As more and more enterprises move their business-critical workloads and applications to the Cloud, top of mind for many is to get the most secure and fast connection to the internet with minimal latency. The goal is moving users closer to the cloud services they are accessing. However, traffic sent over the internet is all best-effort and often prone to attacks.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is laying the foundation to help customers adapt a cloud delivered policy-based network security service model. Cisco SD-WAN integration with Umbrella enables networks to securely access cloud workloads and SaaS applications with one-touch provisioning, deployment flexibility, and optimized performance – sharing user identity in the office or remotely.
The internet core is a highway of thousands of internet service providers (ISPs) that make up the overall fabric of the internet’s topology. Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) function like highway onramps, allowing many networks to exchange traffic while shortening the overall path. Now, building Points of Presence (POPs) near IXPs means that networks can create more peering relationships but its important to understand the most valuable peering relationships are established with well-connected, first-tier internet service providers (ISPs) at the internet’s core.
It’s important to consider that the number of POP’s does not necessarily increase speed. Customers may falsely assume that connection latency decreases when a vendor’s POP is physically located closer to the ISP POP that serves as a connection point for the customer’s network and devices. Yet the shortest path between the ISP and the vendor may require an excessive number of intermediate stops due to a lack of peering or transit relationships.
The internet’s topology and the geographic location of users on roaming computers or mobile devices is always changing, hence Cisco Umbrella leverages anycast routing, enabling every server at every POP to advertise the same IP address globally. This allows our customers to always connect to the same IP address — regardless of variable internet topology or geographic location.
Cisco Umbrella has Direct Peering from Regional Data Centers to more than 1000 network operators (ASN), including leading Service Providers, SaaS and IaaS providers and a Global footprint of 20+ Regional Data Centers, expanding to 32+. With direct peering, customers get a secure, high performance and low latency path to their applications.
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This integrated architecture with ease of automation builds secure connections in minutes and will enable Cisco Customers to take advantage of a global footprint of secure cloud-edge gateways with direct peering to many service providers – IaaS and SaaS vendors. This also offers unified control and orchestration to deploy enterprise segmentation and application experience optimization, due to the predictable performance and latency controls across global SASE services.
In addition, Cisco customers get the advantage of using Cisco DNA Premier licenses for Cisco’s SD-WAN management platform, vManage, to software-define their cloud interconnects to multicloud, and SaaS and Cisco Umbrella integration for Cloud Security and direct peering.
Learn more about Cisco SD-WAN and Umbrella Integration and Cisco Umbrella global network
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