04 Network

Become cloud-ready

Is your network up to the task of
cloud collaboration?

Your collaboration investment’s success depends on your network

Effective collaboration demands reliable performance for real-time audio and video data.

Making that happen requires an intelligent network that can apply traffic-shaping and optimization policies. Using these, you can ensure that real-time voice and video data is delivered optimally, and that users don’t experience drop-outs or unpredictable call quality.

Your provider’s cloud environment is critical

Many collaboration providers deliver their solutions via public cloud environments.
These environments have a large amount of traffic flowing through them at any given
time—from streaming television shows to gaming and music.

Fluctuating demand on these platforms can cause unpredictable traffic spikes and poor performance.
For your collaboration strategy, that can cause issues like unusable voice and poor video quality.

Since this issue is rooted in your provider’s cloud, your IT team has little ability to address it.
Investments in bandwidth and traffic-shaping on internal networks can quickly be negated by
bottlenecks and inefficiencies within the provider cloud.

How to deliver a cloud-ready network

A cloud-ready network is critical to ensuring
performance from your hybrid strategy.
Here’s what you need:
• An intelligent network that provides automation
• The ability to define application SLA policy
• Real-time monitoring and visibility
• Application-aware traffic routing that determines
the optimal path
• A cloud provider leveraging a dedicated
network that’s designed for voice, video, and
meetings traffic

Making hybrid cloud collaboration possible

Cisco Global Webex Backbone and
our collaboration cloud

At Cisco, we provide Webex customers with a dedicated cloud environment for all their collaboration traffic.

Once data leaves customers’ internal networks, it flows through a collaboration-only cloud that ensures optimal
performance and traffic flow for the real-time voice and video data. This approach provides a higher level of consistency than competitive, public-cloud-based solutions. It also ensures that our hybrid cloud customers get optimal performance
from their collaboration investment.

We’ve also connected this dedicated collaboration cloud with the Cisco Global Webex Backbone: a dedicated network designed solely for the transport of real-time collaboration data such as video, audio and shared content. It ties together our cloud data centers, ensuring that data has an optimal, bottleneck-free route from user to user.

Oftentimes, connecting collaboration solutions to cloud platforms over the top of the Internet introduces challenges such as an unknown data-traversal path, unknown latency, or no way to ensure quality of service. These challenges can lead to inconsistent performance in users’ collaboration experiences.

To remedy this challenge, Cisco offers Webex Edge, which is designed to minimize collaboration data’s exposure on the public Internet. Webex Edge provides secure, private peering links between networks and the Global Webex Backbone. With these links, enterprises gain more control of the traffic policy, resulting in consistent performance while greatly reducing PSTN charges for meetings.