7-minute read, including linked content

As part of our ongoing exploration of the ways in which organisations with distributed operations – and today that is everyone with remote workers, not just multi-branch businesses, municipalities, school boards, healthcare teams and the like – are migrating their businesses to the cloud, and how SD-Wan is an important part of that, we’d like to share two important documents with you:

1. An IDC white paper outlining why “SD-WAN technology has been one of the most important advancements for enterprise networks in recent years”. It includes a discussion of the benefits of software-defined WANs, including cost optimization, improved reliability of business applications, and improved productivity levels, among other things. Please click on the link to read “Business Value of Cisco SD-Wan solutions: Studying the Results of Deployed Organisations”.
2. Today’s (June 23, 2021) blog post from Cisco. This post is intended for Cisco partners, but the content is beneficial for everyone to read.

Enabling Digital Transformation with Cisco SD-WAN By Stuart Clark

“Cisco SD-WAN unlocks new possibilities with our network infrastructure, the new architecture is replacing the long-established role of the wide-area network (WAN), connecting our users at the branch office location to applications hosted on servers in the datacenters.  

Often VPN (Virtual Private Network) tunnels or Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) were implemented for segregation of data and security. This approached worked well for years, but as our customer moved into a mobile digital application world and their data move to the cloud, a new approached was required. 

It’s a multi-cloud world We live in a multi-cloud world, where using multiple clouds from multiple providers has become the new normal. Cisco SD-WAN has proven effective in helping Cisco partners accelerate their adoption of multi-cloud environments and drive business solutions for their customers. It helps them manage multiple network providers, ISP circuits, and connect branches to clouds. Cisco SD-WAN allows customers to deliver on-demand branch connectivity to their ISP and cloud providers directly from the SD-WAN controller.

Model-Driven Programmability

Adding Cisco SD-WAN programmability via the vManage REST APIs has opened even more possibilities for extending automation to any task. Such as:

• Template-driven infrastructure deployment service, allowing engineers to define building blocks and create abstractions for the deployments of required sets of resources.
• Update or delete the deployed resources with ease without many changes to the configurations.
• Provisions the reference of one resource definition to another, thus enabling the creation of dependencies and controlling the order of creation of resources.

Many Cisco partners are leveraging these APIs to create custom automated sequences for managing, monitoring, configuring, and troubleshooting the SD-WAN environment based on their specific needs.

That’s why Cisco DevNet is dedicated to delivering an excellent developer experience with SD-WAN.  It’s a dedication that pays off over many developer interactions, as they use the SD-WAN documentation, sandbox, and other resources.”

To read the post in its original and complete form, please click here.

As companies migrate more of their business applications and data to the cloud, and now that distributed networks are the norm in most industries, it’s critical to look at your cloud and network configurations from a strategic point of view.

We are experts in this area and can help.  To learn how, or simply to get more information, please feel free to contact us at i[email protected] or (416) 429-0796 or 1.877.238.9944 (Toll Free).