SD-WAN: The Secure Foundation for the New Government Networking Landscape

As the government embraces a cloud-smart strategy, the IT landscape is evolving. Enabling secure access to applications wherever users may be is a high priority. While delivering speed and agility, the multicloud environment creates challenges such as an expanded attack surface and less control over the user experience. Cisco SD-WAN, a FedRAMP-authorized SD-WAN solution, helps you solve these issues.

With the power of multicloud access and integrated security, government organizations can improve performance, reduce costs, and protect critical assets. As a cloud-native WAN overlay, Cisco SD-WAN ensures application performance and adapts to changing conditions—with minimal manual intervention. Cisco SD-WAN is the foundation for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)-enabled architecture use cases and extends IT's visibility far beyond the traditional on-premise network and across the internet, cloud, and edge. 

Today, your network has to work harder than ever to deliver the required user experiences over the cloud. Cisco SD-WAN enhances application experience on any platform with consistent, predictable performance. Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) optimizes your wide area network, which means better experiences for customers and employees.

Cisco’s SD-WAN uses advanced, real-time analytics to guide users onto the best-performing path for optimal Software as a Service (SaaS) application performance for applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and other cloud-based apps. Enjoy up to 40 percent faster performance for Office 365 with Cisco SD-WAN.¹

Our SD-WAN also delivers seamless, automated enterprise connectivity for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in private and public clouds. The cloud networking solution simplifies workflows for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud, including application-aware policies that allow real-time policy enforcement for cloud and on-premises solutions.

In addition, Cisco SD-WAN automates on-demand connectivity to multiple sites and to the world's leading cloud provider networks through Software-Defined Cloud Interconnect (SDCI) providers like Equinix and Megaport.  

As organizations and users become more distributed, especially with the growth of hybrid work, the demand for anywhere, anytime access to applications has resulted in the transformation of networks to deliver uninterrupted connectivity while maintaining security. To protect anywhere, anytime access, government organizations need to provide security closer to their users and the edge to support network agility, minimize network latency, and optimize their mission and business outcomes.

Cisco SD-WAN provides full-stack multilayer security capabilities for both on-premises and cloud. It provides consistent security policy enforcement that can be deployed and managed anywhere.  

Applications and users are more distributed than ever, and the internet has effectively become part of the new enterprise WAN. As organizations continue to embrace the internet, cloud, and SaaS, government network and IT teams are challenged to deliver reliable connectivity, application performance, and security over networks and services they don't own or directly control.

Network teams often carry the burden of proving the network innocent when something goes wrong. Application issues might masquerade as network issues. Service disruptions can lead to endless finger-pointing. The resulting cycles pinpointing the source of issues can lead to prolonged service interruptions that can ultimately damage the mission success and reputation of government agencies.

Cisco SD-WAN with ThousandEyes integration further extends visibility throughout the internet, cloud, and SaaS applications for actionable insights beyond the traditional government network. ThousandEyes assists in making informed operational decisions leveraging real baseline data, whether it is moving to the cloud or optimizing the transition to SD-WAN from legacy infrastructures. Government enterprises can use advanced SD-WAN capabilities to quickly pinpoint the source of issues, get to resolution faster, and manage the performance of what matters. SD-WAN correlates application behavior and Quality of Experience (QoE) with the underlying SD-WAN network, translating real-time data into visualized insights and actions.

Managing branch environments has always been a major challenge within traditional WAN architectures, and deploying security across global locations adds complexity. This makes consistent policy enforcement even more challenging when a policy change needs to be rolled out across all sites. Cisco SD-WAN makes consistent policy not only possible but seamless.

It doesn't matter if you're managing tens or thousands of locations; Cisco SD-WAN simplifies network management using advanced AI/ML algorithms trained on the largest networking data sets in the world. With a single WAN fabric, all policies and configuration can be centrally managed, even across multicloud environments. Cloud security can be enabled to thousands of sites within minutes. The outcome is true simplicity at an enterprise scale.

Relying on the internet for enterprise cloud access on a global level adds even more complexity. Access quality and the ease of doing business with internet service providers can vary from region to region. Fortunately Cisco SD-WAN is able to scale to meet your agency needs, thanks to its support for multigigabit wireless. To do this, the Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform Family offers multigigabit Ethernet interfaces. With these high-performance ports, government organizations can connect Cisco Catalyst Cellular Gateways and get sub-6-GHz 5G wireless connectivity, reaching speeds of up to 3.3 Gbps and more with upcoming mmWave models. Get fast, flexible connectivity to the cloud that's able to be remotely activated and managed through the Cisco SD-WAN dashboard. Dual 5G SIM for failover and IP pass-through mean that multigigabit 5G for SD-WAN can either complement broadband internet connections or replace them entirely.

Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms provides customers the flexibility to increase memory, capacity, and performance. The portfolio offers investment protection with 5G technology. Cisco offers the highest-performing SD-WAN edge platforms in the industry, with end-to-end visibility through analytics for optimization of cloud applications and edge compute resources.

SD-WAN delivers rich benefits including cost reductions and improved security and simplicity. But the key to a successful SD-WAN transformation is to put the right focus on the initial setup and transition of the first 5 to 10 sites, then to rapidly expand SD-WAN across the rest of the enterprise. This is where services from Cisco Customer Experience are able to deliver the biggest value. Drawing from the best practices of successful deployments from numerous enterprises and government organizations, ranging from simple to complex, the Cisco Customer Experience team's focus is to make the transformation smooth and avoid major hurdles. Categorizing the various sites, establishing templates, defining global policies, and enabling the right security architecture are a sure way to a smooth and successful deployment. An IDC study found that Cisco SD-WAN customers achieved significant savings, with an average reduction of 38% in the five-year total cost of operations.⁶

Deploy with confidence on platforms that increase agility, security, and visibility for connectivity to the cloud.

As the global networking and SD-WAN market leader, Cisco SD-WAN enables organizations to securely connect any user to any application over any transport while ensuring a predictable user experience. It delivers integrated capabilities for multicloud, security, unified communications, and application optimization—foundational to zero trust and SASE-enabled architectures. 

Cisco SD-WAN for Government integrates intelligent, application-aware networking and security in a flexible architecture to deliver: