Theworld is changing and the structure of connectivity between users, businesses, and devices has entered a new dimension.  The rate of transformation has accelerated, including major advances in collaboration and access to applications and data from anywhere.  However, remote connectivity has enlarged the attack surface for cyber criminals and troubleshooting outside your corporate border is challenging.

Our customers are looking for solutions for hybrid work, providing agility for users to securely connect from work, home and everywhere in between. Businesses must empower their hybrid workforce with seamless access to cloud applications and high-quality collaborative experiences.  IT is also tasked with maintaining security, control, and governance across devices, networks, clouds and those applications.

Our latest Networking innovations provide advanced analytics and insights to improve operations for remote IT operators, along with greater integration with storage and cloud providers for more seamless and secure access to applications and data. Learn more about how these innovations can improve the user experiences to support hybrid work environments below.

Simplified Operations for the Workforce and Workspace

To better support the demands of the hybrid workspace, the Cisco DNA Center release 2.2.3 brings exciting upgrades that enable IT to improve wireless performance, facilitate zero trust networking, and support smart building deployments.

With the new Wireless 3D Analyzer, Cisco announces the first true 3D wireless indoor propagation tool. Use your mouse to move around and visualize where signal is propagating through the actual architectural design of your office. You can simulate adding walls or reorganizing the workspace to accommodate your return to office plan. Then do a simulation of the new wireless network design to support this new plan so that you buy what you need without over-dimensioning. And IT teams can simulate this office redesign without being in the office themselves.

Now you can enjoy real time visibility over your zero-trust network like never before. Across both your offices and remote workers,a new policy analytics dashboardgives you complete policy and endpoint status at a glance. You'll see alerts for any attempted policy violations, including spoofing detection, and a granular trust score engine for specific details on endpoint security decision parameters.

Deploying Smart Buildings means supporting more and more IoT endpoints. Network teams struggle to get complete visibility for PoE switch capacity and actual endpoint power consumption without visiting remote branches. Our newPoE Analytics dashboardcan show your team actual power usage, available power, and in which ports. The tool then monitors these devices for unusual power consumption and other anomalies. Need to send five new IP cameras to the office in Singapore? Now you can tell the local team what switch ports have power and monitor the usage.

We are also making it easier to add on other Cisco DNA software products to your network with theCisco DNA Expansion Pack. This new offer allows you to enhance your Cisco Networking solutions with SD-Access, Zero Trust Networking, Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA), digital experience monitoring, location analytics and assurance. It provides flexible way to purchase Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), Cisco DNA Spaces, Cisco ThousandEyes, Secure Network Analytics (Stealthwatch) and other licenses, appliances, and services in one convenient bundle.

Putting IT in control of Internet traffic

Hybrid work has also shifted traffic patterns, where more traffic runs across the Internet. To securely scale out your network to the Internet, Cisco SD-WAN provides a software-defined approach to managing across your users, branches, clouds and the Internet.  Businesses are moving to a multicloud environment that requires secure connectivity everywhere and visibility that extends from into your enterprise network and beyond into the cloud.

Now, more than ever, enterprises need agility to adjust their business models as they continue their journey to the cloud. In this release, we are offering greater interconnection with Cloud and SDCI partners, enhanced multitenancy support and several other advancements for Cisco SD-WAN.

Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect with Equinixdelivers seamless, automated connectivity to multiple IaaS and SaaS environments, without all the complexity. The joint solution enables customers to create network connections to their multicloud deployments with greater agility, reduced operating costs, and increased speed to market compared to classic connectivity options. ?

Managing multi-domain networks and applications has created complexities and IT requires a simple approach. The integration ofCisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud Service Directoryallows enterprises to automate SD-WAN policy for custom applications in multicloud based on application profile. ? The solution bridges DevOps and NetOps; now DevOps can define traffic profiles in Google Cloud Service Directory and NetOps can translate those profiles into network policies.

Cisco CloudOnRamp for IaaS: Azure Secure vWANextends the SD-WAN policy seamlessly to Microsoft Azure and then it provides analytics via telemetry for troubleshooting in Azure as well as secures connectivity to every type of traffic flow.  Cisco is the first Enterprise SD-WAN Partner to support an additional layer of security with support for service chaining with Azure Firewall in the Azure Virtual WAN Hub.  This process has traditionally been manual and tedious.  With this integration, the guesswork is removed, and customers can save time by automatically securing any traffic whether it originates from branch to host vNets, or vNets to Branch, branch to internet or vNet to Internet.

Many customers rely on a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to build out their SD-WAN. Recent enhancements inCisco SD-WAN Multitenancyincreases both scalability and security, which will increase capacity and density to scale and reduce costs for MSPs as well as large enterprises that require multitenancy. The addition of Reverse Proxy adds a layer through which access to Cisco vManage occurs using a Proxy server providing an encrypted bi-directional communications path. The shared control, management, and orchestration plane across multiple tenants will reduce CapEx. Single pane of glass for management and operations of multiple tenants reduces OpEx and flexibility is increased with support for on-prem and cloud, API support and support for KVM and ESXi.?

The Cisco vManage User Interface(UI) has been updated providing a highly visualized and more intuitive user experience that simplifies network management and onboarding of SaaS, IaaS, and security for network operators with expanded pre-configured templates and guided step-by-step configuration.

In a previous release, we provided integrated Unified Communications on the Cisco SD-WAN platform -eliminating the need for a separate UC platform with the associated acquisition and support costs.  In this release, we are offeringfurther platform consolidationincorporating the 5G connectivity into Cisco SD-WAN Edge platforms with the new5G Pluggable Interface Module(PIM) and Cisco mGig WAN module(NIM). ?This eliminates the need for a separate gateway.  Manage up to 3.3Gbps of cellular edge routing in Cisco SD-WAN with direct internet access at the branch and connect to multicloud applications regardless of broadband availability.

In addition to all this news, look out for an exciting announcement next week on how Cisco will provide more customer choice and flexibility in expanding Cisco DNA Software capabilities.

Cisco continues to innovate to address the hybrid workplace transformation the world is undergoing. A secure, agile network has never been more important, and our solutions will help you enable a safe return to the workplace, secure work from home and anywhere access to multicloud applications.

Learn more about the innovations in Cisco Networking.

Check out our Cisco Networking video channel

Subscribe to the Networking blog