How SMBs Can Strengthen Their Networking with AI Solutions from Cisco and CDW

A modern networking environment plays a critical role in enabling collaboration, commerce and customer support for SMBs. But as this environment grows, it introduces three key challenges:

• Manageability: When facing difficulties in keeping the network healthy as new IT assets join the network, manageability ensures daily operations run smoothly and issues can be addressed.
• Orchestration: Laying out the network for several devices, services and users in a compliant and fault-free manner often becomes a bottleneck due to limited IT support across SMBs.
• Security: Increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats often target weak networks, which is a constant problem for SMBs. They have to ensure the network stays performant while also addressing security needs.

SMBs face business disruption due to network challenges

As per CDW’s 2025 Canadian Cybersecurity Study, denial of service (DoS) attacks rose from 41 to 43 percent for medium-sized organizations. This type of attack, commissioned by cybercriminals, often causes business downtime.

At the same time, while small organizations saw a drop in downtime from DoS incidents (from an average of 18 days in 2024 to 14 days in 2025), this type of incident still results in significant operational interruptions.

SMBs can greatly benefit from network solutions that help resolve complexities and enable them to stay resilient against cyberthreats. With AI-powered features, the following Cisco solutions target five key networking aspects for SMBs.

Network management can become burdensome for SMBs as it involves day-to-day operations for network health, configuration and remediations. This extends to their office LAN and Wi-Fi and goes all the way to their cloud network, which can be tough for a limited IT team to handle.

Complexity is the key reason why SMBs struggle with network upkeep. They often manage multiple dashboards and control panes at once, which increases the chance of errors.

How Cisco Meraki helps small businesses

Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed networking simplifies operations by providing a single dashboard to manage switches, access points and security devices.

With AI-powered insights and automation, Meraki continuously optimizes network performance, detects anomalies and deploys updates without constant manual intervention.

This reduces the IT burden and improves responsiveness, while built-in security controls keep data and devices protected across locations.

Benefits of Cisco Meraki for SMBs

By using Meraki, SMBs can manage several network operations with simple administration without burdening their in-house team of IT experts. Meraki can help them achieve the following outcomes:

• Scale operations easily, onboard remote branches faster
• Ensure stable connectivity anywhere for in-office or external connections
• Boost operational efficiency and reduce costs by simplifying the network troubleshooting process

With the rise of hybrid work, SMBs face difficulties securing access for remote employees and branch offices. They may lack the resources to deploy a resilient infrastructure or manage multiple security tools, leaving networks vulnerable to malware and data breaches.

For hybrid workers, ensuring they can access business data securely is critical for their productivity.

How Cisco Secure Connect helps small businesses

Cisco Secure Connect is a cloud-delivered service built on secure access service edge (SASE) principles, which unifies networking for hybrid workers.

It uses AI to conduct network security functions such as safeguarding data traffic, optimizing DNS queries and prioritizing critical business applications.

Using Secure Connect, IT teams can replace multiple connectivity tools with one unified solution. It extends visibility into hybrid worker connections, allowing IT administrators to enforce security policies effectively.

Benefits of Cisco Secure Connect for SMBs

Secure Connect can help enable secure, scalable remote work while maintaining compliance and performance. It helps SMBs:

• Bring remote connection control onto a single administration view
• Battle cyberthreat risks with visibility into threat actors and malicious access attempts
• Ensure that distributed teams can collaborate safely without compromising on speed or productivity

Sophisticated threats can often bypass basic security perimeters and elevate risks for SMBs that may not have advanced threat detection. This can be difficult for SMB IT teams to prepare for, as such threats take longer to remediate and cause greater damage.

On the other hand, modern threat detection tools that can catch sophisticated threats may help alleviate talent and budget concerns for SMBs.

How Cisco Talos helps small businesses

Cisco Talos is a dedicated effort by Cisco to identify threats and build useful intelligence for organizations. It leverages AI and extensive commercial threat intelligence databases, processing billions of telemetry points daily.

The data gathered by Cisco Talos can be easily accessed by SMBs across Cisco’s products such as Cisco Firepower Firewalls, Umbrella DNS and more.

This way, SMBs utilizing Cisco security products gain advanced threat preparedness built into their systems directly. They can identify sophisticated threats and formulate remediation strategies without having to onboard dedicated tools.

Benefits of Cisco Talos for SMBs

Cisco Talos provides SMBs with options to gain global threat intelligence locally and achieve the following outcomes:

• Build proactive defence systems that can alert IT teams when they catch advanced threats
• Minimize the window of exposure to threats and reduce cyber risk
• Ensure business continuity without a dedicated security operations centre (SOC) team

As the organizational network evolves, it may spread into several layers and subnets that are harder to observe compared to a simple network. This is called a network blindspot, which may occur within complex networking infrastructures.

SMBs operating a dense IT infrastructure often face the blindspot problem. They may have limited visibility into nooks and crannies of the network that could potentially harbour vulnerabilities.

How Cisco Observability and ThousandEyes help small businesses

Cisco offers two technologies that can help IT teams build network visibility.

• Cisco Observability platform: A unified and extensible solution that gathers metrics, events, logs and traces the breadth of IT to find network issues faster. It runs an open, API-driven architecture and gives IT teams the tools to build dashboards, alerts, custom queries and correlate different types of network data.
• Cisco ThousandEyes: Focused on digital experience assurance across network, cloud, internet and SaaS environments, ThousandEyes gives visibility into how traffic flows, how applications perform and what users experience, even across networks IT teams don’t own (e.g., the internet, third-party clouds).

Benefits of Cisco Observability and ThousandEyes for SMBs

Both tools help SMBs make sure their networks are easier to investigate and repair on a daily basis. They further enhance visibility by:

• Reducing the time it takes to identify root causes and enabling proactive operations
• Correlating network data and turning that into actionable insights
• Providing digital experiences for customers, not just internal users

Many SMBs in Canada see the potential of AI but struggle with technical and infrastructure barriers. The lack of compute power, security concerns and scalability issues prevent them from adopting AI workloads effectively.

This may stall AI innovation among Canadian SMBs that are trying to get their new ideas to market.

How the Cisco stack helps small businesses

Cisco’s AI-ready infrastructure combines its networking hardware with compute solutions from partners to create scalable, secure clusters for AI applications.

These systems are optimized for data-intensive workloads, enabling SMBs to deploy AI for automation, analytics and customer engagement without massive upfront investment.

Benefits of the Cisco stack for SMBs

By helping SMBs find resources within the ecosystem, Cisco plans to lay the groundwork for future AI innovations. It also helps SMBs:

• Access innovative solutions from partners and Cisco for advanced AI use cases
• Utilize AI-ready network solutions and engineering support for their ideas
• Build on top of Cisco technologies that already feature AI-ready implementation

CDW Canada partners with Cisco to bring Cisco’s innovative networking and security solutions with CDW’s deep implementation expertise to Canadian SMBs.

This collaboration means SMBs can adopt Cisco’s advanced solutions such as Meraki, Secure Connect or ThousandEyes with the confidence that every deployment is supported by CDW’s certified engineers and tailored to their specific environment.

CDW Canada extends the value of Cisco’s technologies by offering end-to-end lifecycle support from solution design and procurement to configuration, deployment and managed services.

This ensures that SMBs not only gain access to cutting-edge infrastructure but also receive proactive monitoring, security updates and optimization assistance throughout their technology journey.