Journey Map – all paths lead to an intent-based network – Cisco Blogs

In my blog The Network of the Future: Where We’re Going, I outlined the Cisco IT networking vision and strategy.  A strategy for how our network would be smarter and faster—using automation and collecting data to enable faster innovation, cost optimization, and reduced security vulnerabilities.

A lot has changed since I wrote that blog – not the least of which is a pandemic that has changed our lives tremendously and an increasingly dynamic business environment that is adapting to keep up. Like many of you, we moved 98 percent of our workforce to a work-from-home model in just a few weeks when the pandemic hit. And in a recent study by AppDynamics,

74 percent of organizations reported that digital transformation projects that in the past would have taken a year to approve, have been signed off in a matter of weeks.

Now, we are preparing for our workforce to safely enter our offices again – offices that must allow our employees to safely connect with each other, collaborate and innovate within a hybrid working model.

Through these hurdles, the network strategy I outlined in my earlier blog continues to evolve and serve us well in supporting and responding to the . I believe that if you have an end goal of where you want to be, it helps you reach the next step in that journey. And what better place to start, than being right where our customers start their journeys.

Cisco IT has expanded its charter as Customer Zero for Cisco technologies with the goal of more fully ascertaining the value in lessons learned from real-life, scalable deployments. From enhancing the quality of our customer experience to implementing 3^rd party integrations, we’re sharing some best practices to make things better for everyone.

That’s why we’ve created an interactive network journey map that I’m positive can help IT teams across the board.

In this journey map, we are sharing the lessons learned as we progress towards an advanced networking platform. This interactive map provides you with insights into:

• What steps we’re taking to evolve our access, WAN, and data center/multicloud networks
• How these changes enable our digital transformation
• Why these steps will move us towards a more automated and intelligent intent-based model

For example, if you’re interested in “scalable access policy” you will find out from the engineers about our early strategies and experiences in deploying software-defined access, and then our latest experiences in deploying on a broad scale.

If you’re looking at how to evolve your WAN for cloud and deploy SD-WAN, you can find out how we are connecting users to increasing numbers of cloud applications.

If you’re looking for insights into data center networking operations, we share our lessons learned in deploying policy automation and network insights.

So, I encourage you to take a look at our journey map, and to come back often to track our progress and get the latest insights that could help you in your own networking journey. You might even want to develop your own journey map that meets your own organization’s business and technology priorities and vision.

Unlike some subway maps, our network transformation journey map is a simplified view of how we’re getting from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point ‘B’ – below is a useful video to help you navigate the journey map. Check it out:

Stay tuned for more and let me know if there are particular milestones you found helpful – or milestones that you would be particularly interested to learn about.

Learn more about our journey to an advanced network
architecture by clicking through our interactive journey map

Follow Cisco IT on social!

Twitter
Facebook
YouTube

Share: