Ed Cho is a Strategic Partner Marketing Manager at Cisco where he is focusing on Cisco's partnership with Microsoft around the cloud and data center. Prior to joining Cisco in 2013, Ed has accumulated a diversity of experiences by working in the healthcare, technology, and media /entertainment space.

This is a guest post by Ed Cho.

Since the inception of our strategic partnership in 2014, Cisco and Microsoft have worked diligiently to combine our respective strengths in the data center and cloud services into game changing solutions that empower our joint customers and partners. True to this objective, we are proud to announce the availability of Cisco's Cloud Service Router (CSR) 1000V within Microsoft's Azure Marketplace, thereby providing our joint customers and partners with access to a ready made virtual routing solution that brings enterprise-class networking features to users of public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure.

Connecting to the Cloud Can Be a Road Filled with Bumps

Businesses such as yours understand the strategic importance of leveraging the cloud as a means to lower costs and to respond to customer needs and business trends in a fast and agile manner. As the case with many cloud users, you are most likely using your Internet connections to connect to public and hybrid cloud providers. However, as you seek to host more of your business critical data and applications in the cloud you may find that this traffic will be competing with non-business critical Internet traffic, making security and performance of WAN connections a top priority.

This is important to consider because deploying the right cloud technology is easier said than done. Identifying and selecting the right cloud strategy matters tremendously and failure to implement the best cloud infrastructure to support that strategy can result in sub-optimal performances in the form security issues, network integration problems and high latency to name a few which can affect your business and bottom line. These challenges can be especially acute if you are a small to mid-sized businesses that lacks the budget and IT resources of larger, enterprise level organizations.

How the Cisco CSR 1000V Provides You with a Smoother Access to the Cloud

Yet, through Cisco's Cloud Service Router (CSR) 1000V, you can now even the playing field by accessing this innovative and easy to deploy solution that allows you to extend your services and applications through public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure.

How does this work? At a high level, the CSR 1000V does this by providing a cloud-based router that is deployed on a virtual machine (VM) instance on x86 server hardware.  Unlike similar products that offer just gateway or security features, the CSR 1000V is a complete multiservice cloud-networking platform offering scalable enterprise-class routing features, IPSEC technologies like DMVPN, FlexVPN and SSL VPN, Zone-Based firewall, and Application Visibility and Control . At the core of the CSR 1000V is a modular architecture that allows you to add more services to meet changing business and user demand.

Additionally, through Cisco CSR 1000V, your business will now be able to receive enterprise network services that result in point-to-point connectivity so that all your remote locations and users get direct and highly secured and cost effective VPN access. This can provide you with advanced multitenant VPN capabilities that can expand your service business opportunities, help you realize cost savings of up to 80%, and improve your competitive positioning and customer service

Over the coming weeks, we will dive deeper into how the CSR 1000V-combined with the Microsoft Azure platform-can elevate your business by transforming your datacenter and completing your journey into the cloud.

To download the CSR 1000V for Microsoft Azure, please visit the Microsoft Azure Marketplace where you can download Cisco CSR 1000V.