MELBOURNE -- Cisco today announced new innovations built to bring visibility to IT's biggest blind spot – the wide area network (WAN). Made up of disparate networks outside of the control of IT, the WAN connects employees to applications, no matter where those employees may be. The fragmented nature of the WAN means that IT often has limited ability to pinpoint problems and get real-time information. Now, Cisco is providing IT with the ability to forecast WAN problems before they happen, while quickly isolating and fixing issues when they do occur.

Over the past few years, the rise of multicloud IT environments has exacerbated the traditional complexity of the WAN and magnified its challenges. A recent IDC study discovered that almost three out of ten organizations considered network outages to be a top WAN concern, with the same number stating they need better visibility and analytics to manage application and WAN performance.

Building on the company's recent push towards intent-based networking, Cisco is driving this network revolution to the WAN. Today, Cisco is introducing new innovations to ensure IT has the vital visibility and insight into the WAN they need to keep their businesses up and running.

"We have set an ambitious goal for ourselves of transforming the entire network, from campus to branch, data center to edge," said Scott Harrell, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Networking at Cisco. "The WAN is a vital part of the network, and is one of the toughest to manage. As we bring insight into the WAN with these new innovations, we get closer to delivering end-to-end intent-based networking to help our customers eliminate downtime and save money."

Cisco provides a full portfolio of services to help accelerate a customer's journey to intent-based networking for the WAN. Services experts help customers create a customized roadmap for success, speed deployment and maximize network performance.

Cisco SD-WAN vAnalytics
Today, Cisco is introducing Cisco SD-WAN vAnalytics (based on Viptela technology). Built as a cloud-based SaaS solution, the technology provides comprehensive data, analysis and corrective actions across the WAN, including branch offices, multicloud endpoints and multiple service providers. Using vAnalytics, customers can forecast how potential policy changes to the WAN could impact application performance. It also provides intelligent recommendations on how to deliver optimal application experiences. For example, organizations can now understand how a rollout of IP-enabled security cameras or a cloud-based application across multiple branch offices could impact WAN infrastructure. Then, vAnaytics can help enterprises identify the stress points and necessary policy changes, helping customers avoid technology growing pains.

"With over 600 branch offices and more than 5,000 employees, we rely on cloud applications and an always connected workplace to serve our customers," said Peter Castle, senior network engineer, Reece Ltd. "Our business requires a secure, scalable and high performance WAN. With vManage, we can centrally deploy branch applications and services rapidly and we have been able to dramatically improve branch availability and bandwidth utilization with the rich analytics this platform provides. We are looking forward to the additional functionality we will be able to achieve with the even richer application visibility that vAnalytics will provide us."

Cisco Meraki Insight
Today, Cisco Meraki is also announcing Meraki Insight, a new tool integrated into the Meraki dashboard to help IT maintain a better end-user experience. The solution provides end-to-end visibility with application and WAN performance analytics. With Meraki Insight, customers can understand and troubleshoot both internal and external issues that can contribute to poor user experience for applications hosted in a remote datacenter or in the cloud. It helps IT achieve faster time to resolution for performance issues by more accurately pinpointing the source of the problem.

"At Extra Space Storage, as we move more and more of our business-critical applications to the cloud, it is imperative to maintain a high-performance network," said Jacob Stimpson, senior analyst, IT Business at Extra Space Storage. "Meraki Insight gives us the network and SaaS application visibility we need to quickly remediate issues and ensure a great end-user experience."

Availability

Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)