As the nature of how we work becomes more distributed and complex, Cisco Systems is looking to enable a more unified and predictive experience for enterprise users. At Cisco Live! 2022, the company announced new cloud management and monitoring capabilities that it said will help more organizations achieve this vision.
More specifically, these new capabilities aim to provide a unified experience across the Cisco Meraki, Cisco Catalyst and Cisco Nexus portfolios at a time when corporate IT teams are looking for more tools that bridge the various technologies, applications, locations, teams and devices that make up their organizations. To that end, Cisco announced Cloud Management for Cisco Catalyst, which allows customers to now use their Meraki dashboards to manage and monitor their Catalyst switches and wireless devices.
“For the Catalyst 9200, 9300, and 9500 series of switches, you can now accelerate your network monitoring and troubleshooting use cases with rich switch health details, client information, network topology, and firmware visibility,” said Chris Stori, senior vice president and general manager, networking experiences, in a blog post. “These benefits are all available in the cloud at no additional cost for customers with Cisco DNA licensing.”
The company also unveiled Cisco Nexus Cloud, a cloud-managed as-a-service offering to be available in the fall, and that leverages the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform to simplify switching and multi-cloud management. Cisco Nexus Cloud will extend customers’ ability to manage across public cloud, private cloud and edge computing environments of any size or scale.
In addition, Cisco’s upcoming ThousandEyes WAN Insights product expands on the Internet monitoring capabilities of the ThousandEyes platform the company acquired in 2020 by providing proactive forecasting and optimization of WAN performance. WAN Insights will be integrated with Cisco SD-WAN vManage and vAnalytics.
Ravi Chandrasekaran, senior vice president of the core software group at Cisco, said in separate blog post, “The combination continuously analyzes SD-WAN and internet performance data and applies predictive models to forecast connectivity issues and recommend actions, such as routing changes, for avoiding or fixing degradations at crucial internet focal points.”
Cisco described this move as the first step toward delivering on the Cisco Predictive Networks vision.