Saving Cisco

By Ellen Messmer, NetworkWorld.com, 06/23/03

We're fast approaching the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., and the destruction of lives and property on that dark day have led to a heightened security awareness at many companies. Bob Browning, manager of tactical operations support at Cisco, recently shared his view on how some things have changed at his company, which makes a substantial portion of the router and switch equipment used throughout the nation's communications infrastructure.

"We lost external manufacturing and the airspace during 9/11," said Browning, who spoke on the topic at the recent Gartner IT Security Summit attended by about 800 corporate executives from across all industries.

Cisco does 90% of its manufacturing offshore and relies on FedEx. "We do just-in-time manufacturing, there's no product sitting on the shelf. We never thought--what if we lose the air space?"

During 9/11 and its aftermath, Cisco found itself scrounging wherever it could to come up with spare switches and other equipment to give to customers whose gear was blasted to smithereens in the attacks.

"We had some difficult conversations at the beginning, for instance with Goldman Sachs, saying there are only so many boxes available, and some are going to the Defense Department," Browning noted.

Today, Cisco has contingency plans, which include more diverse manufacturing, and so important is Cisco seen to defense interests, that "we were given permission to use military aircraft to move Cisco equipment." The White House is also deploying IP-based phones and Cisco is working on special military-grade encryption for them.

The federal government has also given Cisco permission to use a private government-run emergency telecommunications network in the event of any major outage to the general public voice system.

Browning said protecting Cisco employees, and coordination with them during a crisis, was one of the biggest lessons learned during the disaster. Since Cisco now worries more about terrorist attacks directly against the company, new security guidelines at Cisco say "all your executives can't sit in the same building," said Browning.

But he admits it's hard to keep Cisco's top honcho, John Chambers, and other execs, to conform to these doomsday rules. "We can't get them to do," says Browning. But Browning says standard safety procedures allow him to contact Chambers day or night to deal with emergencies.

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