Cisco had a very eventful 2022. From job cuts as part of a corporate “rebalancing,” to a significant data breach, and the restructuring of some of its operating divisions, the networking giant had a busy 12 months.

Here is a recap of SDxCentral's top 10 Cisco stories in 2022.

Cisco in November confirmed plans to cut more than 4,000 jobs as part of a workforce “rebalancing.” Published reports indicated the move is part of a $600 million restructuring and that the changes will also impact Cisco’s real estate holdings.

A Cisco spokesperson in a statement said the moves will impact “roughly 5% of our workforce.” Cisco counted approximately 83,000 full-time employees in mid-2022.

Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins explained the vendor is moving “resources” into its Enterprise networking space and its growing security operations. “Those are important areas,” Robbins said, perhaps to the chagrin of “resources” not in those areas. CFO Scott Herren spun the cuts as a “rebalancing” and doesn't “think of this as a headcount action that is motivated by cost savings.”

Cisco admitted in August that its corporate IT infrastructure was compromised earlier in the year.

Cisco first noticed the breach on May 24, but claims it didn’t observe any ransomware, nor identify any impact on its business, including its products, services, and sensitive customer data. The Cisco Talos team said the attack was conducted by a previously identified group linked to the UNC2447 gang, Lapsus$ group, and Yanluowang ransomware operators.

Cisco in August announced plans to combine its Enterprise Networking and Cloud division with its Mass-Scale Infrastructure group in order “to deliver one vision for networking end-to-end,” according to a company spokesperson.

The vendor tapped long-time Cisco veteran Jonathan Davidson to head the newly combined divisions. Davidson had previously served as EVP and GM of the Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group. Former Enterprise Networking and Cloud EVP and GM Todd Nightingale left Cisco to take on the CEO role for edge cloud provider Fastly.

Cisco connected its Catalyst switching and wireless hardware to its Meraki dashboard in a move toward bringing a full cloud-managed Enterprise networking solution to the market.

Catalyst Switch users now have three steps on the journey to the cloud, including cloud monitoring capabilities for select Catalyst Switches, cloud-manageable Wi-Fi 6E access points to certain Catalyst wireless devices, and a fully cloud-managed access networks that combine Catalyst and Meraki.

Cisco claims the move will improve IT efficiency, reduce infrastructure costs and complexity, and enable a smoother journey to the cloud.

This year’s Cisco Live event highlighted simpler networks with more unified cloud management services. The event’s themes focused on software offerings, user experience, and as-a-service, but very little on the “speeds and feeds” of its hardware that Cisco traditionally touts, Dell’Oro Group research director Mauricio Sanchez noted.

“It was very interesting to see the themes be about simplification, making the customer experience easier, and being able to purchase the solutions in different ways,” Sanchez told SDxCentral. “But it’s not the classic conversations about speeds and feeds or silicon or some esoteric technology … that Cisco historically pushed.”

Cisco unveiled its Security Cloud unified platform that integrates security and networking services across hybrid multicloud environments. The networking giant also officially named its secure access service edge (SASE) offering as Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, and added a new Talos Intelligence On-Demand service.

Cisco Security Cloud is a set of cloud-based services that provides threat detection and prevention, minimizes cyberrisks, and integrates breach response and remediation with machine learning (ML) technology, Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM of security and collaboration at Cisco, told SDxCentral.

Cisco introduced its Predictive Networks, which gather data from the vendor’s vast telemetry sources, uses ML to learn the pattern and build a model, predicts Application issues based on the model, and provides options to improve network user experience.

The platform is powered by predictive software engines the vendor has been building and testing for the past two years. The company plans to deliver the predictive technologies across all domains as integrated, plug-and-play Software-as-a-Service offerings without the need for extra hardware.

Cisco plans to focus its environmental sustainability investments on meeting its 2025 goal to reduce scope 1 and 2 emissions by 90%.

“This is really looking to source long-term power purchase agreements to create new renewable capacity in the grid,” Chief Sustainability Officer Mary de Wysocki said.

One of de Wysocki’s focuses will be strategizing Cisco’s sequencing of investment to “connect the dots between our net-zero commitment as well as the customer solutions that are going to help our customers hit theirs,” along with assessing the impact of circular design and circular economy principles on net-zero goals.

Cisco expanded its SASE ecosystem to offer integration with security services edge (SSE) providers Cloudflare and Netskope.

Gartner recognized Cisco as one of nine vendors that can offer a single-vendor (or unified) SASE solution. This includes network edge capabilities like SD-WAN and a cloud-delivered SSE security suite that includes secure web access gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker, zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS).

The integration with Cloudflare and Netskope will also help organizations simplify configuration and improve IT experience with reduced manual work and less errors, according to Rohan Naggi, product manager of Enterprise cloud and SD-WAN at Cisco.

Cisco’s Networking Academy wants to train 25 million people over the next decade to become cybersecurity experts. This push is chiefly supported by Cisco’s Skills for All program – a free online platform for learning courses, interactive tools, and career resources, including certification for entry-level security jobs.

Cisco also announced a partnering with Experis to place 1,000 people in new IT roles in the first year.