What is Cisco Cloud Control and why should customers care?

More than another console

On paper, Cloud Control sounds simple enough. It provides a unified environment, a shared data layer, and a common system of action, while also giving customers access to capabilities such as unified inventory, topology, policy, identity, and event correlation across the Cisco estate. During the keynote demos, Cisco showed single sign-on, all assets in one place, a single topology view, and direct access to products such as Meraki, Splunk, Security Cloud Control, Intersight, Control Hub, and Cisco IQ.

That alone would be useful. Cisco’s biggest enterprise customers have spent years dealing with product silos that made perfect sense inside the org chart but far less sense in an actual IT environment. Networking had its console, security had its console, observability had its tools, collaboration had its dashboard, and the poor operator in the middle had to stitch it all together manually. Cloud Control is Cisco’s admission that this model no…