Cisco SD-WAN Middle-Mile Optimization with Umbrella and Megaport

hello my name is aaron and i'm a technical marketing engineer on cisco's sd-wan product team in this demo we're going to explore two of cisco's newest middle mile optimization strategies umbrella sig direct peering and underlay automation via megaport we get into the demo let's quickly set up some context and answer the question what is middle mile optimization and why should you care to do that let's go back in time to how networks used to be constructed several years ago historically networks were constructed with one idea in mind connecting users to the data centers data centers were considered the crown jewels of most organizations as nearly every business critical function was hosted within them as time went on however the cloud era started to emerge and suddenly critical business resources began to be hosted outside the organization within some nebulous cloud and no longer found within the data center to further compound the issue most organizations also subscribed to a centralized internet access model meaning internet access to the cloud also came out of the organization's data centers as cloud architectures really started to ramp up this method of access to them no longer sufficed since it often carried a steep latency penalty so along comes sd-wan which ushers in a new model of internet access distributed with sd-wan organizations were free to drop internet bound traffic off locally at the branch to allow it to access the cloud resources directly and coupled with features like sd-wan cloud on-ramp it could be reasonably optimized over the internet but some organizations need more and in fact these organizations have asked how they can combine the benefits of both access models with centralized access it was easy to control and optimize cloud-bound traffic it was just inefficient with distributed access the traffic is more efficient but it's a bit harder to control and optimize this is where the notion of middle mile optimization comes into play the middle mile is that area of the internet between your organization's edge and the cloud edge at some point in your traffic's journey to the cloud chances are you'll cross the middle mile the key is how can we minimize the amount of time spent there or avoid it altogether this is where features like umbrella secure internet gateway and mega port integration come in by minimizing internet or middle mile exposure to your organization's cloud-bound traffic and directing that traffic to a regionally strategic aggregation point we can optimize underlay connectivity to and from the cloud specifically by reducing hop count latency loss and in many cases increasing bandwidth as an added benefit your cloud-bound traffic stays on the sd-wan fabric longer meaning we can apply overlay optimization to it as well now you may be wondering how umbrella secure internet gateway fits into this story as a secure internet gateway provider which services most of your organization's outbound internet traffic umbrella also maintains direct peerings with some of the world's top sas providers hence cloud-bound traffic traversing the umbrella pop can not only be secured it can easily be directed down a dedicated pipe to the cloud service provider cisco sd-wan enabled branches can automatically connect to the umbrella pop within close geographical proximity by attaching an umbrella sig template to the device template already in use here we've executed a simple ping test against the sas provider box from our windows host once our umbrella sig template has been attached this user's branch router will locate the nearest umbrella sig pop and begin directing box traffic to it over an ipsec tunnel now consider the fact that some organizations want even tighter rain on this traffic perhaps because they have even more stringent connectivity requirements minimizing middle mile exposure is great and all but what if you could dynamically stitch together the underlay path however you see fit extending the sd-wan fabric over dedicated connections towards cloud providers that are strategic to your organization we do this by extending your sd-wan fabric to mega-port co-locations within close geographical proximity to large pockets of your users just like you would with umbrella but now instead of relying on pre-built connections to sas providers you get to orchestrate the connectivity you want into the cloud service provider for instance you may decide that you want a direct connection to salesforce.com or perhaps office 365 or maybe you want to try cutting costs by foregoing aws direct connect and utilizing the high speed cross connect services offered by megaport all of this is automated through the vmanage cloud onramp for multi-cloud workflow here one of our branches lacks connectivity to one of the organization's production aws vpcs let's build a virtual cross connect from the nearest co-location we just provisioned into aws to extend our sd-wan fabric into that vpc and after a few clicks and without manually having to configure anything within the cloud service provider dashboard our user can now access these resources over an optimized connection sd-wan now ensures that our aws bound traffic is directed to the best performing path to megaport where it hops onto a more premium bandwidth with cisco sd-wan underlay automation through megaport you can create fully reliable and redundant worldwide connections between your sites and cloud applications within minutes all through the vmanage dashboard you can expect to save costs compared to mpls and cloud egress charges reduce the time to provision circuits from months to minutes with no hardware required and add reliability back to the middle mile this can ensure end-to-end consistent security policy segmentation and performance across the entire network i'd like to thank you for joining me on our brief discussion and demo of middle mile optimization interested in learning more about cloud optimization and visualization check out our other demo on cloud unread for sas enhancements with vanalytics

Channel: Cisco SD-WAN and Cloud Networking

Views: 2,205

Keywords:

Id: yDS5wozZjqs

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020