I was excited to attend the Open Networking User Group Conference last week at Columbia University in New York. The Open Networking User Group is a community of IT business leaders who exchange ideas and best practices for implementing Open Networking and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) designs. One of the ONUG working groups is the SD-WAN Working Group which was my main interest for attending this event. The SD-WAN working group has determined a set of 10 business requirements (based on user-developed use cases) that Enterprises should consider when evaluating SD-WAN solutions:

1. Ability for remote site/branch to leverage public and private WANs in an active/active fashion for business applications.

2. Ability to deploy CPE in a physical or virtual form factor on commodity hardware.

3. A secure hybrid WAN architecture that allows for dynamic traffic engineering capability across private and public WAN paths as specified by   application policy, prevailing network WAN availability and/or degradation at transport or application layer performance.

4. Visibility, prioritization and steering of business critical and real-time applications as per security and corporate governance and compliance policies.

5. A highly available and resilient hybrid WAN environment for optimal client and application experience.

6. Layer 2 and 3 interoperability with directly connected switch and/or router.

7. Site, Application and VPN performance level dashboard reporting.

8. Open north-bound API for controller access and management, ability to forward specific log events to network event co-relation manager and/or Security Incident & Event Manager (SIEM).

9. Capability to effect zero touch deployment at branch site with minimal to no configuration changes on directly connected infrastructure, ensuring agility in provisioning and deployment.

10. FIPS 140-2 validation certification for cryptography modules/encryption with automated certificate life cycle management and reporting.

ONUG invited vendors to test their SD-WAN solutions against these 10 requirement and then present the results at the ONUG conference. The test partner was IXIA who worked with each vendor to execute the test plans and capture the results. The Cisco team tested our Intelligent WAN solution combined with Application Policy Infrastructure Controller with Enterprise Module (APIC-EM) and I am pleased to announce that the Cisco solution passed all the test requirements.

To learn more about Cisco's Intelligent WAN solution please visit www.cisco.com/go/iwan.