From outages to an optimization roadmap

Background

This organization runs Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) as the control point for network access — but had no ISE expertise in-house. Every certificate renewal, patch cycle, and design question carried production risk, and the team was stuck reacting instead of improving.

Challenges

• No in-house ISE expertise — nobody on staff owned the platform day to day.
• Outages from certificate expirations — expiring certs repeatedly took authentication down.
• Outages from software bugs and patching — upgrades were risky and root cause analysis dragged on.
• Non-optimal design — the deployment had grown organically and no longer fit the environment.

Outcomes

• An extension of the team — ModernCyber's ISE experts took ownership of platform health, monitoring, and operations.
• Root cause before TAC — during a critical incident, ModernCyber isolated the responsible Cisco bug before Cisco TAC completed its own analysis.
• Onboarding + health assessment — a structured onboarding and full ISE health assessment established a baseline of every risk in the deployment.
• A prioritized optimization roadmap — firefighting was replaced with a sequenced plan to redesign, harden, and stay current.