Coauthored by Bilal Raja and Grimt Habtemariam

Many organizations have already developed cloud migration targets and are looking at how they can accelerate cloud adoption. As organizations increasingly embrace IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS consumption models many have selected AWS as their primary cloud provider.

While pre-application migration planning and application readiness is a key area of focus, many organizations have also realized that network readiness is also critical in accelerating and ensuring a successful cloud adoption journey. Legacy network architectures lack the simplicity, adaptability, automation and most of all application-awareness needed to deliver the best user experience. A Cloud Ready Network needs to enable a secure and optimized connectivity to cloud services from the branch/remote-offices.

Cisco next-gen SDWAN is one of the pillars of the Cloud Ready Network that can accelerate organizations adoption of cloud.

Cloud Ready WAN

To guarantee optimal end users experience an organization requires seamless connectivity between branch office locations, applications, and workloads hosted in the cloud. Many WAN solutions are ill-equipped for this task because they are generally rigid, complex to configure, and expensive to maintain. IoT adoption, a dramatic increase of the number of network devices, and the sophistication of security threats further compounds this challenge.

Cisco SDWAN on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an overlay WAN architecture that is designed to address heterogeneous WAN connectivity and distributed users by building a scalable WAN infrastructure that reduces data transport costs and operational expenses. Cisco SDWAN for AWS helps with the following two major use cases:

Cloud Onramp for SaaS