Configuring Cisco Security with Amazon VPC Ingress Routing

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a new capability in Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networking that is designed to make it easier and more efficient for Cisco Security customers to deploy advanced security controls in the cloud. This new capability is called Amazon VPC Ingress Routing. It allows users to specify routes for traffic flowing between a VPC and the internet or from a VPN connection, such as a private datacenter.

Amazon VPC Ingress Routing is a service that helps customers simplify the integration of network and security appliances within their network topology. With Amazon VPC Ingress Routing, customers can define routing rules at the Internet Gateway (IGW) and Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) to redirect ingress traffic to third-party appliances, before it reaches the final destination. This makes it easier for customers to deploy production-grade applications with the networking and security services they require within their Amazon VPC.

While the remainder of this post focuses on Cisco’s NGFWv and ASAv products, this capability can also be used to deploy a number of other network-based security solutions into the AWS traffic path. This includes services such as the following:

◉ Firewall policy enforcement
◉ Network traffic visibility
◉ Malware detection
◉ URL filtering
◉ Intrusion Prevention
◉ DNS security

This is a big win for Cisco customers deploying our security products in AWS, and we are pleased to have been an early adopter and Integration Partner with AWS on this launch.

How to Use Amazon VPC Ingress Routing with Cisco Firewalls

The configuration is achieved by creating a custom route table and associating subnet routes with the private Elastic Network Interface (ENI) of the security appliance, and then associating the public ENI with an IGW and VGW. A single firewall instance can protect multiple subnets; however, a separate instance is needed per VPC. Below are some details on the testing we performed as well as sample use cases and configuration guidance.

Use Cases / Deployment Scenarios

Cisco NGFWv/ASAv can be deployed in a VPC to protect the following traffic flows:

◉ Traffic Traversing an Internet Gateway (IGW) To/From the Internet
◉ Traffic Traversing a VPN Gateway (VGW) To/From a Remote VPN Peer

Benefits of Using Amazon VPC Ingress Routing with Cisco’s NGFWv and ASAv

◉ Offload NAT from the firewall to AWS network address translation (NAT) gateway or instance
◉ Simplify protection of multi-tier applications spanning subnets and VPCs
◉ The scalable design makes it easy to add new subnets, and more of them
◉ Enables bi-directional, threat-centric protection for traffic bound for private networks and the internet

POC Deployment Scenario

Enable outbound Internet connectivity and offload NAT function to AWS NAT gateway

In this scenario, the Cisco Firewall (NGFWv or ASAv) is deployed between internal services in the AWS VPC and the internet. The route table for the Internet Gateway (igw-rt) has a specific route for the Inside subnet which directs inbound traffic to the Cisco Firewall for inspection. Prior to this enhancement, the users had to NAT egress traffic on the firewall to bring back the reply packet to the same virtual appliance. This new configuration eliminates the need for an ENI on the firewall and removes the requirement to perform NAT on the firewall, thus improving performance.

Cisco NGFW/ASA with AWS IGW (routable attached to IGW) and AWS NGW to NAT outbound traffic

Cisco NGFW/ASA with Multiple Subnets, Three-tier Architecture Using IGW and Amazon VPC Ingress Routing

This topology expands on the previous​, demonstrating how multiple subnets can be protected by a single firewall. By utilizing the AWS NAT Gateway service, the number of protected subnets behind a single firewall can be scaled significantly beyond what was previously possible.

As with the previous architecture, the ​Cisco Firewall is deployed at the edge in routed mode, forwarding outbound traffic to the IGW. Multiple routes are configured in the IGW’s route table to direct the traffic back to the appropriate subnet while the protected subnets forward their traffic to the internal firewall interface via the NAT gateway.

Cisco NGFW/ASA three-tier Architecture with AWS IGW and VPC Ingress Routing

Cisco NGFW/ASA with Multiple Subnets, Three-tier Architecture Using VGW and Amazon VPC Ingress Routing 

Cisco Firewalls can also be deployed in an Amazon VPC to inspect traffic flowing through a VPN tunnel. In this case, the ​Cisco Firewall is deployed at the edge in routed mode, forwarding outbound traffic to the to a VGW. In this example, the local and remote networks are routable; therefore, the NAT gateway can be eliminated, further improving efficiency and reducing cost.

