Simplify your network experiences: Insights from the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SD-WAN

Simplify your WAN platform to create better experiences today and tomorrow.

Change—a word that has become synonymous with our reality. How we work, live, and connect with one another continues to change at a pace we never thought possible, making it incredibly difficult for IT to keep up. This rapid evolution has created fragmented and increasingly complex IT ecosystems that, in many cases, are not sustainable.

So, how can organizations simplify their platforms to create better experiences for users today while continuing to plan for tomorrow?

When it comes to networking, IT leaders need to look at their infrastructure holistically. Every organization is unique, with its own systems, criteria, and challenges, which means that every organization requires a different networking solution.

At Cisco, we’ve worked closely with our partners and customers to help them adapt to global supply chain issues, uncertain geopolitical and economic conditions, and unrelenting technology transitions. These partnerships have helped us accelerate our roadmap and execution but, more importantly, it has helped our customers deliver exceptional, customized network experiences.

Gartner recently announced Cisco as a leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant  for SD-WAN (previously WAN Edge Infrastructure) as well as a 2022 Gartner^® Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for WAN Edge Infrastructure. This year’s Magic Quadrant has also estimated that Cisco’s SD-WAN solutions can address the widest array of use cases for organizations of all sizes across all verticals.

“I&O leaders responsible for networking are selecting products to connect branches and remote workers to applications and other enterprise locations. They should select software-defined WAN and, increasingly, secure access service edge to connect enterprise sites to cloud workloads securely.”

— Gartner, 2022 Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN

Why does this matter?

Every IT decision made today will impact the user experiences of tomorrow, so leaders need to make choices with long-term success in mind. Analyst rankings can be a helpful tool to identify innovative partners and aid in decision making, but it’s not the only factor. Capabilities across hybrid work, security, and agility are important to consider when selecting an SD-WAN partner.

Elevate experiences faster through software

When it comes to delivering hybrid work experiences, there’s no debate that internet performance and security are critical. IT needs visibility across the internet to provide hybrid workers in multiple regions with a high-quality experience for bandwidth-thirsty SaaS applications and cloud workloads.

Building for productivity in this ever-changing environment requires new approaches, delivered seamlessly through software. Here are three examples from the past few months:

• We’re giving IT teams new ways to extend visibility across the internet, cloud, and SaaS through integrations with ThousandEyes into Meraki and Viptela SD-WAN.
• In the face of growing state-sponsored security threats, our Cisco Meraki SD-WAN team leveraged the power and reach of our cloud platform to instantaneously increase firewall throughput for thousands of customers
• And Cisco leveraged our close partnership with AWS to deliver one of the first SD-WAN integrations with AWS Cloud WAN to streamline multi-region cloud deployments.

The right security, in the right place, ahead of time

As we think about the millions of employees working from highly-distributed locations, we can’t help but think of IT teams scrambling to implement new technologies and processes to support them—all with the backdrop of volatile geopolitical events driving spikes in malicious activity—reminding us that security has never been more important.

To protect their hybrid workforce and assets, enterprises need continuously up-to-date and agile security measures automatically applied to wherever they are. Increasingly, IT is focused on security, and considering whether it should be natively integrated with connectivity or reliant on third-party integration.

This is why Cisco SD-WAN solutions natively fuse SD-WAN connectivity with advanced on-premises and cloud security. And behind it all is Cisco Talos—the world’s largest commercial threat intelligence organization—driving rapid detection and protection against known and emerging threats at internet scale.

Additionally, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) continues to gain momentum in the industry. This June, we announced a major milestone for Cisco and SASE with our unified, single-vendor SASE product, Cisco+ Secure Connect. With Secure Connect, customers can now reduce operational complexity and improve security no matter how employees are connecting to critical tools. Built on the Cisco Meraki cloud platform, Secure Connect helps customers overcome the challenges of managing more remote users, devices, applications, and data across multiple clouds, while minimizing security threats.

Continuous innovation to solve evolving challenges

Finally, it’s important to embrace a new mindset around change to ensure seamless, secure access to any application, over any network, anywhere.

As we look to the future, IT must go beyond traditional SD-WAN and look toward the use of AI to further enhance experiences, as well as more comprehensive, turnkey solutions that bring security and connectivity together.

In a complex world where change is the norm, there’s one thing IT leaders can be sure of—simplicity is everything.

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