Policy and assurance integrations between technology domains (Campus, WAN, DC and Cloud)
Large and medium-sized organizations need to adopt a holistic network infrastructure strategy to cope with the unique performance, security, and management challenges of highly distributed applications, data, users, and devices. Legacy approaches that have relied on manual processes to secure data and applications and control access to them are no longer adequate or sustainable.
The networking industry has recognized these challenges and is addressing them in the form of an intent-based architectural approach that builds on software-defined networking to allow continuous, dynamic network alignment with IT and business policies. This means that application, security, and compliance policies can be defined once and enforced and monitored between any groups of users or things and any application or service – or even between application and services themselves – wherever they are located.
To achieve this desired outcome requires an intent-based network architecture across all network domains, including campus, branches, SD-WAN, and private and public clouds. Cisco can help IT teams achieve this goal by guiding customers in a step-by-step journey that prioritizes their technology investments and accelerates intent-based infrastructure deployments across all of these domains.
Cisco’s intent-based networking solutions extend across campus and branch access networks with Cisco DNA, across the WAN with Cisco® SD-WAN, and across distributed application environments with Cisco ACI™. We are now taking steps to apply policy and assurance integration across these domains to enable consistent performance, compliance, and security enforcement that allows IT and business intent to be expressed in one domain and then exchanged, enforced, and monitored across all of them.
We are implementing our strategy toward this multidomain, intent-based networking with the following integrations:
● Cisco ACI with Cisco AppDynamics®
● Cisco ACI with Cisco SD-Access
● Cisco ACI with Cisco SD-WAN
● Cisco SD-Access with Cisco SD-WAN
● Comprehensive and consistent security over all domains
Cisco ACI with AppDynamics integration — identify problems faster by correlating applications and network data:
● Monitor performance, improve performance and provide consistent security for your business applications wherever they go
● Enable visibility into application tiers and their correlation with networking constructs
● Correlate application health and network constructs for optimal application performance, deeper monitoring, and faster root cause analysis
● Cross-launch Cisco ACI, AppDynamics, and SD-Access to correlate network and application data
● Through a single pane of glass, consistently enforce segmentation policy based on the user’s security profile as they access resources within the data center
● Enable security administrators to manage segmentation seamlessly from end to end, from user to application
● Provide a common and consistent identity-based microsegmentation capability from user to application
● Define application Service-Level Agreement (SLA) parameters once in the data center and propagate to SD-WAN automatically
● Let SD-WAN select the best path and prioritize the traffic appropriately through to the campus and branch user. Enable an optimum application experience
● Enforce identity-based access control throughout the enterprise, even between sites across the SD-WAN
● Avoid slow and complex tunneled links between sites
● Limit user and device access to protected resources, sensitive data, and critical applications with end-to-end segmentation
● Protect users no matter where they are, and the applications they are accessing – whether on the internet or in the data center or cloud – with comprehensive security applications.
