“The need is urgent. The rewards are great. And the time is short.”

That’s how UN Secretary-General António Guterres described the global climate crisis at the COP29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November.

COP, which stands for Conference of Parties, is a U.N.-led event that monitors progress against climate change while setting new goals and agreements. The largest U.N. gathering of the year, COP29 hosted nearly 190 countries and more than 550,000 attendees.

And while the $300 billion per year that developed nations pledged toward climate efforts fell short of what many had hoped for, the November conference was still deemed a success. Guterres called it “a base from which to build.”

Behind that success was a secure, high-bandwidth network that enabled all manner of seamless connections, communications, and audience experiences — and which was planned, configured, implemented, and run by principal technology partner Cisco, in particular, the company’s CX Services team.

“When COP29 was first being discussed,” said Elnar Asadov, head of ICT for COP29 Azerbaijan, “we recognized that IT would be one of the key components of this event. And for this reason, we invited one of the leading technology companies, Cisco, to collaborate with us.”

Of course, in addition to being secure and hyper-connected, for an event like COP29 the network needed to be more energy efficient.

And Asadov was on hand last week at Cisco Live in Amsterdam to receive a Customer Hero Sustainability Leader Award from the Cisco CX team. This award recognizes customers who are actively achieving their sustainability goals by collaborating with Cisco products, solutions, and services to minimize their own environmental impact while helping promote sustainable practices. 

James Turrell, Cisco's head of customer experience (CX) marketing, highlighted why the COP29 ICT team was singled out for this highly competitive award.

“Under the leadership of Elnar Asadov,” he said, “the team partnered with Cisco Customer Experience to embrace the principle of “One Team, One Family, One Goal.” Together, they built and deployed a secure, automated, and energy-efficient network infrastructure in an impressive timeframe of just three months.”

A tight timeline meets powerful commitment 

When Cisco won the contract, Ahmed Sobhy, a Cisco customer experience manager who was involved with the engagement from the start, knew it would be challenging. Cisco had been involved in previous COPs — COP27 in Egypt and COP28 in Dubai — but the timeline for COP29 was particularly tight.

“We received the confirmation by May,” Sobhy recounted, “and this gave us only three months to have everything ready for a specific milestone called proof of concept in August. That meant having the procurement, design, implementation, everything, in the span of three months. And we would have only one month after the POC to proceed with the rollout.”

But given the urgency that Guterres referenced, Cisco, the COP team, and the other technology partners knew that they were supporting a critical cause — with an opportunity to help support real change for the planet. And as the COP leadership insisted, there was zero room for downtime, latency, security breaches, or other disruptions.

“We had a very short time,” said Hind Sidawi, a Cisco customer program manager who led the COP29 engagement. “But we made the impossible happen, to be honest. Between our expertise, our guidelines, our consultancy, and between the COP team being very eager and committed, they trusted us. And working what felt like 24/7, we made it happen together as one.”

Key network infrastructure and services included Cisco SD-Access, Catalyst Center and Catalyst switches, Wi-Fi Access Points, Cisco Network Operations Center (NOC), and Cisco Identity Service Engine (ISE). Additional proactive network visibility, monitoring, and threat intelligence was provided by Cisco Umbrella, Cisco ThousandEyes, and Cisco Talos to ensure that potential breaches and disruptions were caught before they caused downtime.

The technology functioned flawlessly throughout a three-week event crammed with meetings and presentations. And while a 20-second disruption was caused by another vendor, the problem was quickly identified and remediated with the help of Cisco ThousandEyes. Beyond that, Cisco technologies supported everything from media and IPTV to audio/visual experiences and interpretation hubs, with more than 2,000 wireless connections per day.

At the same time, Cisco’s CX Expert team and NOC services provided 24/7 support in network, compute, wireless, and more.

As COP29 project governance officer Ayhan Satiji expressed, the spirit of collaboration and camaraderie built through the project.

“Cisco provided proactive service delivery, not reactive,” he said. “We acted as one team, one family. Cisco thought of us as a part of themselves, and we thought of Cisco as a part of ourselves.”

For COP29, a secure and more sustainable experience

A high-profile event like COP29 can draw all manner of hackers and cybercriminals. So, Cisco worked closely with other security vendors and the COP team to ensure that any attempts from bad actors would not lead to disruptions.

As Sidawi stressed, the attacks were expected, and when they came the teams were ready.

“In a country such as Azerbaijan, cyberattacks are an especially sensitive issue,” she said. “The team from COP highlighted this as a risk from day one, and we took this point and made sure the whole design was built around safety and security.”

Preparation, she added, was a big part of the security strategy.

“Everyone was so well prepared,” Sidawi said, “that even when there were attacks, everyone knew what to do and did not have to go into panic mode.”

“We did have some cyberattacks,” added Satiji, “but thanks to the design architecture, thanks to our team, we defended it.”

Of course, at an event centered around climate change and sustainability, an inefficient network would not be appropriate. So, Cisco’s commitment to circularity and energy efficiency were additional factors in choosing them as partners.

“The sustainability perspective was with us all the time,” said Satiji, “We used the latest technologies from Cisco in terms of energy efficiency and in the design.”

The success at Baku has the Cisco team looking to COP30, in Brazil later this year.

 “At Cisco, we believe we are a trusted partner,” Sobhy said, “and that having this customer success story will augment our position to be part of the next COP, in Brazil, and the following one in Australia.”

From the COP side, Asadov agreed.

“Of course, we hope to continue working with Cisco,” he said, “to continue the partnership for the future.”

And he repeated that it wasn’t just the technology but the cooperation and communication that cemented the partnership.

“Even when we only got one or two hours of sleep,” Asadov concluded, “it felt like one team, one family. And in the end no one wanted to go home.”