Cisco Digital Network Architecture

Why an intent-based network?

How does an intent-based network help you in business terms? It allows you to continuously align your network to your organization’s needs. It delivers contextual network-based insights, automates processes and protects against threats. For example, it learns the performance needs of all your applications and services and continuously adapts end-to-end to achieve the required service quality. And, it automatically applies access policies between, users, applications and devices, consistently anywhere across the network. And, it understands operational compliance requirements and continuously verifies that golden software images and patches are applied.

What makes all this possible is a fundamental transformation occurring in how networks are built and run:

• Closed and hardware-centric models are giving way to open, programmable and software-centric platforms that integrate with applications, systems and domains beyond the network.

• Manual, repetitive command-line-interface-driven management is being largely superseded by policy-based automation.

• Perimeter-based, reactive security has been supplanted by network-embedded, context-based security that reaches from the cloud to the enterprise edge.

• Simple network visibility is morphing to predictive and contextual analytics for users, devices, applications, things and the network at all points in time.

Cisco DNA reflects all these changes. With this architecture, business and IT can become far more nimble and respond to business conditions quicker and more intelligently.

Speed and simplicity to meet growing demands

Traditional network architectures are unable to scale for the digital era. Cisco has reimagined our network architecture with the following characteristics:

• Centralized management: Design, provision, enable policy and assure network services through cloud-enabled, centralized management. Enable visibility of end-to-end network services for campus and branch environments, on-premises or in the cloud.

• Automation: Fully automate the network infrastructure based on one policy across the entire access network, acting as a single fabric, with Cisco SD-Access. Accelerate branch deployments with Cisco SD-WAN. Simplify and scale operations by automating day-to-day configuration, provisioning, and troubleshooting.

• Assurance: Proactively predict performance through machine learning to correlate user, device and application data for contextual business and operational insights. Identify issues and provide actionable insight to deliver better, more personalized experiences.

• Security: Mitigate threats with end-to-end network segmentation and enforce security policies across the network. Identify and mitigate threats and vulnerabilities with network analytics - even in encrypted traffic.

• Virtualization: Deploy network services in minutes on any platform – branch, colocation or public cloud – and connect users to applications with one seamless network.

• Open platform: Streamline IT operations, enable innovation and align to business intent

by making the network open and extensible for integration with other systems and applications.