Avatar

Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge InfrastructureWe are excited to announce that Gartner has again recognized Cisco as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure. Cisco SD-WAN solutions enable customers to deliver a secure, predictable digital experience for today’s hybrid workforce, build dynamic, smart workspaces, and secure multi-cloud environments, accelerating the transition to a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)-enabled architecture.

The workloads placed on today’s networks are more dynamic and distributed than ever before, and the requirement to support these radical new use cases are most acutely felt in the WAN. IT must provide connectivity to a new class of hybrid users, mission-critical cloud applications, and a vast array of connected devices, while also ensuring an optimal experience for every interaction. These bridges between internally hosted, IaaS-hosted, and SaaS applications require end-to-end security and governance to protect enterprise data across sites. And as more application traffic migrates outside corporate borders, these teams need better solutions for visibility and automated troubleshooting across the digital experience. And this trend towards distributed complexity is only accelerating.

Cisco SD-WAN: Seamless, Secure and Optimized

To provide our customers with a trusted platform and technology leadership, Cisco SD-WAN offers capabilities that go beyond the traditional software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN). From enabling multicloud access, to securing infrastructure against the latest threats, to delivering optimized insights, in our opinion Cisco is the expert who can best help businesses deliver exceptional network experiences, across locations.

Cisco SD-WAN enables us to securely leverage AWS as a worldwide transit network. The time to connect
can be very fast
reduced to the time to send the router to the remote site, which is less than a week.”
– Adrien Geniller, Lead Network Architect, ENGIE

Seamless Multicloud Access: To start, Cisco SD-WAN provides the industry’s leading multicloud integrations, delivering unified policy across all major clouds, an optimal experience for SaaS applications, and automated, cloud-agnostic branch connectivity with cloud interconnect. Our extensive cloud integrations with providers like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Megaport, and Equinix enable customers to automate seamless connectivity to any site-to-cloud, site-to-application, and site-to-site configuration with flexibility, security, and scale.

Security your way: Next, Cisco SD-WAN solutions provide integrated security and network policy controls for on-premises and cloud-native SASE environments integrated with cloud-delivered Cisco Umbrella®, to protect against security blind spots and cyberthreats. These solutions leverage Cisco Talos, the industry’s-leading visibility, actionable intelligence, and vulnerability research group that drives rapid threat detection and protection for Cisco customers. Across our Viptela and Meraki SD-WAN portfolio, we help customers secure their cloud edge and support flexible, high-performance and consistent policy management across on-premises or cloud-managed solutions.

Optimized with Insights: Finally, the integration of Cisco ThousandEyes with Cisco SD-WAN delivers enhanced visibility that goes beyond the traditional network boundaries into the Internet, cloud, and SaaS. ThousandEyes enables customers to quickly pinpoint the root cause of network issues, correlate app behavior with underlying network performance, and translate real-time data into actionable insights that matter.

Cisco SD-WAN: The cornerstone of SASE

“Cisco SD-WAN Security delivers simplicity and automation so that we can apply the right security controls where
needed, when needed. We are excited to bolster that solution with the Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform solution.”
 Joachim Sinzig, Dir Product Management , Riedel Networks

At Cisco, we are uniquely positioned to help customers by providing solutions that include the consolidation, ease of deployment, and management that you need to scale your business and provide effective security for users anywhere they choose to work – without a degradation in speed, performance, or user experience. As SASE architecture evolves, each organization will travel their own unique journey when implementing SASE. For many organizations, their journey towards a SASE (Secure Access Services Edge) strategy starts with Cisco SD-WAN. While the success of a SASE implementation rides on multiple factors, from architecture, performance, and experience requirements, the fastest path to an effective SASE implementation are unlocked by working with a single vendor who can bring together best-in-class networking, security, and observability—while offering the flexibility and investment protection to transition to the cloud at your pace. Cisco provides all the building blocks of a SASE architecture today, brought together in a single offer.

Cisco is proud to be named a 2021 Magic Quadrant Leader for WAN Edge Infrastructure by Gartner. We are delivering our vision to combine our best-in-class networking, security, and observability capabilities to deliver seamless, secure access to any application, over any network, anywhere users work.

 

Check out our Intent-Based Networking video channel.

Subscribe to the Networking blog

 

 


Gartner, Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, Jonathan ForestNaresh SinghAndrew LernerEvan Zeng, 20 September 2021
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Cisco.


Authors

Prashanth Shenoy

Vice President of Marketing

Enterprise Networking and Mobility