What Cisco Networking Learned During the Pandemic

Cisco averaged between 20,000 and 30,000 daily remote connections from employees working from home. Now that all Cisco employees — like those at most other companies — work remotely, it sees more than 170,000 remote network connections daily across 96 countries and 498 cities. “That is unprecedented,” said Cisco CIO Jacqui Guichelaar during a virtual roundtable discussion about staying connected and securing networks. “We definitely did not have a plan for that. We do now.”

And all of this had to happen within the span of a few weeks. “What would typically take an computer engineer vs computer science years to plan out and build out … it’s been really challenging for us as a team to figure out how do we scale? How do we start doing it in a systematic way, but in a fast way that we’ve never done before,” Guichelaar said.In addition to its own employees, more than 1 million customers rely on Cisco to keep their businesses running as they make the needed networking and security adjustments to enable remote workers. And, in some cases like health care and education, these networks need to rapidly scale to account for a massive influx of traffic.

Cisco’s Webex logged more than 12 billion meeting minutes since March 1, said Fran Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people officer. “We’re powering telehealth right now for 17,000 health care organizations in 118 countries,” Fran added. “We know that in the past there was a belief that we couldn’t do some of this virtually. And we’re learning that’s not true.”