GITEX 2017
Cisco and Abu Dhabi Monitoring and Control Centre ADMCC, announced collaboration towards achieving the vision for a safe, secure and intelligent city. Building on their existing relationship, ADMCC will leverage the power of Cisco’s technology solutions and innovation to support Falcon Eye, an integrated, live surveillance system deployed across the city of Abu Dhabi.
The strategic cooperation focuses on adopting Cisco’s latest innovations to enable ADMCC to stay at the forefront of technological updates and to harness new trends in the areas of safety and security. Launched in July 2016, the Falcon Eye project will benefit from Cisco’s state-of-the-art datacentre architecture designed specifically to support virtualisation in the data centre based on Cisco’s Unified Computing System.
This will support the expansion of Abu Dhabi’s city-wide video surveillance project to help protect citizens and residents and provide a suitable environment for the prosperity and growth in the nation’s capital.
“Safe cities create an environment that attracts the investments, businesses, and talent necessary for economic growth and development,” said ADMCC Director General, His Excellency Saeed Saif Al Neyadi. “Interagency collaboration and real-time analytics are critical to our ability to help law enforcement provide proactive, informed policing that pre-empts incidents and responds faster to emergencies. Given their technology leadership, domain expertise and comprehensive portfolio, Cisco is the optimal partner to support the evolution of our Falcon Eye project and to develop new uses for our capabilities.”
ADMCC and Cisco are joining forces to create a more flexible, functional, and secure environment within the datacentre. Cisco was selected for its leading cybersecurity solutions that help detect and block threats faster with Advanced Malware Protection. When complete, the Cisco cybersecurity solution will apply threat-centric visibility and control to the environment, manage unauthorised access to the network, and gain more visibility to prevent malicious behaviour.
“Keeping citizens and assets safe and secure is a critical foundation for the economic and social prosperity of any city,” said Shukri Eid, Managing Director, East Region, Cisco Middle East. “We are proud to contribute to Abu Dhabi’s vision for a confident, safe society by working closely with ADMCC to enable government agencies to better pre-empt and respond to emergencies and to safeguard the city’s inhabitants.”
The Falcon Eye project provides coverage across the city of Abu Dhabi. It receives a live feed from thousands of visual surveillance devices distributed across Abu Dhabi, which connect into a single integrated control platform providing smart warnings and quick access to data creating events and initiating incident management. The solution is utilised by ADMCC stakeholders with functions tailored to each of their requirements and roles.
The Abu Dhabi Monitoring and Control Centre was established under the direction of His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Ruler of Abu Dhabi, as stated in Law no 5, with the aim to manage and regulate the use of monitoring and control devices systems in public and private facilities and analyse the data provided by the devices, so as to prevent crimes and detect offenders and maintain public security in the emirate.
The Monitoring and Control Centre have been mandated with, and set the regulatory standards for integrating all public access cameras onto one platform to provide full uninterrupted coverage of Abu Dhabi in compliance with the Safe City 2030 Vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Executive Council, mandated the General Secretariat of the Executive Council, the Abu Dhabi Council for Economic Development and the Department of Planning and Economy to develop a long-term economic vision for the Emirate.
This mandate was given in order to deliver upon the vision of His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, Ruler of Abu Dhabi, for the ongoing economic success of Abu Dhabi.
Cisco also announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Miral, Abu Dhabi’s creator of destinations, to further explore opportunities to enhance Miral’s digital offerings across its portfolio of leisure destinations on Yas Island.
The MoU establishes a framework for closer collaboration between the two parties by leveraging Cisco’s broad portfolio of technology products and solutions to support Miral’s vision to create unique and exciting destinations. The agreement outlines a number of potential areas for cooperation that aim to enhance and differentiate Miral’s destinations through the use of innovative, intelligent technology and best practice within the IoT space.
“At Miral, we are proud to have an innovation-driven culture that enriches our product offerings and world-class customer experiences. Adopting the latest seamless technology is central to our strategy to establish Yas Island as a top global destination in which to live, work, play and invest.” said Mohamed Abdalla Al Zaabi, CEO of Miral. “Our partnership with Cisco will allow us to explore and identify tangible outcomes through a digitisation journey that will enhance the global attractiveness of our destinations and theme parks, enabling us to create a seamless customer experience that drives loyalty and return visits.”
“Miral’s vision to unite people and places through immersive experiences goes in line with Cisco’s commitment to connect the unconnected in ways that unlock tremendous value for our customers and partners,” said Eid from Cisco. “We are excited to work closely with Miral to create a digitisation framework that contributes to the creation of memorable visits and engaging experiences on Yas Island.”
