Enable rapid delivery of Cisco Intelligent WAN service using self-service portal and zero-touch, fully-automated provisioning

Written by Dave Roberts, Director of Virtual Managed Services (VMS) at Cisco

Cisco recently announced that Verizon is now using Cisco’s Virtual Managed Services (VMS) as the foundation for the delivery of its SD-WAN service. Leveraging VMS, Verizon can now help enterprises to quickly place an order for SD-WAN services based on Cisco’s Cloud Managed IWAN and configure those services with the click of a button using VMS’s end-user portal. Setup and configuration is made simple with VMS’s zero-touch provisioning features. After the enterprise orders the service, VMS’s automated SD-WAN provisioning system takes over and new devices are added to the customer network in minutes, not months. If customers already have compatible equipment, there’s no need to wait for new equipment to be shipped and the service can be live with just a few clicks.

Cisco’s VMS is a software-defined services platform for managed service providers that enables the rapid delivery of profitable SD-WAN, security, and assurance services. VMS provides a self-service user experience and embedded orchestration infrastructure, allowing it to achieve an ROI of 200% and an OPEX reduction of 78% for the service provider. VMS works with the ubiquitous installed base of Cisco products and can be extended by service providers to create highly-differentiated offerings using both Cisco and 3rd-party technologies. VMS is extremely flexible and can deliver services based on software-defined network functions or physical hardware, deployed in the cloud or on the customer premises, ensuring that the system accommodates future service definitions and grows with the service provider.

Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is a new technology that provides enterprise customers with a simple, flexible, and cost-effective WAN transport. Cloud Managed IWAN is Cisco’s version of SD-WAN based on a variety of Cisco technologies already embedded in Cisco routers and firewalls. IWAN provides a flexible network topology using a variety of WAN transport types, including MPLS, LTE, and Internet. IWAN embeds intelligence in the network endpoints to route traffic over the best transport type given the importance of the traffic as determined by the end-user. For instance, an enterprise may decide that video conferencing traffic is business critical and should be routed over a high-performance MPLS network while web browsing is less critical and may be run over a less costly Internet link. If either of the links fails, IWAN routes the traffic over the remaining link as a backup. IWAN also makes security easy. Previously, creating a large VPN network required the configuration and maintenance of a large number of point-to-point VPN tunnels. This was complex, time-consuming, and error-prone. In contrast, IWAN creates a mesh of dynamic VPN tunnels between all the site of a large network, optimizing performance without increasing complexity. All IWAN traffic is encrypted by default, helping enterprises maintain high levels of security without increasing complexity.

VMS makes it easy for service providers to deploy IWAN as a profitable SD-WAN service offering.

Supporting Resources
• Cisco Virtual Managed Services
• Verizon+Cisco SD-WAN Workshop for Enterprises