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Cisco IWAN helps enterprises cut down WAN costs through smarter utilization of MPLS, Business Internet and other low cost links without compromising performance, reliability and security. For example, Cisco IWAN ensures that business critical applications such as Email, Share Point, SAP will be routed via the MPLS network while non-critical traffic such as Social Media, Netflix etc. will be routed using inexpensive internet connections.
However, Cisco IWAN configuration requires administrators to configure 1000s of lines of CLI for each IWAN domain.
Each of these configurations requires CCIE level expertise. The process is tedious and often results in human errors and security violations. Further, the entire on-boarding process takes months to ensure the features are properly configured and validated.
Apart from the initial provisioning, subsequent policy updates require the same CCIE level expertise thus introducing delay and complexity. Due to the complex configuration, troubleshooting Cisco IWAN is a nightmare.
Ultimately, customers are not able to realize the benefits of Cisco IWAN technology to implement new policies as per the business requirements.
Customers are currently re-purposing generic automation solutions as a Band-Aid to this problem. However, these automation solutions use scripts and tools that are rigid, do not scale, do not support multi-tenancy, do not support service assurance and they use proprietary models that require vendor assistance for every change.
NCX 5.0 has out of the box support for Cisco IWAN services. Administrators can automate the configurations for all the IWAN features for all the various deployment combinations.
Unlike scripting, NCX uses industry standard IETF YANG models. Customers and system integrators can easily modify or extend the NCX YANG models as per their business requirements without requiring vendor assistance. The solution supports Zero Touch Deployment, Role Based Access Control, Configuration Reconciliation, introduces Self-Service and scales to thousands of branches.
Further, NCX supports Multi-Tenancy so that MSP (Managed Service Providers) can automate multiple IWAN domains for their managed enterprises. NCX enables Cisco IWAN customers to on-board hundreds of branches within days instead of months.
Once the branches are up-and-running, NCX provides a simple, easy-to-use GUI; so that any network operator or MSPs can quickly deploy network policies in multi-tenant environment without touching thousands of network elements individually. The self-service GUI avoids human errors, improves security posture and makes the network adapt to dynamic business requirements.
After NCX is deployed, network services will be delivered within minutes using self-service portal instead of months, all network operations will be automated, security violations will be detected and remediated, troubleshooting will become simpler and operating expenses will reduce dramatically.
Check out the following resources for more details.
Data Sheet
Solution Brief
– Kiran Sirupa, October 12th, 2016
