Cisco Tightens SD-WAN and Security

CISCO PARTNER SUMMIT — Cisco is invigorating the partner opportunity with the unification of SD-WAN and security. The news about this “no compromise” solution to solve customer problems was announced Tuesday at Cisco Partner Summit 2018 in Las Vegas.

By combining “best-of-breed” security with best-of-breed SD-WAN, Cisco’s goal is to balance security with application performance at the cloud edge, as delivering performance across many clouds – public, private and SaaS – moves to the forefront for businesses.

“Security is something that enterprises absolutely cannot compromise on and as a CIO you can’t compromise on the application experience,” said Scott Harrell, senior vice president and general manager, enterprise networking at Cisco. “We’re bringing SD-WAN in a way that there are no security compromises.”

To make this happen, Cisco is taking IP from its security portfolio – for example, next-gen firewall capability, intrusion detection system and URL filtering – and is integrating it via software into it SD-WAN devices, which will be able to be managed via a single pane of glass. The Cisco SD-WAN will be powered by Talos, Cisco’s cyberthreat intelligence model.

“Every SD-WAN system that goes out will have these capabilities inherent,” said Harrell.

Cisco also simplified Cisco Umbrella deployment, to augment what’s done on premises. SD-WAN will be integrated with Cisco Umbrella, the vendor’s cloud-based security, blocking access to malicious destinations before a connection is enabled.

“Work doesn’t stop when a user leaves the office. Work is wherever the user is, and Cisco Umbrella follows users in office and when they roam off the network,” said Harrell.

Addressing application performance, Cisco has teamed up with Microsoft to enhance the Office 365 experience for users — one of the most predominant applications in use today. Office 365 users using Cisco SD-WAN will see up to a 40 percent performance improvement given Cisco’s ability to determine the most optimal path to the Microsoft Office 365 cloud.

Also included in Tuesday’s announcement is new SD-WAN infrastructure that includes two new integrated services routers (ISRs) designed for small and large branch offices.

Scott Harrell

Scott Harrell

Harrell noted that there’s a big opportunity for Cisco partners to create services. To help enable that opportunity is Cisco’s DevNet community. Today Cisco said that it has created new SD-WAN learning labs and sandboxes to help partners use the open APIs and to innovate.

Cisco says today’s SD-WAN and security integration is a partner opportunity for today with the WAN transformation in full force.

“Ninety-five percent of customers around the world are going to look at some level of SD-WAN deployment capabilities within the next 24 months,” said Nirav Sheth, vice president, partner solutions, architects and engineering at Cisco. “Because the numbers of customers thinking about this new cloud edge and are looking to merge and marry SD-WAN and security together, the CAGR opportunity is significant — from 40 to 77 percent annual growth, tied to product and service.”

That’s almost a $10 billion SD-WAN opportunity worldwide by 2022, he added.

This new partner opportunity fits into what Cisco sees as the Partner of the Future, a five-pillar concept for partners to perform and transform, that it’s discussing this week at Cisco Partner Summit.

Those five pillars: Deliver secure application-centric flexibility; drive loyalty with managed services; reach new buying centers; monetize the software life cycle; and build on the Cisco platform.

Cisco SD-WAN Security and Microsoft Office 365 software availability are coming soon. The Cisco ISR 1111X-8P and 4461 are available now.