Knowledge Base
ANM Blog
Industry news and insider tips
Cisco IQ: A Technical Look at Cisco’s Unified AI-Powered Customer Experience
Cisco announced Cisco IQ at Cisco Partner Summit on November 4, 2025, following a period of Early Field Trials.
Cisco IQ became generally available for its SaaS deployment mode on April 24, 2026. For IT and network teams that manage Cisco infrastructure, it’s worth understanding now, since it changes how support, professional services, and day-to-day operations are delivered.
Say Yes to AI, Safely: A Technical Blueprint for AI Governance
Your organization is already using AI. That part isn’t in question.
Employees adopted generative AI tools before policy caught up, vendors embedded AI into platforms you already pay for, and development teams are quietly standing up agents that hold real credentials and touch real data. The only open question is whether anyone is watching.
The Network Operations Gap: Why More Dashboards Won’t Fix It
Every network team has the same story.
A new platform gets deployed, promoted as the tool that will finally bring visibility and control to the environment, and within a year it’s an inbox with 900 unread alerts.
The dashboard is still there. The license renewal is still coming due. But the tool isn’t actually running the network, people are, the old way, just with an extra login they never use.
Your Data Has Escaped. Now What?
Here’s a question worth sitting with: Would you bet your job that your current disaster recovery strategy can restore everything your business runs on today?
If your honest answer is absolutely not, you’re not alone. And if that answer makes you uncomfortable, it should. Because for most organizations, the gap between what a DR plan promises and what it can actually deliver has never been wider.
The culprit isn’t lazy IT teams or outdated tools. It’s something more structural: data sprawl.
Technology Without a Roadmap Is Just Expensive Guesswork
Most organizations don’t struggle with a lack of technology. They struggle with a lack of alignment.
Over time, infrastructure grows organically. New security tools are added to address emerging threats. Cloud services expand to support business demands. Teams adopt new platforms to solve immediate challenges. Before long, the environment becomes a collection of well-intentioned decisions that may no longer work together toward a common goal.
The result isn’t necessarily poor technology, it’s fragmented strategy.
That’s where roadmap planning and gap analysis become critical.
The 47-Day Deadline: How CA/Browser Forum’s New Certificate Rules Are Reshaping Enterprise Security Operations
What every IT leader needs to know
What every IT leader needs to know about the mandates that will fundamentally change how your organization manages digital trust and why acting now is a strategic advantage, not just a compliance checkbox.
Bad Wi-Fi Is a Business Problem
Your organization probably has far more wireless devices than you realize.
According to IoT Analytics’ State of IoT 2025, the number of connected wireless devices worldwide is on track to nearly double from 21 billion today to 39 billion by 2030. Wi-Fi accounts for nearly a third of all IoT connections globally, more than any other wireless technology. Manufacturing alone leads IoT deployments at 34%, and AI-driven use cases are accelerating demand for low-latency, always-on connectivity.
Yet most organizations are still running wireless infrastructure designed years ago, for a fraction of today’s device density and application demands. When Wi-Fi fails, or simply underperforms, the result isn’t just a help-desk ticket. It’s a real-time business impact: dropped voice calls, sluggish clinical applications, stalled warehouse operations, and frustrated employees.
Wireless is no longer just access points down a hallway. It is business-critical infrastructure that demands the same rigor as your switching and security stack.
Why Staff Augmentation Still Matters for IT Leaders
The pace of change is accelerating. New security threats, cloud demands, AI initiatives, and compliance pressures are stacking up, often faster than teams can realistically scale.
For many IT leaders, the challenge isn’t identifying what needs to be done. It’s having the right people, with the right expertise, available at the right time to execute.
That’s where staff augmentation comes in. But not all models are equal, and the difference between success and frustration usually comes down to how it’s structured.
Why Traditional ZTNA Falls Short and What to Do About It
Zero Trust isn’t new. Most IT leaders have already started down this path, often by replacing legacy VPNs with ZTNA solutions.
But here’s the issue: many organizations are finding that “ZTNA” alone isn’t solving the problem they thought it would.
The pace of change is accelerating. Users are everywhere. Applications are everywhere. And security policies are often scattered across tools that weren’t designed to work together.
What looked like progress can quickly turn into complexity.
The CA/B Forum Is Rewriting the Rules of Digital Certificates. Are You Ready?
For decades, X.509 digital certificates have quietly underpinned trust on the internet. They authenticate websites, encrypt traffic, secure devices, protect applications, and enable machine-to-machine communication. But that foundation is now undergoing its biggest transformation yet.
Driven by browser vendors, security incidents, operational failures, and the looming reality of quantum computing, the CA/Browser Forum (CA/B Forum) has approved sweeping changes to how public digital certificates are issued, validated, and managed. These changes will reshape how organizations design PKI architectures and force a long-overdue shift toward automation and crypto-agility.
This is not a future problem.
The first enforcement milestones arrived in March 2026.
Identity Is Now Your First Line of Defense. Are You Treating It That Way?
For years, security strategies were built around the network. Firewalls, segmentation, and perimeter controls defined how organizations protected access to systems and data.
That model doesn’t hold up anymore.
Today, identity is the control plane. It determines who gets access, under what conditions, and how that access is used. And as the pace of change accelerates—cloud adoption, hybrid work, third-party integrations—identity has become both the most critical security layer and the most targeted.
The challenge isn’t recognizing its importance. It’s managing the complexity that comes with it.
Modern Observability: From Reactive Monitoring to Proactive, Business-Aligned Insight
As IT environments continue to expand across hybrid infrastructure, cloud platforms, and distributed applications, the challenge isn’t a lack of data—it’s making sense of it fast enough to act.
That’s where modern observability comes in.
In a recent ANM Pathways webinar with Cisco and Splunk, our teams explored how organizations are moving beyond traditional monitoring toward a more connected, intelligent approach—one that ties performance, security, and business impact together in real time.