Imagine the Art of Possible with Cisco and Microsoft

Now more than ever, Cisco and Microsoft–together–are imagining the art of possible and aligning for impact. Our partnership is driven by a singular focus on providing our mutual customers with innovation and capabilities aligned to help them achieve even higher levels of success.

The strength of our partnership was on full display at this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference. If you missed it, let me share some conference nuggets from the areas of collaboration, networking, security, and delivering exceptional application experiences.

Collaborate like never before

Based on our research, 75 percent of customers use more than one video conferencing platform to get their work done. This likely includes both Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams. However, there was previously little to no integration between the two products. For instance, if you were in a conference room with an investment in Cisco Webex devices, your only option was to use Cisco Webex for video conferencing. The same situation applied to Microsoft Teams.

However, seeing the world through a customer-first lens–especially given the emergence of hybrid work as the norm–the most effective meetings may well include people using different video conferencing platforms. Therefore, Cisco and Microsoft came together and asked, “How do we best make the meeting experience seamless and flawless, realizing that the status quo no longer involves customers using one technology in one office to conduct their meetings?”

The resulting solution now includes Microsoft Teams running natively on their Webex devices, as described in the related news release. To learn more, watch the Microsoft Ignite on-demand session, Microsoft Teams to Cisco meeting room devices.

Build, connect, and operate intelligent multi-cloud networks with Azure

Just as hybrid work belongs in our customers’ new normal, so does running multi-cloud environments. For many Cisco customers, this includes connecting to Microsoft Azure. With the heightened priority of continuously delivering exceptional user experiences, our customers are turning to Cisco SD-WAN as an integral part of their enterprise WAN strategy. Therefore, Cisco SD-WAN Cloud OnRamp for Multi-Cloud has been integrated with Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN) to help ensure exceptional connectivity for Azure customers. This integrated solution helps to:

• Seamlessly instantiate SD-WAN endpoints into Azure vWAN using automation and APIs
• Extend SD-WAN policies and controls to workload Azure Virtual Networks (VNets)
• Provide a highly scalable solution for multi-regional workloads

This solution also offers secure connectivity, securing traffic to and from Azure with encrypted tunnels and integrating transparently with Azure Secured VHUB and Firewall Manager SASE.

You can learn more about this integration by listening to the Microsoft Ignite on-demand presentation, Ask the Experts: Build, Connect & Operate Intelligent Multi-Cloud Networks.

Make secure even more secure

Of course, security is on all our customers’ minds. In response, Cisco and Microsoft are partnering in several areas–for example, in establishing and expanding proactive defense with cloud-native security controls, cloud firewalls, and zero trust micro-segmentation.

To learn more, watch the Microsoft Ignite on-demand presentation, Zero Trust Micro-segmentation & Proactive Cyber Defense for Cloud Workloads and Environments. This presentation explains how to build and enforce a consistent segmentation and malware defense–leveraging enforcement points across hosts, firewalls, and cloud security controls–to protect a dynamic and complex application infrastructure using Cisco and Azure solutions.

Focus on delivering exceptional application experiences

We know that IT departments are challenged to continuously deliver exceptional application experiences, given the complex stack of application, infrastructure, network, security, and third-party services that must all work together seamlessly.

Unfortunately, when there are issues, finger pointing in war rooms trying to locate the culprit can be very time consuming and a highly inefficient use of limited IT resources. Meanwhile, latencies of mere seconds beyond expectations can lose customers for good.

To address this challenge, Cisco offers its full suite of applications on Azure–including AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, and Intersight Workload Optimizer (IWO)–to provide visibility into the entire stack, enabling IT teams to identify and remediate issues quickly. Learn more about how this solution might help you deliver exceptional application experiences by watching the Microsoft Ignite on-demand session, Cisco AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, and IWO Integration Use Case.

Cisco and Microsoft–together–committed to co-innovation

Cisco and Microsoft are committed to co-innovation and partnership to help our mutual customers be successful. In the Microsoft Ignite on-demand session, Committed to Co-innovation. Cisco + Microsoft, Jonathan Davidson, Cisco EVP of Enterprise Networking and Cloud, discusses what this means as it relates to Microsoft Azure. Not only will Jonathan share joint innovation with Microsoft, but he also shares some resulting success stories.

Now more than ever, we’re listening and responding to our customers with unrivaled innovation. We’re combining our positions of market leadership to align for impact, helping our mutual customers to continuously deliver exceptional and secure user experiences.

To learn more about our joint solutions,

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