Orange Business Services and Cisco have teamed up to help take their customers’ digital transformations one step further. The two are working to build on their existing SD-WAN work to develop software defined LANs (SD-LAN) solutions in its Open Labs program.
The Orange & Cisco SD-LAN solutions will be tailored to address individual customers’ business challenges surrounding network automation, analytics, and security.
“The Orange Open Labs provide a global mix of physical and virtual resources for innovation and development. This helps companies explore their future connectivity and performance possibilities in a safe and secure environment. The benefit of hands-on experience is clear, with 80 percent of enterprises utilizing the Open Lab for an SD-WAN proof of concept (PoC) moving on to roll-out SD-WAN pilots with Orange Business Services,” says a joint announcement.
The “self-organized, self-serving” network
While networks strain to accommodate increased numbers of devices, apps and data, the Orange and Cisco SD-LAN creates a centrally-managed wired and wireless architecture and is therefore easier to integrate and run, says the two companies.
“With the exponential growth of users and devices in a highly mobile world connecting to applications and data in multiple cloud environments, enterprises are looking to deliver security and optimal application experiences while reducing costs,” said Sachin Gupta, senior vice president, product management, Enterprise Networking, Cisco.
“Building on our collaboration with Orange around Intent-based Networking, we are now expanding from SD-WAN to SD-LAN, delivering multi domain segmentation, automation and analytics.”
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Campus benefits
For campus Wi-Fi networks, Orange and Cisco SD-LAN addresses deployment and visibility issues. According to the companies, it can effectively monitor services, access and usage on networks, and anticipate any essential upgrades to deal with the demands of wireless users.
It also provides secure identity-driven access, defining the users, things and devices that can access the network, the announcement says. Access can be granted or revoked at a granular level such as setting up guest Wi-Fi groups, for example.
“SD-LAN allows for segmentation based on the connected device, making it easy to segment groups, departments and the like. This enhances security, performance and device priority access management,” the announcement says.
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