Cisco Unites SD-WAN and Security to Address the New Cloud Edge

Cisco is unifying its security and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technologies to help organizations embrace the cloud faster with choice and confidence. 

The WAN is undergoing a radical transformation. Today, organizations host their applications in multiple clouds – public, private and SaaS. The way people work has also changed; employees connect from coffee shops and airport lounges, instead of just the office. Now, organizations must rely on the Internet to connect users to business-critical applications. This has resulted in a new Cloud Edge – the intersection of networking and security.

Until now, SD-WAN solutions have forced IT to choose between application experience or security. By evolving its SD-WAN portfolio, Cisco is addressing the new realities of the Cloud Edge. Cisco SD-WAN can help IT deliver better application experiences and make users more productive with unmatched simplicity and scale. And now, best-of-breed security can be easily enabled anywhere it is needed, from the branch to the cloud.

“The emergence of the new Cloud Edge is disrupting our customers’ network and security architectures. Today, every WAN device must become software defined and secure,” said Scott Harrell, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Networking at Cisco. “Cisco’s SD-WAN makes it easy for customers to get the very best of networking and security. We are building a bridge to a new business world that speeds our customers’ ability to unlock the power of the cloud — faster with less risk.”

Cisco SD-WAN: Simple, Secure, Scalable

Cisco SD-WAN is built to address today’s most pressing issues, yet flexible enough to tackle the challenges of tomorrow. New innovations include:

• Fusing Security with SD-WAN: From application-aware enterprise firewall and intrusion prevention, to URL filtering, advanced security is now integrated into Cisco SD-WAN devices and managed through a single pane of glass. And Cisco SD-WAN is all powered by Talos, the industry’s most powerful cyber threat intelligence solution.
• Simplifying Cloud Security Deployments: By integrating Cisco SD-WAN with Cisco Umbrella, access to malicious destinations can be blocked before a connection is ever established.
• Applications Experience: Cisco has partnered with Microsoft to enhance the Office 365 application experience for users. Unlike other vendors, Cisco SD-WAN monitors in real-time all available paths to the Microsoft Office 365 cloud. Using Microsoft Office URLs, Cisco is also able to determine the closest cloud, resulting in up to 40 percent faster performance for users.
• Open and Programmable: With open APIs, Cisco SD-WAN provides service providers and partners the opportunity to create unique new services. To help developers and network engineers innovate, Cisco DevNet has created new SD-WAN learning labs and sandboxes.
• New SD-WAN Infrastructure: With the world’s broadest SD-WAN portfolio powered by Viptela and Meraki, Cisco is offering even more options for customers with two new Integrated Services Routers (ISR) designed for small and large branch offices.
• Quick Start Service: Cisco is also helping customers accelerate SD-WAN deployments and decrease risk via a new SD-WAN Quick Start Service.  For a fixed-price, customers get access to remote implementation and knowledge transfer capabilities to streamline projects. 
• Easy to Buy and Manage: Cisco has made it easier to consume and manage the new solution. Both the network and security can be purchased through a single license model and managed through a single interface.

Documenting Network Automation Examples on DevNet Code Exchange

It’s no secret that one of the biggest challenges network engineers face when they embark on the network automation journey is the lack of concise documentation in open source projects. In many cases, I find myself digging through the code of projects to understand how to use it (therefore my preference for strong typed languages).

While documentation is important, I’d say usage examples are even more so. Think of network engineers accustomed to reading extensive configuration guides. It’s no wonder why YAML is appealing to many of us – we need concise and simple examples. Don’t get me wrong, even most senior developers spend a good amount of time searching for code examples in StackOverflow.

You don’t have to be a code contributor or an expert to help with improving the documentation of a project. These days you can create your own repo to document your findings, and that might benefit others.  For example, I recently wanted to get started with pyATS and Genie. After some research, and a lot of trial and error, I knew the best I could do to contribute back was to post what I was able to figure out.  It’s not a comprehensive guide, but might save some time to someone out there that won’t have to start from scratch.

On the other hand, if I’m writing some code for a library, I want to make sure I provide enough examples. I’ve received very valuable feedback on my IOS XR gRPC library – ranging from things I didn’t consider, to great ideas for improvement.

You can also share the code of an integration you are working on. Not long ago, someone on our team thought it would be a good idea to configure a multi-vendor network via Slack using NSO. Here are the details of the proof of concept we put together. Of course it’s possible you might not like this idea, but at least it’s a good example on how to use Slack and NSO API’s.

Is there any new technology you are playing around with? I remember when I first learned about model-driven Streaming Telemetry, I felt I was drinking from a fire hose! To help alleviate that feeling, we would create tables that store only the info we needed, which we could then put in a relational database.  Check out this example in which we showed how you could print out this data for ease of consumption.

Speaking of API’s and Streaming Telemetry, I cannot finish this without making reference to one of the most common buzzwords nowadays – “closed loop automation.” Here is my basic example using OpenConfig and ygot.

Bottom line is you don’t necessarily need to write code to contribute to opensource or publish something on GitHub. Go share your ideas, you will not only help others but also learn a lot through the process. You can find these examples and more in DevNet CodeExchange.

I hope this inspires you to document your own examples. I’m looking forward to learn from those.