Experts on Experts: A Conversation with the Director of Product Management, Nick Carrieri
Earlier this year, Jason Wright sat down with Nick Carrieri, the Director of Product Management, to discuss the latest news surrounding Security renewals and the Cisco commitment to customer experiences as they relate to Firewall upgrades.
How Cisco is putting the customer experience first
Security is extremely important to Cisco. That’s why we’re investing in acquisitions, integrating new technologies, and focusing on creating a customer experience that allows you to roll out your security policies in one, streamlined place. And, with massive new feature sets, including upgraded SD-WAN capabilities, Zero Trust application access, and new hardware to power it all – the latest version of Cisco Firewall is a massive proof point of the dedication we have to your security.
Code stability > feature velocity
Like with any version upgrade, the team spent significant time on feature development, innovation, and ease-of-use improvements, such as Fleet upgrades, moving management to the cloud, and generally making experiences easier for administrators.
But the bigger focus in this release has been around making the code robust, ensuring that the tradeoff between resiliency and features is no longer a decision customers must make. With an intense focus on the quality of the code, the team has prioritized code stability over new feature velocity.
“We’ve upped the ante to get code stable by upping the quality standards,” says Carrieri. “We multiplied the requirements needed to ship code to our development team. [We’ve] carried that forward by building automation and additional people hours and testing, adding over 100 customer test profiles to our test beds... Running test beds tens of thousands of times a week [to understand] not only the practical side but also traffic profiles. This produced code on the back end that can effectively solve over 85% of all open TAC cases. We also had the fastest adopted release of this code with positive customer feedback.”
SD-WAN capabilities and Zero Trust application enhancements
While the focus has been on code stability, the team still made big strides with new feature sets. Version 7.4.1 will offer customers SD-WAN capabilities in the Firewall, matching the market needs and requirements.
Additionally, as customers are evolving post-pandemic, Zero Trust is a huge focus, evolving past VPNs and giving customers the ability to access applications through the Firewall in a clientless format. “The big differentiator is that not only do you have that access,” says Carrieri, “but also the security stack to do inspection and malware and file analysis on that connection.”
We’ve also had a lot of acquisitions, such as Valtix – now called Multicloud Defense – in our Defense Orchestrator, so you can now provide security gateways in minutes, rather than the many precedented manual hours. With this latest release, Firewall 4200 is 2-6x performance built to focus on what our customers need most: an affordable way to get higher throughput, more inspection, and more capacity in their network.
The newly available AI Assistant
Since January, Artificial Intelligence has been the talk of the town. Recently, at Cisco Live Melbourne, Cisco announced our AI Assistant for the Firewall and the Cloud Delivered Management Center.
“The greatest aspect about this is you’re not going to have a different AI Assistant experience as you go through our portfolio,” says Carrieri. “We are taking the same experience throughout our entire Cisco portfolio.”
The newly available AI Assistant addresses three major customer pain points: extensive Firewall rules with millions of lines of code, 1200+ page configuration guides, and arduous troubleshooting. With AI Assistant, customers can assist, augment, and automate their Firewall management, lightening their load and letting technology do what it does best. Learn more at cisco.com/go/security-AI for an AI Assistant demo.
--
Ultimately, it’s no secret what’s held many back from upgrading and reaping the benefits of all these new enhancements: historical Firewall upgrade customer experiences have been a challenge. But thanks to an internal program called Fireworks, the team designed a way to offer better code for our customers, while also helping them get there, at no additional cost.
"We’re alleviating hesitation by sharing more data than ever to create transparency,” says Carrieri, recognizing that it takes a village to make customers more comfortable with these migrations.
Watch the video to hear the full conversation and get the first-hand story behind how Cisco’s commitment and dedication to the customer experience influenced this latest release. Learn more about how you can get started today at cloud.path.cisco.com/secure-firewall-levelup.
