"Your voice is breaking up." How many times have we all heard or said that these past two years?  Probably second only to "You're on mute."

The world has truly changed during the pandemic, and digital transformation has accelerated for most companies. We are now supporting employees in offices as well as homes, collaborating with each other using applications that are hosted in the cloud and outside IT environments, while continuing to help the business operate at the same level or better than pre-pandemic. We are now living in a different world compared to two years ago, and at Cisco we challenged ourselves to find new ways to empower our customers to be able thrive in this new reality.

Earlier this year, Cisco shared its vision for Cisco Predictive Networks, an initiative to bring predictive capabilities across our broad portfolio of products and offerings. Based on years of technical innovation, Cisco Predictive Networks aims to unlock a new level of reliability and performance, helping customers evolve with today's demands by predicting certain application and network issues before they happen.

Today, we're excited to announceThousandEyes WAN Insights, the first pivotal step toward delivering on Cisco's vision. It's a milestone for Cisco, for ThousandEyes, and for the future of predictive networks.

The Internet is the new corporate backbone. It has no SLA, but fear not.

Cloud adoption, migration to SaaS, SD-WAN, and hybrid work are some of the major drivers in digital transformation that effectively make the Internet the new corporate backbone. This Internet has no service level agreement (SLA), and delivering a great digital experience over a best effort Internet environment is a huge challenge that organizations face. So, how do we at Cisco empower organizations to provide a great experience over an unpredictable Internet environment?

First, we provide the best view of global Internet health, covering networks as well as top SaaS applications that organizations rely on. This lets our customers proactively address major unexpected network or application issues affecting them as soon as they happen by making the desired changes either on their end or their provider's. A lot of these outages can't be predicted, and organizations need to react quickly as soon as they happen -real-time visibility is key. However, we do believe many service disruptions can be avoided if we do a better job of looking at all the data and learning from the past. This is the focus of Cisco Predictive Networks and the origination of ThousandEyes WAN Insights.

From reactive to preventative, with the power of Cisco ThousandEyes WAN Insights

WAN Insights now extends ThousandEyes Internet visibility into SD-WAN health, giving organizations the ability to look at their top applications, the experience specific sets of users are facing, and how that experience can improve by learning from past behaviors. Specifically, based on past behavior we forecast possible service disruptions (e.g., the San Jose site is likely to see disruptions to O365 between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. next Wednesday). In addition, we provide recommendations and expected improvement (e.g., changing routing for the San Jose site from Internet-A to Internet-B will provide a 20% improvement in user experience for O365). At this stage, it's a recommendation with the vision to work toward more automation in the future. Once enabled, ThousandEyes WAN Insights recommendations will also be visible in Cisco vAnalytics.

So, what does this mean for SD-WAN deployments? First, think of this technology as a guiding hand, helping you get the most out of the SD-WAN deployments, taking the guesswork out of initial policy setup and optimization. Second, as environments continue to evolve, you can fine tune based on long-term recommendations to ensure the environment delivers the best digital experience possible to your users. This truly gives you the power to move from reactive to preventative with your SD-WAN environments. It doesn't get any more real than this!

We're just getting started

While we can't predict the Internet outage caused by beavers chewing Internet cables (yes, that did happen in Canada), ThousandEyes WAN Insights represents a significant first step toward proactive problem solving and an important milestone for Cisco Predictive Networks. We love working with customers as design partners and will offer ThousandEyes WAN Insights as a private preview release while we continue to evolve the solution.

We can't wait for all our customers to experience ThousandEyes WAN Insights and maximize the digital opportunity for their business, workforce, and customers. We look forward to sharing more soon -stay tuned.

Read the product announcement blog for a deeper, technical dive:

ThousandEyes WAN Insights