Cisco heralds first networking industry overhaul in 25 years
Vendor says a range of its products will be made SD-WAN compatible, with traditional networking 'completely under disruption'
Cisco has made a range of its security products available across its SD-WAN offering in reaction to what it describes as the biggest market shift in networking in more than 20 years.
Several products from Cisco's security offering - its firewalls, intrusion protection system (IPS), URL filtering and its cloud-based security from Cisco Umbrella - will become available across its SD-WAN offering.
The security services will be accessible through Cisco's SD-WAN management portal before the end of the year.
Announcing the news to members of the press at Cisco's 2018 Partner Summit in Las Vegas, SVP of enterprise networking Scott Harrell said the move is Cisco's response to the biggest market shift in the networking space in more than 20 years.
"The way a network is built has been largely the same for the last 20 to 25 years. You primarily connect to users through applications that are primarily hosted in the datacentre. And you did that over a wide area network," he said.
"This model is completely under disruption right now and is under a huge wave of change. Why is that happening and why are we undergoing this change? It is because of the rise of cloud. We all know this and we all understand this is going on, that SaaS is becoming the dominant application for the enterprise."
Harrell said that more enterprises are relying increasingly on internet connectivity as cloud-based services such as Salesforce.com, Office 365, AWS and Azure become more widely used.
"As that happens, internet connectivity becomes business critical. That thing that used to be a best effort for Cisco, now we need to make sure that it performs the best it possibly can and it has the best security. Every device that connects to the internet must become software-defined and must now become secure," he said.
"If [customers] wanted maximum security, sometimes they have to take an application compromise because they have to route everything back to their central datacentre where they have a full security stack. Or, if they wanted the best application experience, they needed to break up the traffic and get that traffic to their cloud apps as fast as possible and as close to the user as possible, but having to compromise on security."
Harrell said that the announcement from Cisco will mean "there will be no compromises" for customers using SD-WAN, something that no other competitor is able to offer.
"If you look at our competitors, almost none of them have this capability. A lot of them have good SD-WAN, but very weak security, so they have to do a mash-up with third parties which creates complexities for the end user. Or they are really good at security, but kind of mediocre at SD-WAN. Only Cisco can bring the best of security with the best of SD-WAN," he said.
Logicalis and Computacenter executives joined Cisco on stage to show their support for the move.
Logicalis' VP of security and network solutions, Ron Temske, said: "There's an expression I use with my customers: security must be the enabler of yes, not the facilitator of no. If you're using security as an excuse to slow down performance or to degrade business productivity, you're not doing it right. We have to think about how we use security as an enabler.
"That's exactly what Cisco is coming forward with. They're not only adding more security to a platform in an area that has been traditionally hard to do without drawing everything back to the datacentre, but actually enhancing the performance and bringing applications."
Cisco's VP for partner solutions, architectures and engineering, Nirav Sheth, emphasised the lucrative partner opportunity in SD-WAN.
He claims that 95 per cent of customers will deploy SD-WAN within two years, an area that IDC promises will deliver a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of up to 77 per cent in five years until 2022.
Computacenter Germany's head of networking strategy, Frank Witte, said Cisco's SD-WAN solution will provide more opportunities around advisory and managed services.
"Networking architecture hasn't changed for the last 20 years because of that centralised datacentre for traffic and application usage. But with the as-a-service model in general and the infrastructure-as-a-service model, this new connectivity needs new architectures," he said.
"SD-WAN is of course the new architecture the customer looks for. For us, we believe in practices such as advisory services around that, like proof of concept to help them on that road map to move to a new architecture. As a partner in the European market, it allows us to go back to more managed services covering SD-WAN because we are managing all the branches and office, and our customers require us to be managing the full set."
Temske added that he has observed a blurring of the lines between Logicalis' security and networking departments as SD-WAN becomes more widely used.
"If you look at our NOC and SOC offerings today, they are physically separate; they have separate staff and a separate reporting structure because that's the way those worlds have existed," he said.
"We still have a stable of customers who do not want us to cross that line; that certainly still exists. But we are seeing that blurring from a services perspective and we're dealing with that as the lines in the technology are blurring."