Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect with Megaport At-a-Glance

Multicloud adoption continues to grow

As businesses accelerate adoption of multicloud environments, managing multiple network providers and traditional telco circuits when connecting branches to clouds can be complicated and time-consuming. In addition, cloud connectivity options could be expensive and unreliable, and can take months to provision. Enterprises lack flexibility and scalability when using current network connectivity options such as the public internet.

Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect with Megaport: Realize the full potential of multicloud

Cisco^® Catalyst SD-WAN’s integration with Megaport allows you to deliver on-demand branch connectivity to the world’s leading cloud providers, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, directly from your SD-WAN controller. The Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect integration with Megaport’s cloud-neutral interconnect platform provides the automation to deliver reliable network performance, cost-optimized connectivity, and reduced provisioning time.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager provides a single, easy-to-use console to automate the deployment of connections between sites and clouds, reducing provisioning from weeks to minutes (Figure 1). Megaport Virtual Edge provides a secure, reliable way to connect to Megaport’s Software Defined Network (SDN) across 25 countries, including 360 service providers and more than 270+ cloud on-ramps.

Cisco also ensures that traffic traversing the private backbone of Megaport is encrypted end-to-end. Cisco extends the SD-WAN fabric over the private underlay all the way into the cloud service provider by hosting virtual SD-WAN routers in transit VPCs/VNETs. This not only allows for end-to-end encryption for branch to cloud traffic, but also overcomes any failures of the underlay by automatically steering traffic from the branch to cloud over the internet.

This collaboration will extend Cisco’s industry leadership in SD-WAN for multicloud enterprise networking by offering an ecosystem platform for partners like Megaport to bridge Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN fabric with carrier-neutral and software-defined cloud interconnect fabrics.

Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect site-to-site and site-to-multicloud connectivity

Benefits of Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect with Megaport

●      Simple on-demand provisioning and management: vManage provides a single pane of glass for end-to-end network automation from branch to clouds (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), which reduces human error and cuts connectivity time from weeks to minutes

●      Secure SD-WAN: Worldwide, end-to-end security segmentation, and policy enforced through SD-WAN

●      Guaranteed SLAs: Guaranteed uptime with 99.999% availability over the Cloud Interconnect backbone

●      Optimized cost: Reduces cloud data egress fee costs by up to 54% and network charges by up to 75%

●      Increased visibility: End-to-end visibility to 1500+ business applications (including SaaS applications)

●      Encrypted multicloud interconnects: SD-WAN tunnels created between interconnect gateway (Megaport Virtual Edge) and the cloud service provider allow for branch to cloud traffic to be completely encrypted through the Megaport backbone.

How do you deploy Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect?

Users have the convenience of managing their SD-WAN fabric and connectivity to clouds and other branches completely through Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager. All policy administration and bringing up of virtual routers as well as connections is API driven and invisible to the user. Users must only select the bandwidths of the connections needed and the locations where they want to connect from/to, along with a few other settings, to establish connectivity. Please refer to the configuration guide in additional resources.

How do you order Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect?

Users may order the solution via Cisco partners, who will have the capability to order all components of the solution through Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW) on behalf of the user. Users will be able to purchase Cisco Catalyst 8000V Edge Software licenses along with the Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect gateway (Megaport Virtual Edge), Virtual Cross Connects, and Megaport Ports through CCW. Licensing is available in 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year terms or with the Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) billing model (launching in September 2023). Please refer to the Megaport Ordering guide for additional details on ordering various SKUs.

The PAYG licensing mechanism will require users to purchase PAYG ($0 licenses) SKUs from CCW through their partners. These PAYG license SKUs entitle users to bring up any Megaport services without requiring any term commitments upfront. This also allows users to dynamically expand or contract their network based on their day-to-day bandwidth requirements and be billed at the end of the month. A true consumption-based billing model enables you to only pay if you use the Megaport services so there is no wastage, no overages, and truly dynamic access to your network. With no upfront commitments, the guesswork is taken out of determining the amount of bandwidth you need for the next year. Users are billed based on publicly available rates, for compute and bandwidth reserved on a daily basis. Pricing varies based on the region where the services are located and the size of compute and bandwidth of the Megaport Virtual Edges and Virtual Cross Connects respectively. Users can also easily track their usage/consumption on their Subscription Billing Platform (SBP) portal.

Additional resources

●      Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect with Megaport FAQ

●      Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect with Megaport Podcast

●      Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect with Megaport Configuration Guide

●      What is Software Defined Cloud Interconnect? Video

●      What is Software Defined Cloud Interconnect? Webpage

●      Cisco SD-WAN Cloud OnRamp

●      Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN