Taking Your Network Where The Data Is with Cisco ACI

Part 1 of the Accelerate to Multicloud series

To keep up with the massive influx of data and increased demands on the network, networking professionals have to learn to broker, connect, build, and govern not only in the data center, but across a vast multicloud landscape. Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure Anywhere (ACI Anywhere) is a major step forward in managing complexity, maximizing business benefits, and deploying workloads in any location and on any cloud.

At Cisco, there are three key areas companies need to focus on when transitioning to ACI – the Challenge, the Strategy, and the Solution. Today we’re starting our three-part blog series where we’ll dive into them all, starting with the Challenge.

Turn Complexity into Flexibility

Making the network less complex, more cost-effective, and more available is easier said than done.

Modern data centers are increasingly complex and distributed—spanning multiple geographically diverse sites and clouds and involving different technologies from a variety of vendors that are operating at a range of different capacities and capabilities. As a result, network engineers are facing a variety of challenges:

Agility – Applications are the lifeblood of modern business. They need to be deployed quickly on the network, transferred seamlessly to any environment, and scaled rapidly without compromising availability or security.

Availability – Businesses are dependent on applications and data, so it is critical that the network connecting them stays up and running—and it needs to play a more proactive role in overcoming disruptions anywhere along the chain.

Security – In the expanding multicloud data center, the network plays one of the most vital roles in protecting a business’s reputation and assets. Securing the data center and its applications requires a holistic strategy where security is pervasive.

Multicloud – Many businesses are looking to multicloud to meet their ever-growing infrastructure needs. But that leaves them with a new challenge: Their on-premises infrastructure must coexist peacefully with public clouds while still meeting required security policy, connectivity, and performance levels.

ROI – Cost remains one of the chief limitations for engineers looking to implement a premier solution, and a strong potential for return on investment remains one of the biggest drivers for business decision makers.

How do you overcome these Challenges? With solid strategy. In our next blog in this series, we’ll talk about the need to scale multicloud networks with operational simplicity and a consistent policy model—in any app, any location, any cloud—and the strategy it takes to be successful.

Can’t wait? Dive deeper into Cisco ACI Anywhere, view a demo or get the data sheet and find out how you can make the move to multicloud with Cisco ACI

For additional info about how we are helping our customers create and implement Intelligent Automation with Cisco ACI, see the Networking for the Distributed Multicloud Datacenter IDC report ad make sure to check out the Make the move to multicloud with Cisco ACI eBook

2 Multicloud Is the New Normal, an IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Cisco, March 2018.