Cisco Brings Analytics to SD-WAN Deployments

Few areas (if any) of the networking market today are growing faster than SD-WAN. Cisco is now aiming to help advance SD-WAN with new analytics capabilities to help organizations gain better visibility.

Among the new offerings announced by Cisco is SD-WAN vAnalytics, which is based on technologies originally built by Viptela. Cisco acquired Viptela for $610 million in May 2017.

Cisco SD-WAN vAnalytics is a cloud-delivered, software-as-a-service (SaaS) capability that provides analysis of WAN traffic patterns, as well as recommendations for corrective actions. Going a step beyond just looking at what is happening with existing or historical traffic, the vAnalytics service also enables organizations to run test scenarios and forecast how a given change might impact the network.

“The WAN is a vital part of the network and is one of the toughest to manage,” Scott Harrell, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise networking at Cisco, stated. “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 Meraki Insight

In addition to the SD-WAN service, Cisco also announced the availability of the Meraki Insight service for WAN and SaaS application performance.

Meraki is Cisco’s managed WiFi and wired network management service. Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2 billion back in November of 2012 and has expanded the platform in the years since.

With Meraki Insight, Cisco is set to provide organizations with visibility into how SaaS application performance is impacted by the WAN in order to help networking professionals resolve any potential issues.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.