgenticOps lies a really exceptional innovation: the Cisco Deep Community Mannequin. This isn’t simply one other giant language mannequin; it’s an LLM purpose-built for the distinctive complexities of actual networks. Skilled on Cisco’s a long time of unparalleled networking experience, our Deep Community Mannequin constantly outperforms general-purpose fashions, delivering larger than 20% larger precision and accuracy on networking duties, all whereas being leaner in measurement. This purpose-built intelligence is a game-changer. 

AI Canvas 

We additionally launched AI Canvas, a revolutionary new instrument that leverages the facility of the Cisco Deep Community Mannequin to immediately create customized dashboards and pull collectively knowledge and visualizations on the fly. Think about the seamless collaboration this allows between NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps groups — a real unification of insights.  

Subsequent Gen Networking Units 

To make sure our prospects have the bodily infrastructure to assist this AI-driven future, we introduced a full portfolio of next-generation networking gadgets particularly designed to fulfill the calls for of AI workloads. That is the largest refresh of our core networking gadgets in at the least a decade, and I couldn’t be prouder of what our groups have completed. 

Cisco’s Management 

Why are we so enthusiastic about this new period? As a result of no different vendor can match the breadth of our capabilities throughout switching, routing, wi-fi, and Industrial IoT for campus, department, and industrial use circumstances. Our prospects want safe community materials that join every part with larger bandwidth and decrease latency, addressing their wants for sophistication, scale, and ease. Cisco is the AI infrastructure firm that’s uniquely positioned to ship this. 

Operational simplicity, particularly with AgenticOps, is paramount. Within the period of agentic AI, organizations might want to function their networks at machine scale, but with shut human-agent interplay. Improvements like AI Canvas and our new Cisco Cloud Management show how we’re uniquely able to correlating cross-domain knowledge and making use of refined AI capabilities skilled on data distinctive to Cisco. With Cisco Cloud Management, IT groups will be capable to execute cross-product workflows, proactively determine and resolve points, and handle infrastructure in a unified manner. This stage of innovation is just unmatched available in the market. 

Moreover, we’re fusing safety instantly into the material of the community. Agentic AI represents some of the vital safety challenges of our lifetime. Our bulletins, similar to integrating our new campus sensible switches into our hybrid mesh firewall, introducing Cisco Reside Shield to deal with vulnerabilities with out community downtime, and enhancing deep telemetry integration with Splunk, are important steps in addressing these challenges at machine-scale. 

I’m extremely happy with the groups working with our prospects to redefine this house. We’re working with the velocity of a startup and the dimensions of an market chief. It’s due to these groups that Cisco is and can stay the undisputed market share chief in each switching and wi-fi networking.    

Unmatched Scale 

Within the final two years Cisco has unified our {hardware} platforms, licensing, and assist, beginning with wi-fi and now extending to switching and routing. We’ve additionally unified cloud administration for all our new and present gadgets, sustaining our dedication to giving prospects alternative in cloud, on-premise, and hybrid administration.  

Our options are the core of campus and department networks worldwide, powering 85% of Fortune 500 corporations and serving each main trade.  And, we join over 35 million community gadgets to our administration platforms, and energy over 1 billion related purchasers. 

It is a new period for networking, and a big alternative for our prospects, enabling them to navigate the complexities of the way forward for work with confidence, simplicity, and unparalleled safety. The improvements showcased at Cisco Reside characterize a elementary leap ahead in how we take into consideration, construct, and function networks 

I’m extremely optimistic about what we’ll obtain collectively.
— Jeetu 

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The spoofing assault works by manipulating HTTP request headers despatched to the Redfish interface. Attackers can add particular values to headers like “X-Server-Addr” to make their exterior requests seem as in the event that they’re coming from contained in the server itself. Because the system mechanically trusts inner requests as authenticated, this spoofing method grants attackers administrator privileges while not having legitimate credentials.

Gradual vendor response creates danger window

The vulnerability exemplifies advanced enterprise safety challenges posed by firmware provide chains. AMI sits on the high of the server provide chain, however every vendor should combine patches into their very own merchandise earlier than clients can deploy them.

Lenovo took till April 17 to launch its patch, whereas Asus patches for 4 motherboard fashions solely appeared in latest weeks. Hewlett Packard Enterprise was among the many sooner responders, releasing updates in March for its Cray XD670 methods utilized in AI and high-performance computing workloads.

The patching delays are significantly regarding given the vulnerability’s scope. Producers identified to make use of AMI’s MegaRAC SPx BMC embody AMD, Ampere Computing, ASRock, ARM, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, Huawei, Nvidia, Supermicro, and Qualcomm, representing a good portion of enterprise server infrastructure. NetApp additionally confirmed in its safety advisory NTAP-20250328-0003 that a number of NetApp merchandise incorporating MegaRAC BMC firmware are additionally affected, increasing the affect to storage infrastructure.

Dell had earlier confirmed its methods are unaffected because it makes use of its personal iDRAC administration know-how as an alternative of AMI’s MegaRAC.

Enterprise operations in danger

This widespread vendor affect interprets into critical operational dangers for enterprises. BMCs function at a privileged stage beneath the principle working system, making assaults significantly harmful.