The2013 Cisco IT Impact Surveyfound that 40% of IT professionals stated that moving their applications to the Cloud as one of their key IT challenges over the past 12 months with 50% of respondents highlighting security data protection and guaranteeing the reliability of applications in the cloud (SLA's) as the main reasons.

Talking with our Enterprise customers, it is clear that there has been significant gap in the solutions that provide enterprise-class secure connectivity from users and branches to public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS). As a result, IT departments have not been able to easily connect their private networks into AWS with the consistent security and policy management that they are familiar with -that is until now.

To help customers combat these challenges and accelerate their migration to cloud, I am proud to announce the availability of Cisco's very first virtualized product now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS): Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000V.

The CSR1000V leverages the Cisco IOS XE operating system, providing cutting edge routing and security services. This is the same operating system that powers our industry leading Aggregation Services Routers (ASR) 1000 and Integrated Services Router (ISR) 4451-X.  Now Cisco customers will be able to leverage their existing network management tools and processes they use in their private networks all the way to the public cloud, allowing them to connect to the cloud with confidence. In addition to the IOS XE command line, the CSR 1000V includes a RESTful API, allowing orchestration tools to not only provision the CSR 1000V, but also configure and monitor it as well. This type of automation and programmability will be critical as IT departments are under increasing pressure to deliver services on-demand.

By deploying the Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000V in AWS, Enterprises will be able to leverage familiar enterprise-class network and security services like FlexVPN, Zone-Based Firewall and Application Visibility and Control (AVC).

We currently have a number of customers using the CSR1000V in AWS. Including HealthSparq, a leading healthcare transparency company, which is using the CSR to securely connect with their business partners. You can learn more about how the CSR is solvingHealthSparq'sIT challenges by watching this video:

https://youtu.be/Fk8YfFGH-No

My team will also be at AWS ReInvent showing some exciting demo's of the CSR in our booth (#533). If you are not able to attend the show, you can also get detailed examples of customer deployments from this white paper.

For more details about the Cisco CSR1000V please visit www.cisco.com/go/cloudrouter.