Intent-Based Networking Ready Mobility Express – What’s New? Part 1

This is part one of a two-part blog series about the latest enhancements of the Cisco Mobility Express solution.

You already know that Cisco Mobility Express is a great tool for the SMB set. Now larger organizations can deploy Cisco Mobility Express and Cisco DNA Center thanks to new multi-site-based support.

As Enterprise Wireless continues Cisco’s journey to building Intent-Based Networking, we have significantly beefed-up our Mobility Express offering over the last few months. It’s now ready to be supported at distributed enterprises with thousands of sites running Mobility Express. We have heard many customer requests asking not to have a physical controller at every site but would like to have site level control and management for tasks like software updates, monitoring per site among others.

The good news is that with our latest DNA Center enhancements, we now support distributed enterprise deployments allowing you to have the flexibility of deploying a controller in the campus and Mobility Express in the branches. It’s the best of both worlds!

And we have more new features. Below are new exciting capabilities which we are adding to the Cisco Mobility Express solution.

Cisco Mobility Express with DNA Center – Intent Based Networking ready:
Cisco Mobility Express joins the Intent-Based Networking world with DNA Center 1.2 and AireOS 8.7 release (more on this in part two of this blog series). Cisco DNA Center provides a centralized management dashboard for complete control of the network across multiple sites running Mobility Express. Full automation capabilities for provisioning and change management means that you are now able to deploy multiple sites with Cisco Mobility Express in Day 0 with no-touch deployments. You are also able to make configuration changes, software updates, and more to your sites through a centralized dashboard. Cisco DNA Center Assurance provides an easier approach to troubleshooting and issue resolution by adding 360-degree contextual insights across the network, users, devices, sites and apps, potential issues can be detected before they even become problems. The benefit is that customers get a single pane of glass management whether they deploy a physical controller, Mobility Express or a combination of both.

World’s Smartest Access Point supported on Cisco Mobility Express:
Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Point is the latest best-in-class access point from the Cisco Aironet Portfolio. It provides high performance, top-notch security and detailed analytics. In addition, starting with AireOS 8.8, (also explained more in the next blog) 4800 Aironet Access Points will support Cisco Mobility Express. For single or multi-site enterprise deployments of up to 100 access points, it is an ideal solution for open office and high-density environments. With DNA Center Assurance and built-in Intelligent Capture on 4800 which are supported on Mobility Express – customers can now enjoy the benefits of faster issue detection and root cause analysis, on-demand, real-time troubleshooting and in-service AP monitoring with packet capture. What this means is that customers using Mobility Express and DNA Assurance can now fix a network problem-that would take anywhere from a few days to weeks to repair-now only takes a few minutes.

To learn more about Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Point click here. To learn more about Cisco DNA Center click here. And to read more about what’s new with the AireOS 8.7 and 8.8 releases, click here.