Under the MoU, Miral and Cisco will work together to explore digital solutions that enrich visitor experiences across Miral-managed destinations and support the development of new digital services. The two companies will cooperate on ways to increase customer loyalty by enabling deeper and more meaningful relationships with visitors and optimising a digital content to suit their interests.
Cisco unveiled Cisco Intersight, a management and automation platform for Cisco Unified Computing System and Cisco HyperFlex Systems, marking the start of a multi-year strategic programme to provide customers with clear IT advantages that support their competitive business goals. Cisco Intersight simplifies datacentre operations by delivering systems management as-a-service, alleviating the need to maintain islands of on-premise management infrastructure. Complete system lifecycle management is delivered by Cisco Intersight through machine learning, analytics and automation.
Today, most IT organisations are adopting a multi-cloud strategy, and as a result, customers need a scalable and consistent management environment across their datacentres, private clouds and public clouds deployments. Customers also seek consistent management and policy enforcement across bare metal server environments, converged infrastructure and hyper-converged infrastructure. Cisco Intersight delivers the ability to connect and manage all of these comprehensively.
Application architectures are also transforming with scale-out and multi-site deployment models, delivered by containers and micro-services. In addition, DevOps accelerates the rate of application development and continuous feature delivery. Cisco Intersight addresses these challenges, helping IT staff optimise operations while enjoying a more intuitive user experience.
According to Gartner: The growing large quantity of configuration data points and connections aggregated from datacentre deployments, edge, cloud and IoT will increase IT ops complexity, countering trends in software-defined simplicity.
Cisco has invested years of research and development into software innovations to bridge these gaps. With the cost of an unplanned datacentre outage estimated at thousands of dollars per minute, and the extraordinary costs of corporate security breaches, often due to human error, IT leader’s welcome new advances in intelligent automation.
“Organisations that move to cloud-based systems management platforms will find that service delivery quality is significantly improved, the overall risk to the business goes down, and IT staff productivity is increased,” said Matt Eastwood, Senior Vice President, IDC. “Artificial Intelligence infused cloud-based management tools can offer deep insights into the state of the infrastructure, identify troubles before they become major issues, and enable quicker root cause identification and analysis of issues.”
Intersight is designed to deliver a new, higher level of simplicity and intelligence that is intuitive from the start and continues to learn and evolve over time:
Pervasive Simplicity
Cisco Intersight features a dynamic user interface that can be customised by user role. As a cloud-based service, new functionality is delivered via portal updates without burdening customers with upgrades, and the experience scales seamlessly as customers directly connect new systems for management. The platform is designed to constantly learn to help make daily IT operations easier. Analytics combined with tight integration with the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) constantly improve the assistance provided through the recommendation engine.
Expertise
Tight Cisco Technical Assistance Center integration and insights from Cisco and the UCS Community provide recommendations and best practices.
Continuous Optimisation
The ability for the Intersight platform to provide actionable intelligence will grow stronger over time from the power of cloud-based machine learning. It can learn from the collective experience of the UCS user community, as well as the best practices of Cisco experts and peers. This will enable better predictive analytics and resource utilisation to be provided through the recommendation engine.
Agile Delivery
IT can rapidly respond to business demands and frequent changes while maintaining the policy enforcement designed to implement safe and reliable business services Cisco Intersight is API-driven and Cisco UCS and HyperFlex are fully programmable systems, supporting development and operations tool chains for continuous integration and delivery.
Constant Protection
The Cisco Intersight service adheres to the stringent security standards of Cisco InfoSec, and helps enable secure communication between the Cisco Intersight SaaS platform and managed endpoints, allowing applications to be deployed and updated securely.
Cisco Intersight will be available in Q4 2017 and is integrated and designed to coexist with existing UCS and HyperFlex management tools, so customers can adopt Cisco Intersight as they desire without added complexity. Cisco Intersight will be available in an on-premise deployment model in the future. Cisco Intersight is built on an extensible architecture with OData standards-based RESTful APIs and connector framework simplifying third party software and hardware integrations.
As customers include Cisco UCS, HyperFlex and Intersight in their IT modernisation initiatives, Cisco offers a comprehensive lifecycle of datacentre services from advisory through optimisation, managed technical and learning services to improve cost-efficiency and reduce risk. Cisco’s portfolio of services leverages global expertise, proven processes, and innovative methodologies to help customers accelerate and simplify operations.
