Cisco unveils new cloud-managed networking offerings

Cisco has announced new cloud management capabilities that offer a unified experience across the Cisco Meraki, Cisco Catalyst and Cisco Nexus portfolios.

The company has also unveiled a new Cisco ThousandEyes product designed to proactively forecast and get the most out of WAN performance.

The new offerings were announced at the company's networking and security event Cisco Live, as part of its strategy to provide customers with greater agility, resilience and productivity.

Cisco says organisations are increasingly relying on digital experiences to maintain the productivity of their workforce and ensure they are providing the best experiences for customers and partners.

It adds that these new offerings are important as there is growing unpredictability when using cloud-managed platforms and organisations need solutions that bridge their technologies, locations, teams and devices to combat this.

One of the main difficulties is increasing complexity in IT environments which has resulted in user expectations being higher than ever.

In addition, because connections that businesses rely on have multiplied in number and diversity, the network and overall IT experience are more fragmented, less secure and becoming continually harder to grow.

"Our customers choose to run their businesses on Cisco technology because we sit at the intersection of networking, security and cloud," Cisco Enterprise networking and cloud executive vice president and general manager Todd Nightingale says.

"We believe the network is the foundation for the modern enterprise and must deliver agility through simplicity.

"Cisco is addressing our customers' most important concern, which is managing complexity through smart, data-driven platforms that power a digital business."

Cisco's new offerings to advance its networking platforms for better customer experiences in their transition to cloud-based operating models include:

Cloud management for Cisco Catalyst

This offering allows customers to monitor select Catalyst Switches to manage new Catalyst Wireless devices through the Meraki dashboard, which fosters greater visibility and flexibility in the customer experience.
Further, campus and branch networking customers will now be able to simplify their IT operations by combining cloud management with networking hardware.

Cisco Nexus Cloud

Nexus Cloud is a cloud-managed platform delivered as-a-service that enables users to deploy, manage and operate cloud networking in a straightforward way.

The offering is powered by Cisco Intersight for more robust switching and multicloud management and will extend the ability of the company's customers to manage across public cloud, private cloud and edge computing environments of any size or scale.

Cisco intends to have Nexus Cloud available later in the year.

Cisco ThousandEyes

An internet and cloud intelligence platform, ThousandEyes WAN Insights marks the first step toward Cisco delivering on its Predictive Networks vision by allowing enterprise IT to move from reactive to preventative-based networking, improving operational efficiency and application experience assurance.

The offering will be available soon and proactively alerts IT teams to problems before they occur to prevent negative user experiences.

Moreover, the platform offers policy recommendations and ways to improve paths.

Alongside ThousandEyes' view of Internet health and behaviour, the addition of ThousandEyes WAN Insights helps empower customers to maximise their internet and cloud-centric environments and deliver stronger digital experiences.

More straightforward network security

An announcement from the RSA Conference, Cisco+ Secure Connect Now is a unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering; an as-a-service, cloud-managed product available to customers through a single subscription.

It provides customers with an SASE offering that is fast to deploy and easy to manage, simplifying how organisations connect and protect users, things and applications.