Experience can be defined as, "having been affected by direct observation or participation." It's no secret that the business world is becoming intensely user-focused and experience-driven. If we look at most technological advancements of recent times, they all have one thread in common -creating and delivering greater unified experiences.

As enterprises accelerate their transition to a Cloud operating model, global IT teams must manage the complexity of securely connecting resources across all edges to all workloads from anywhere. The need to improve application performance to provide a delightful end-user experience, greater network insights to remediate operational issues, and increase overall resilience to support an always-on hybrid workforce has become more important than ever. Keeping pace with evolving business imperatives in this experience-centric era, organizations need to drive multi-cloud and hybrid cloud enablement, ensure high-quality user experiences, enforce security and enhance network visibility.

Cisco continues to deliver on its promise of innovations that places experience at the center of this new era of hybrid work and digital business.

The latest Cisco SD-WAN release (17.9) allows our customers to deliver -secure site-to-cloud connectivity, visibility into the application experience, scalable SD-WAN Multi-Region Fabric deployment, seamless and secure connectivity for a remote workforce, and security based on identities.

Secure site-to-cloud connectivity

Supporting multi-cloud environments, Cisco SD-WAN now ensures that site-to-cloud traffic traversing the private backbone of middle-mile providers like Equinix or Megaport is encrypted end-to-end. Cisco extends the SD-WAN fabric over the private underlay all the way into the cloud, enabled by hosting the virtual SD-WAN routers in transit VPCs/VNETs of AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. For high availability requirements, Cisco SD-WAN also ensures automatic traffic steering to alternate or secondary paths for the site-to-cloud traffic, when the primary private underlay path is unavailable.

Visibility into the application experience

Cisco vAnalytics now provides enhanced insights and automation for Microsoft 365 network routing by providing visibility into network quality of Experience (QoE) metrics and Microsoft telemetry metrics for each available path. Microsoft 365 path analytics provides visibility into which path is being used by Microsoft 365 traffic over a period of time. This enables monitoring of the traffic and provides insights to improve the application experience.

Scalable SD-WAN Multi-Region Fabric deployment

Many organizations are evolving their WAN architectures as they increase multi-cloud adoption, optimize the SaaS application experience, and transition to a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) model. Cisco SD-WAN Multi-Region Fabric -a new foundational capability provides the ability to easily divide a single Cisco SD-WAN overlay network into multiple regions and a central core-region network for managing inter-regional traffic. . Cisco SD-WAN Multi-Region Fabric is also a core enabler for WAN architectures involving a middle-mile WAN. Cisco SD-WAN Multi-Region Fabric offers Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and global enterprises the capabilities to enhance, scale up, and more importantly, simplify Cisco SD-WAN fabric across regions.

Seamless and secure connectivity for remote workforce

Reliably and securely connecting users from offices, homes, and just about anywhere has become a critical success factor in today's environment where mobility is pervasive. To enable organizations to achieve seamless and secure connectivity, we now offer the Cisco Catalyst Wireless Gateway (CG113).  This simple-to-deploy wireless router is designed to empower the remote workforce to connect and collaborate like never before. Flexible Wi-Fi 6 and LTE failover deliver a consistent application experience with enterprise Wi-Fi connectivity and security extended to the remote workforce. Agile deployment and ongoing management are automated through the Cisco SD-WAN dashboard. With a small and silent form factor, the CG113 is non-invasive to a home office.  The Cisco Catalyst Wireless Gateway can be used either as a standalone wireless home router or integrated with Cisco SD-WAN Remote Access (SD-WAN RA).

Security based on identities

With the convergence of networking and security, user/device identity in policies has become a primary requirement for implementing security in a more meaningful way. Cisco vManage integration with Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) applies policies based on identity enabling customers to configure (Zero Touch network Access (ZTNA) policies based on usernames and user-group names. ISE interfaces with external Active Directory (AD) to provide user identity mapping. Security policies based on Network constructs such as IP, Protocols, Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), and Geo Locations might not support new hybrid work use cases. This feature enables fine-grained control with security policies based on identity. It simplifies policy management and improves operational efficiency by allowing IP addresses to change for devices while keeping policies constant.

As the business world continues to evolve to an agile hybrid work environment, we know our customers are looking for simpler, more agile ways to operate. Cisco SD-WAN offers capabilities that go beyond the traditional software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN). Cisco SD-WAN ensures your IT has the best networking infrastructure to connect users reliably and securely across multi-cloud, branch, data centers, and hybrid workforces and deliver superior experiences with enhanced network visibility.

No matter what stage you are at in your journey, take the next step and let Cisco SD-WAN help deliver a unified experience for you, your customers, and your workforce.

Learn more about the latest Cisco SD-WAN innovations

Additional Resources:

Cisco SD-WAN Multi-Region Fabric Video