Cisco NGFW/ASA three-tier Architecture with AWS IGW and VPC Ingress Routing

In Addition to Support for Amazon Ingress Routing, we are adding AWS Security Group management to Cisco Defense Orchestrator (CDO). We are also extending the existing ACI policy-based automation for L4-7 services insertion to the AWS cloud by leveraging Amazon VPC ingress routing. These integrations will make deploying L4-7 services in a hybrid cloud as well as Cisco Security at scale in AWS easier than ever.

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Automated Cloud Infrastructure: Extending ACI and AWS integration

It’s the time of the year – AWS re:invent 2019 is happening this week. Cisco and AWS customers deploy workloads and applications in both their own data centers and the AWS cloud today and look forward to even better integration to achieve their infrastructure automation goals while maintaining a consistent operational model.

Cisco and AWS are extending their partnership across multiple domains such as campus, WAN, branch, data center and cloud using a policy based, automated approach. This blog will focus on how customers can leverage the new AWS capabilities and enhancements to build a better Automated Cloud Infrastructure for their data centers.

Our customers started to deploy Application Centric Infrastructure in their own data centers using Nexus 9000 fabrics 5 years ago. Key tenets of the ACI operation model have been:

1. Intent based/ policy driven automation
2. Define policy once – deploy automatically when and where needed
3. Flexible and scalable multi-tenancy
4. Automated service insertion and traffic redirection
5. Open APIs to provide network connectivity between baremetal, hypervisor, container, and cloud environments

AWS announced multiple innovations and enhancements this week:

1. AWS Outposts – provide AWS services on-premises
2. AWS VPC Ingress Routing – Inbound routing control for more efficient service insertion
3. AWS Transit Gateway – Simple and high performance connectivity between AWS VPC’s

These innovation and enhancements map very well to the ACI operational model our customers have deployed today.

ACI extension to AWS Outposts

AWS Outposts are Amazon’s on-premise services for running applications that require the lowest possible latency or that have local data-processing requirements. Earlier this year, we announced availability of Cisco Cloud ACI on AWS for hybrid clouds. Therefore, extending ACI enterprise-grade networking to AWS Outposts becomes very easy. As Figure 1 shows customers can now leverage Cisco Multi-Site Orchestrator to manage ACI fabrics on premises, Cloud ACI instances in the AWS cloud, as well as AWS Outposts instances connected to ACI or NX-OS Nexus fabrics all at the same time.

Key benefits of using ACI with AWS Outposts for our customers are:

• Enterprise-grade network connectivity
• Consistent segmentation (e.g. zones, tenants)
• Automated service insertion and service chaining (more on this below)
• End-to-end visibility and troubleshooting

Figure 1: ACI extension to AWS hybrid cloud and AWS Outposts

A more detailed solution brief discussing how to connect AWS Outposts to existing Cisco Nexus data center fabrics is available here.

ACI integration with AWS VPC Ingress Routing

Amazon VPC Ingress Routing is a service that helps customers simplify the integration of virtual network and security appliances within their AWS VPC network topology. ACI enables customers today to define policies for automated service insertion and chaining. Many customers are using that functionality in their on-premises data centers. With the availability of AWS VPC Ingress Routing they will be able to use the same policy based approach for their AWS network designs as well.

Key benefits of using ACI with AWS VPC Ingress Steering

• Enterprise-grade service chain functionality for hybrid cloud

• Consistent service insertion for cloud native and 3rd party L4-& service appliances in AWS cloud and on-premises

• Automated service insertion and service chaining

Figure 2: ACI Automated Service Insertion in Hybrid Cloud

ACI Integration with AWS Transit Gateway

AWS Transit Gateway provides efficient and high performance interconnect between multiple AWS VPCs. The integration with Cisco ACI will provide customers the ability to maintain and manage their multi-tenant on-prem data center environment while automating connectivity to multiple AWS VPC instances in the cloud connected through AWS TGW.

Figure 3: ACI Integration with AWS Transit Gateway

Key benefits of using ACI with AWS Transit Gateway

• Enterprise grade segmentation and multi-tenancy

• Enable higher inter-VPC throughput provided by AWS TGW

• Secure automated connectivity from on-premises to AWS TG

Cisco ACI and AWS integrations enable customers to also simplify their day2operations by providing a single pane of glass (Multi-Site Orchestrator) for visibility, troubleshooting their network connectivity and segmentation across on-premises and cloud environments.

