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Simple, effective collaboration is more important to today’s business than ever before. Today's workforce is becoming more mobile and video conferencing is becoming less of a luxury and more of a necessity. Whether you’re hosting an all-hands meeting, collaborating with remote employees, or connecting with customers having the right space and solutions is essential for your business.

Santa’s done with his list, now it's time for IT’s! We are reminded throughout the year to check our technology hardware and our different policies. Our software systems remind us to update our passwords and even force us to if we go too long without it. Software licenses renew and if any of our technology is outdated our technology partners help us to update our environment. But, what about the things we may not think to check or push to the back-burner because something more important comes up? 

Having worked in Information Technology departments since the mid 90’s, I’ve seen a lot of change.  As you might expect from technology, things move fast, as technology continues to improve at a rapid pace.  But the biggest change I’ve seen is the feeling that most businesses have towards IT and IT spending.  As a systems administrator in the 90’s I remember feeling as if companies never saw the true value of their IT departments, to the point where they were even described as ‘cost centers’.  It felt like pulling teeth trying to secure a budget from the business for things that I felt were critical, such as proper backups with low recovery point objectives, and highly available networks that can withstand a failure without a big fire drill of scrambling engineers while hundreds of employees sit idly waiting for you to fix it.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading cloud infrastructure platform on the market today. AWS provides everything from public DNS, directory, and database services, to monitoring and alerting services. Each of these services is designed to reduce costs and complexity for the enterprise.

In this edition of our SD-WAN series I’m going to take a step away from our lab environment and attempt to address a question I get a lot from our customers. “How do we integrate a SD-WAN router or pair of SD-WAN routers into our current environment?” Well the answer I’m afraid is the networking consultants classic line of “It depends”. And it really does, Cisco’s SD-WAN solution was created by engineers with a background in routing and this routing foundation really gives us a lot of flexibility when positioning our SD-WAN routers into our existing environment.

Technology is constantly moving and advancing, and as we continue to innovate we are able to use different enterprise technologies to grow our business. Technology used to be a means to help operate the business but has transformed into a means to better the business beyond those day-to-day operations. Technology is connecting our teams, connecting us with our customers and helping us to serve those customers more efficiently.

Cisco is reinventing the collaboration experience, delivering messaging, meetings, voice/ video calls, and digital whiteboarding in the cloud.

In my last post we looked at the steps that a vEdge goes through to bring up its control plane connections and authenticate itself onto the fabric. In this post we will follow on from where we left off and see how we use these control plane connections to exchange topology information, WAN policies and security keys via OMP.