Here are 5 insights you might have missed from Cisco's Future Cloud event

In early June, cloud providers, integrators, technology partners with Cisco Systems Inc., and industry analysts came together in a virtual format to discuss what tomorrow’s cloud will be.

The discussion, part of “Future Cloud: One event, a world of opportunities,” focused on a number of key areas, including the work of enterprise developers, recent updates for Cisco’s operational model, and creating the hybrid cloud experience. Here is a closer look at five additional insights which emerged from the Future Cloud event interviews hosted by theCUBE. (* Disclosure below.)

1. How much is riding on the application now? Everything.

If there was ever a question that business brands are now wholly dependent on the application, one needs only to look at the spectacular failure of Quibi Inc.

Launched as a content delivery service in April of 2020, Quibi’s promise was to deliver “quick bites” of celebrity-laden videos on a mobile platform. The $1.75 billion startup encountered technical problems on launch day and fell out of the 50 most downloaded apps within a week of its debut.

Moreover, the app was initially not transferrable to the larger home TV screen, and it lacked the ability for users to take and distribute screenshots. This put Quibi at a disadvantage with other mobile streaming content service apps from the start and users did not react favorably.

By the end of May 2020 the service had 1.5 million active users, a comparatively paltry number against major competitors such as Disney+ which boasted over 50 million subscribers. Just six months after launching, Quibi announced in October that it was closing its doors.

“If you think about it, the application is actually driving the brand recognition and the brand experience and the brand value,” said Vijoy Pandey, vice president of engineering and CTO of Cloud Distributed Systems at Cisco, in an interview with theCUBE. “All interactions with customers and consumers and even businesses are happening through that application. So, if the application is unreliable or not available or not trusted, there’s a problem. There’s a problem with the brand, with the company and the trust that consumers and customers have.”

2. The tech world is moving on from a single pane of glass.

For many years, the “single pane of glass” through which to view and manage the totality of IT infrastructure was like a siren call heard on the deck of a ship in the middle of a vast, foggy ocean. It was alluring, but it was very hard to pin down.

In today’s application-focused view of the IT world, organizations want to see the landscape from the inside out and not have to think about running the infrastructure itself. This makes having a single pane of glass less significant than bringing the infrastructure to where the application resides and monitoring performance, regardless of whether the platform is a public cloud, private cloud or at the edge.

Cisco moved to address this reality with its acquisition of ThousandEyes Inc., a cloud network performance monitoring business in May of 2020. ThousandEyes technology allows users to monitor multicloud environments and the links between applications in those clouds, a key step in network visibility. It is the kind of operating model which Cisco believes is what customers need to gain much-needed observability in the hybrid world.

“We’ve decided that we’re not going to chase this single pane of glass view of the world, which frankly our customers don’t want,” said James Leach, director of business development at Cisco, in a recent conversation with theCUBE. “What they want is a single operating model that’s similar to what they can get with the public cloud, but they want it across all of their cloud operations. So, what that means is they don’t want to just consume infrastructure services, they want all of their cloud services from this operating model.”

3. Cisco’s service mesh strategy is becoming clearer.

In November, Cisco made an acquisition that did not generate a tremendous amount of notice at the time, but the technology it gained has become a key element in the networking giant’s Kubernetes and application management strategy.

Cisco’s purchase of Hungarian startup Banzai Cloud gave it a Kubernetes-based platform for developing and scaling cloud native applications. Perhaps more significantly, Banzai Cloud provided Cisco with an important element in its evolving service mesh business.

Service mesh projects, such as open-source Istio, are gaining more interest because the technology offers a solution for maintaining thousands of microservices in a network. Mesh technology can control how different parts of an application share data.

In the last two months, Cisco has picked up the pace of its service mesh initiative by leading a $5 million round for application integration startup TriggerMesh and announcing the launch of Cisco Service Mesh Manager, an extension for Intersight Kubernetes Service or IKS which makes is easier to deploy Istio in the management of APIs.

“You need to think about networking for the application age, how it is managed, how it is deployed, and it needs to be very developer-friendly,” said Vijay Venugopal, vice president of product management at Cisco, in an interview with theCUBE. “We’ve built out Service Mesh Manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking. This is built on the acquisition Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud and we’ve taken the assets of Banzai and delivered the Service Mesh Manager as an extension to IKS that brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development teams.”

4. Cisco Plus points the way to the true hybrid cloud.

What is the “true hybrid cloud?” Is it the coexistence of on-premises operations with one or more public clouds? Or perhaps it’s a combination of public and private cloud environments with some standard of integration binding them together?

This is an important question for Cisco because the company has invested a great deal of money to provide hybrid cloud services for its significant enterprise customer base. A hint of how the networking giant is defining hybrid can be found in its rollout of Cisco Plus in March.

Cisco Plus is the firm’s as-a-service strategy to bring flexible buying and consumption models to customers. It includes Networking-as-a-Service and a full lifecycle suite of services bridging on-premises, edge and public cloud. The key, as described by the company in its announcement earlier this year, is that customers not only want to operate infrastructure as a cloud, but also consume it in the same fashion. For Cisco, this captures the essence of the true hybrid cloud experience.

“If you want to manage across clouds, you have to do it from the cloud,” Leach said, during his extensive conversation with theCUBE. “It’s just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and scope that it needs to impact your entire domain, your world which is much larger now than it was before. We’re talking about true hybrid cloud here.”

5. The new security perimeter is now the API.

As if the security community did not need another problem to worry about, there is new threat wave on the horizon, and it involves the API. Gartner has recently predicted that APIs will emerge as the top vector for attacks in 2022.

Vulnerabilities for APIs can include security misconfigurations, injections that fool an interpreter into running malicious code, and careless monitoring which allows attackers to hide unnoticed in a network.

Examples of potential API exposure and its impact are already beginning to accumulate. One security researcher has claimed that a large credit bureau left an API tool open on a lender site without security protections. An API bug in a popular exercise platform allowed users’ private account data to be pulled directly from company servers.

Cisco and other companies are beginning to sound the alarm about API security, an area expected to receive more focus in the coming year.

“That API is your new security perimeter and the data object that it’s trying to access is also the new security perimeter,” said Cisco’s Pandey during an interview with theCUBE. “If you can secure API to API communication and API to data object communication, you should be good. But guess what, software is buggy, everybody’s software. You need to secure at the API layer and the data object layer, that is the new frontier.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Future Cloud event. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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