In addition to enabling the above innovations, we are also helping customers to accelerate their automated cloud infrastructure deployments through a ‘Cisco Cloud ACI’ promotional offer.

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Weathering the Storm with Webex

Webex tools for disaster relief 

Storm Emma hit the coasts of Ireland in late February 2018. Towns and cities across the country were slammed with the bleakest snowstorm in almost half a century as a cold front travelling in from mainland Europe plunged the country to record low temperatures and buried many regions in over 2 feet of snow. Gale force winds compounded the relief efforts causing widespread disruptions to roads, rail and air travel. As a national emergency was declared, a co-ordination team assembled in Dublin to liaise with multiple authorities handling the response efforts across the country.

Recently, I met with Bryan Humphreys, Information and Communications Technology Project Leader for Cork County Council, to discuss his local authority’s response to the storm.  Bryan explained the unique challenges his team faced, “Cork County is the largest local authority by geographic area in Europe. However not only is it a large region, we are responsible for a county which has remote areas with mountainous and rugged terrain, and over 1,000 kilometres of coastline. We needed to equip our emergency teams to deal with all situations and to empower them with real-time and relevant information at their fingertips to allow for rapid and safe responses, especially during such conditions experienced with Storm Emma.”

County Cork’s rugged coastline and terrain

Responding to a natural disaster

Bryan and his team deployed Webex in late 2017 after witnessing other collaboration tools failing to deliver on original promises. Initial deployment started with a Webex Board in the Cork city headquarters and the team rapidly expanded their footprint in the ensuing months. Bryan’s team and the local authority make use of Webex devices and Webex Teams daily but the challenges which came with Storm Emma really exemplified to Bryan the power of the integrated Webex platform.

“Some of our response officers were equipped with tablets running Webex Teams letting us share critical information such as weather forecasts, maps and building blueprints. Our teams on the ground were able to respond effectively and efficiently in these life-threatening conditions. Our incident response vehicles were equipped with Cisco Webex devices which allowed our teams to join meetings from isolated and inhospitable areas. In some instances, we had remote teams dialled into a Webex session which ran for over 9 hours!”

“I can give examples of how first responders used Webex Teams to share insights into weather patterns to ensure their job was executed as efficiently and safely as possible, ensuring our responders returned home safely at the end of the day.”

“The Cisco Collaboration solution allowed us to run our crisis management team remotely. Back in our Cork offices in the south west of Ireland, we used the Webex Board to dial into national central crisis management meetings with government agencies situated out of Dublin.”

“Webex is now so central to our operations that we could not have managed such efficient responses to incidences without it. We have several Webex Boards in our offices in Cork, we’re using Webex Share in our meeting rooms, and our departments collaborate on Webex Teams. We’re looking at developing pods in our offices with DX80 units and the Webex platform opens up the possibility for remote working.”

For Bryan and his team, choosing Webex brought collaboration to new heights. “For us it was a no brainer. The quality and ease of the Webex platform was excellent, and in responding to some of the worst storms to ever hit Ireland, the Cisco Collaboration solution has been pivotal to our communications. Other local authorities in Ireland are now witnessing the power of the Webex platform and what we’re achieving in Cork and they too are exploring Webex as a model for their teams.”

The power of Webex has become central to Cork County Council’s response to national emergencies with storms becoming more commonplace with changing climate patterns not just in Ireland but around the globe. Cork County Council’s use of Webex and its applicability both in responding to emergencies and in an everyday working flow exemplifies the power of Cisco’s Collaboration tools and how Webex Teams can solve local authority’s collaboration needs.

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Automated Networks for Flexible Manufacturing Cell’s

Competing in the industry as a manufacturer isn’t just about controlling costs. It’s about building an agile company that can deliver exactly what the market demands—today and tomorrow. Yet as product lifecycles get shorter every day, it doesn’t make things any easier in a mass production environment. So meeting customer needs today now requires you to not only keep operations efficient but also flexible—So you can respond quickly to each specific customer order and scale to the ever-demanding needs of the operations and manufacturing teams. 

Manufactures have been faced with a dilemma. A dilemma they only deal with when orders are not shipping.  For instance there is the minimum equipment needed to make the product which has a known but more often an unknown maximum yield. The schedule is based on the time it takes to make product which is equal to or less than the maximum yield of the machine.  When the yield falls below the schedule the unit profit is then lost and may be unrecoverable.  What makes this more difficult is that production lines are built for long runs of a given product.  These productions lines are not easily changed to build a different product.

This inability to change easily creates a financial boundary for many manufactures.  They won’t even attempt low volume production thus keeping some products off the market entirely or the manufacturing is moved offshore to a location with a low labor rate for manual manufacture. 

Manufactures have long wanted to be able to accurately measure yield.  Improve yield and you improve profits.  This assumes the schedule to meet orders approaches 100%.  If the orders for a given product falls can the line be easily reconfigured for another product?

One of the systems that may also need to be reconfigured is the network.  Cisco has been working to make network changes easy, even automated.  Therfore it was fortunate to come across the folks at the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (C-CAM) near Richmond Virginia.  They have just received a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to research the viability of the flexible manufacturing cell.  The purpose is to develop a profitable easily reconfigurable production cell for short and varied production runs.

To get the data from the production equipment will require a well–connected network.  So that well–connected network can and should include data collection via embedded edge computing.  Security for in plant and remote access to the data.   We believe that C-CAM is onto something that can revolutionize manufacturing in the U.S. and Cisco is proud to be participating with NIST and C-CAM in this endeavor. 

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Nexus and MDS Management & Automation Made Simple!

As customers move to architect their data centers to support cloud model to enable them to respond quickly to business needs, software management and orchestration plays a key role in making that happen. Simply put you need software that easily integrates with existing infrastructure and provides ease of fabric automation and flexibility, visibility, troubleshooting and operation.

DCNM Dashboard with Customizable Dashlets

Cisco Data Center Network Management (DCNM) has evolved over the years to support such function and need for Nexus switches. The power of the NX-OS with DCNM can accelerate IT efficiencies operational model.

Let’s look at the newly released DCNM version 10 with the built-in data base and high availability:

Fabric automation – DCNM allows customers in Day 0 operation to make big fabric deployments easy, leading to lowered Opex. With Power-On Auto Provisioning (POAP), validated templates and definable fabrics, DCNM lets customers normalize fabric images, devices, provisioning methods, and Fabric underlay settings for reliable, consistent fabric behavior.

DCNM POAP Navigator

Defining New Fabric

Selecting a Validated VXLAN-EVPN Template

Fabric flexibility – Great for brownfield or greenfield deployments whether you have VxLAN, FabricPath and/or VLAN fabrics. Customers who have N7K/N5K and now thinking about VXLAN/IP Fabric — DCNM has you covered and lets you integrate Nexus 9K platform seamlessly. Only the Encapsulation and underlay Templates change.

FabricPath and VXLAN/IP Fabric templates for Nexus 7000

Fabric visibility – Very easy to visualize switches, links, health, vPC connections, FEX, End to end fabric view of network, virtual machine and storage.

VXLAN/IP Fabric and FabricPath on interactive topology view

Large Topology View with Storage

Fabric troubleshooting – in Day 1 & 2 operation, DCNM provides a view of the overall fabric, shows overlays regardless of encapsulation type (e.g. VXLAN or FabricPath), simplifies fabric troubleshooting and helps find things across the enterprise using multi-site/search (Aggregated DCNM search views across multiple sites)..

DCNM Multi-Site Manager

Fabric operation and automation – Engineer and customize the fabric solutions ahead of time to meet your business needs. Consolidate and automate current and next-gen overlay technology (VxLAN and FabricPath) on the same topology/manager. Integrate Border/Edge Router to the fabric seamlessly. Scale to many hundreds of devices.  Automate workload deployment for physical or virtual workloads and integrate with virtual machine management (e.g. OpenStack, VMware, UCS Director). Engineer deployment scenarios with a large library of customizable Configuration Profiles.

Fabric Automation Profiles for almost any Host automation scenario

Best of all, DCNM is designed to provide investment protection for customers allowing them to run across all Nexus platforms as well as MDS storage.

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Using the Cisco DNA Center SDK

Background

What is a Software Development Kit (SDK)?  Put simply a set of tools, libraries and documentation to simplify interacting with a REST API.  I am super excited, as I know how much simpler it is going to make developing scripts for the Cisco DNA Center API.

The Cisco DNA Center SDK is written in python and provides a python library in PyPI and associated documentation.  PyPI is the official python package index, and simplifies installation of the library.

I am going to assume you are familiar with Cisco DNA Center API, so focus on installing and using the SDK.

Installing the Cisco DNA Center SDK

The SDK is available via PyPI, so all that is required is “pip install”

I would recommend using a virtual environment. This is optional, but means you do not require root access and helps keep different versions of python libraries separate.   Once created, it needs to be activated, using the “source” command.

If you logout and back in, activation needs to be repeated.

python3 -m venv env3
source env3/bin/activate

To install:

pip install dnacentersdk

You are now able to use the SDK.

Using the Cisco DNA Center SDK

This is super simple.  In the past, I needed  lots of python code to get an authentication token, then wrap GET/PUT/POST/DELETE  REST API calls.

Using the SDK is so simple, I am going to use the python REPL (the python interactive console).   To start it, simply type “python” on the command line

$ python
python 3.7.2 (default, Jan 13 2019, 12:50:15) 
[Clang 10.0.0 (clang-1000.11.45.5)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

First create a connection to DNAC. Go into the REPL (above) and paste the following commands:

from dnacentersdk import api
dnac = api.DNACenterAPI(base_url='https://sandboxdnac2.cisco.com:443',
username='devnetuser',password='Cisco123!')

For this example, I am using the DevNet sandbox. If you want to use your own DNAC, just change the base URL and credentials. You might also require “verify=False” if you have a self signed certificate.

In the past this would have been complicated. I needed to get a token, and then make sure I used that token as a header for subsequent requests. This is all taken care of with the creation of the api.DNACenterAPI object.

Now, for the first API call. This call gets all of the network devices, and the for loop prints out the managementIP address. Note that an object is returned, rather than a json structure.

devices = dnac.devices.get_device_list()
for device in devices.response:
    print(device.managementIpAddress)

This shows all of the steps with their output

$ python
Python 3.7.2 (default, Jan 13 2019, 12:50:15) 
[Clang 10.0.0 (clang-1000.11.45.5)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from dnacentersdk import api
>>> dnac = api.DNACenterAPI(base_url='https://sandboxdnac2.cisco.com:443',
username='devnetuser',password='Cisco123!')
>>> devices = dnac.devices.get_device_list()
>>> for device in devices.response:
...     print(device.managementIpAddress)
... 
10.10.20.51
10.10.20.81
10.10.20.82
10.10.20.80
10.10.20.241
10.10.20.250
10.10.20.242
10.10.20.243
10.10.20.244
10.10.20.245
10.10.20.246
10.10.20.247
10.10.20.248
10.10.20.249
>>> 

Documentation

How do you know what methods are available to call? Official documentation is available https://dnacentersdk.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/api.html

The API is structured around groupings of endpoints. For example, all of the endpoints for network-devices are under “devices”. In the example above, dnac.devices.get_device_list() returns all network-devices.

You can also take advantage of python’s introspection capabilities.

In the example above, a dir(dnac) will return all of the properties and methods for the dnac object. The ones of interest are highlighted

>>> dir(dnac)
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__module__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__weakref__', '_session', 'access_token', 'authentication', 'base_url', 'clients', 'command_runner', 'custom_caller', 'devices', 'fabric_wired', 'file', 'network_discovery', 'networks', 'non_fabric_wireless', 'path_trace', 'pnp', 'session', 'single_request_timeout', 'site_profile', 'sites', 'swim', 'tag', 'task', 'template_programmer', 'verify', 'version', 'wait_on_rate_limit']

You can then use the help() function to get more information about the particular methods available. In the example below, help for dnac.devices will show a method of get_device_list() which returns all of devices in the inventory.

>>> help(dnac.devices)

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Why 20,000 Customers Trust Cisco for SD-WAN Solutions

For the past two years, I have been proud to work on bringing the next generation of SD-WAN technology to our customers. We’ve achieved great success, at significant scale. We’ve learned a lot along to way, as have our customers. It’s safe to say that adopting SD-WAN is important to them.

Today, we can disclose that over 20,000 customers trust Cisco for SD-WAN solutions across our Viptela and Meraki lines (as of Q1, FY2020). We have deployments across industries, and around the world.

Backbone of the Modern Enterprise

IDC research shows that almost 95% of the enterprises they surveyed expect to be using SD-WAN within 24 months. This tracks with our own metrics: As of August 2019, 70% of the Fortune 100 are using Cisco’s SD-WAN solutions.

Clearly, SD-WAN is a critical technology for businesses adopting cloud services. It is the common connective tissue between the campus, branch, IoT, data center, and cloud. It brings all the network domains together and delivers the outcomes business requires. It must align user and device policies, and provide assurance to meet application service-level agreements. It must deliver robust security to every device, and every cloud, that the enterprise’s data touches.

Every customer is looking for agility, but not at the expense of security, visibility, or control.

The transition to SD-WAN is accelerating, thanks to the pervasive adoption of cloud services. Today’s businesses are adopting clouds apps like Microsoft’s Office365 productivity suite and many other SaaS apps. Our surveys show our customers have, on average, 30 paid SaaS applications each. And that they are actually using many more: over 100 in several cases.

As our customers reach these levels of cloud usage, they quickly find that their WAN architectures must change, as well as their entire approach to security. Our customers need to maintain choice and control as their WAN stretches over networks that are outside their control.

Cisco SD-WAN offers simplicity, cost savings, scale, application performance, security, visibility, and investment protection.

To help them grapple with the different public clouds, SaaS apps, colocation facilities and the different types of connectivity available, customers are looking for a trusted advisor to help them navigate the maze of options. What they can’t accept are WAN solutions that require compromise, like getting better application experience, but at the expense of security.

Cisco provides the most secure cloud scale SD-WAN. It is part of our wider strategy to deliver multi-domain networking with an intent-based architecture.

Secure and Cloud-Scale – Why customers trust Cisco

The only way for Cisco to make the move to SD-WAN work is to listen to and collaborate with our customers and partners. We have been doing this for years and will continue to do so. It’s why we are, and will remain, the market leader.

For example, National Instruments was facing the need for drastically more bandwidth across its 88 sites. But the network team’s budget, and its reliance on existing networking links, wasn’t up to the challenge. Stopgap solutions were adding complexity and frustrating employees.

We partnered with National Instruments to bring their WAN under control, with Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela. National Instruments’ new network has 30 times the bandwidth of their previous solution, it’s easier to manage, and it’s less expensive to run.

As Luis Castillo, Global Network Team Manager for National Instruments said, “Having more bandwidth at our sites means that our WAN issues aren’t impacting business operations. Software updates that used to take eight hours to replicate across the network now take 10 minutes. We don’t have to bother with call admission control or limiting video quality or the other measures we had to take to deal with bandwidth constraints. We have been unbelievably impressed with the performance, reaching numbers we’ve never been able to before, while at the same time reducing costs like never before.” 

In Australia and New Zealand, the plumbing company Reece Group, with 5,000 employees over 600 branches, had embarked on a digital transformation. Peter Castle, a Network Administrator, told us the company wanted to provide an always-connected workplace, for all its staffers across all its locations.

Reece went with Cisco SD-WAN to be able to deploy new apps and features, bring up new locations quickly, and prioritize network traffic for cloud applications. Castle said that with Cisco SD-WAN, “My life as a network administrator is significantly easier. To deploy new configurations and policy changes across the entire network, what would have taken a very long time previously, touching many devices individually, now takes a matter of minutes.”

In banking, we’ve worked with customers like Associated Bank, Wisconsin’s largest bank. The institution has over 5,000 employees over more than 250 branches. After evaluating eight SD-WAN platforms for security, traffic management, scalability, and simplicity of operation, they installed the Meraki MX platform to meet their needs. Associated’s network architect Tim Larson says this solution saved the company over $500,000 annually while improving its average bandwidth to branches by 7,800%.

I’m  proud of what we were able to do for National Instruments, Reece Group, Associated Bank, and thousands more SD-WAN customers. Our portfolio is the broadest and the deepest in the industry, and we look forward to working with even more businesses who have their own unique needs.

Simplicity, cost savings, scale, application performance, security, visibility, and investment protection. Combined with our world-class partners and global support and services, we are delivering peace of mind while accelerating our customers’ cloud strategies.

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