Cisco expands Cisco Intersight to EMEA for sovereignty and high performance

Cisco Live EMEA

Cisco Live! is a premium event for Cisco and our partners to introduce and demonstrate new solutions, products, and capabilities. That’s what we’re doing this week with our technical preview of an expansion of Cisco Intersight tailored for our Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) customers. This is another example of the continuous innovation and customer value we’re delivering through Intersight, a multi-tenant, software-as-as-service (SaaS) platform that allows customers to bring teams, tools, infrastructure, and apps together. With the platform being hosted in Frankfurt, Germany, this marks the first time we are delivering Intersight in another region.

The technical preview will demonstrate the top capabilities that our EMEA Intersight customers will benefit from including:

1. Better compliance: Our customers will be more capable of addressing regulatory requirements around control, confidentiality of personal & sensitive data or availability, and service resilience required of all EMEA cloud services providers. An example is the ability to meet the guidelines of the Gaia-X Labelling Framework, designed to enable higher level of trust in digital platforms.
2. Seamless connection and configuration: Customers can leverage the same plug-and-play device registration and “claiming” model that they use with the existing Intersight instance. The connection and configuration changes will work seamlessly and transparently as EMEA instance users register and claim their devices on the new instance.
3. Data sovereignty without compromising UX: The EMEA instance offers the same user experience Intersight customers are familiar with. We can now showcase accounts that are in EMEA and will automatically redirect users while maintaining data sovereignty requirements.
4. Improved performance and latency: With the proximity of the Intersight instance and infrastructure in a local region, customers can enjoy the benefits of improved performance and reduced latency resulting in an overall better user experience. An example is the ability to speed up telemetry analysis and accelerating the creation of actionable insights generated by the local instance, users, devices, and data.

Under the Hood of Intersight EMEA Instance

The addition of another region is a major milestone for any SaaS platform due to its inherent operational and deployment complexities. Examples of some of the key considerations that the Intersight engineering teams addressed in migrating to a multi-region model include:

Deployment & operations: With Intersight being a distributed instance across multiple regions, we had to make the platform aware of the customer’s region for a particular session. The engineering teams also applied DevOps principles to ensure that we maintain feature parity across America and Europe.

Disaster recovery & business continuity: Improvements were made to handle the failure of availability zones in the new region thereby extending the ability of the instance to handle partial or complete outage within the region. This essentially reduces the “blast radius” of a catastrophic failure, leading to zero downtime for our customers’ mission-critical applications.

Platform infrastructure evolution: Intersight, as a SaaS offering, has expanded support to regions across geographies, powered by a modern architecture, leveraging Kubernetes, microservices and a multi-region network infrastructure. Modern service mesh technology is used for security, observability, and reliability of the network traffic between services while leveraging cloud platform constructs to provide an isolated secure environment for running Intersight services in each region.

Security: As security and compliance are at the heart of the offering, our ISO 27001 & SOC 2 Type II certification footprint are being expanded to include this new region.

Service resilience: We added critical changes to our backend infrastructure to accommodate multi-region capability for our customers. Scaling a SaaS offering to maintain high-availability and resiliency required significant architectural optimizations.

How to get started

We are now inviting our EMEA customers to participate in the tech preview of the Intersight EMEA instance. For more information, please contact the team: intersight-emea-tech-preview@cisco.com

Share: