Interview with Mariano Zotes, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN
“At Ikusi we’ve developed a wide range of technical support and consultancy services to help companies implement and maintain their Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution effectively”
For starters, how would you describe the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution in one sentence?
For me, the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is synonymous with efficient, flexible and secure communications, irrespective of the network operator or type of network used.
What does the solution consist of?
It’s a solution that combines SDN with WAN capacities to improve business network management, increase security, optimize the performance of applications and provide greater flexibility and efficiency in network connectivity.
Who is Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN aimed at?
Basically any organization with multiple offices that needs to connect any user to any application, in any location. And that wants an efficient, flexible, secure and reasonably-priced solution.
That’s the target audience of the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution. As I mentioned, this solution enables efficient, flexible and secure communications between the different offices of a company, irrespective of the network operator or type of network used.
What are the key features of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN?
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers multiple benefits. These are the main ones:
- Centralized, dynamic network management: facilitates network configuration, monitoring and optimization from a central location.
- Traffic optimization: the Cisco SD-WAN solution allows network traffic to be prioritized and optimized according to business needs. This ensures the efficient performance of the company’s critical applications.
- Improved application performance: the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution uses application acceleration techniques to improve the performance of applications on the network −even via lower bandwidth WAN connections−, as well as poor latency, packet loss, etc.
- Advanced security: offers advanced security functions, such as firewalls, threat detection and data encryption, to protect the company networks against cyberattacks and security threats.
- Multi-cloud connectivity: allows companies to securely and efficiently connect their offices and data centers to multiple cloud services, facilitating the adoption of multi-cloud architectures.
- Simplified management: the solution provides a centralized management interface that facilitates configuration, monitoring and resolution of problems across the entire network, thus simplifying operations.
- Network resilience: Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers redundant connectivity options and fault tolerance to ensure network availability even in the event of a link or device failure.
- Cost optimization: by enabling the efficient use of WAN connections the solution can help reduce bandwidth costs and improve the network cost-performance ratio.
- Scalability: it can adapt to the changing needs of the company by adding new sites or efficiently expanding the network.
Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is also available in a managed service version?
Correct. To facilitate the adoption of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and for maximum leverage, at Ikusi we have developed a wide range of technical support and consultancy services to help companies effectively implement and maintain their Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution.
In addition, the Ikusi Intelligence platform collects data from the Catalyst SD-WAN dashboard and adapts them to the customer’s operational and data display needs.
With the Ikusi Intelligence platform we provide a layer of analytics and business intelligence, giving organizations executive control of the resources and network services they use. This allows them to make immediate cost-benefit decisions, thanks to the real-time visibility of the impact on the business.
This is a unique offer in the market which allows IT or network personnel, executives or managers, to have first-hand centralized business information for more agile decision-making.
More specifically, what can Ikusi’s Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN managed services offer sectors such as retail, manufacturing and banking?
From a business perspective, the retail sector needs to streamline and incorporate processes to provide a better customer experience, which results in increased revenue. And SD-WAN networks enable activation of these processes.
For example, omnichannels. One of the retail sector’s priorities is to combine different online and offline sales channels, to enable a natural switch from the physical to the virtual and to give consumers the perfect buying experience.
The buying experience is fundamental, since satisfied customers are more loyal and generate repeat revenue, and technology is an excellent ally for enabling the conditions for a better customer experience.
The manufacturing sector is demanding ever more robust and intelligent networks to support the automation processes they are deploying across the entire production chain and the growing digitalization of their business management.
From this perspective, SD-WAN networks are the answer to the growing sophistication of the sector, which is becoming ever more complex due to the increasing interconnection between the corporate and industrial network and the digitalization process in general.
For the financial sector, it is increasingly more critical to have high visibility of what is happening on their network in real time. Intelligent networks enable this objective. Not only do they offer greater visibility, but also enable the traffic to be managed so that the business applications of financial institutions always operate at maximum performance.
Can you give us an example of an Ikusi deployment case study?
Yes, we worked with a customer in the consultancy sector who had a MPLS network deployed in Europe and Latin America, but they had problems because in some locations the network was either not available or was very costly. So they decided to migrate to SD-WAN networks.
As a result, they have a homogenous network, irrespective of whether the traffic is routed through the private WAN network (MPLS) or public WAN network (Internet). With this new architecture the traffic is routed through the internet, this being a faster access route than the private WAN network (MPLS) and because it has a lower cost and provides better coverage.
I’d like to emphasize that during the migration to the SD-WAN networks, the consultancy firm applied policies and/or dynamic routing for traffic balancing for sites with various access lines according to its needs. This is something that MPLS networks don’t offer. User experience improved significantly after the migration, thanks to faster and more reliable communications.