White Paper

© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public. Page 5 of 6
●
Cisco IOS® Embedded Event Manager (EEM) provides real-time network event detection and onboard
automation. It gives you the ability to adapt the behavior of your network devices to align with your business
needs.
With Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN), your routers also bring automated intelligence to your branches to simplify
operations and lower costs:
●
Performance Routing (PfR) offloads the Internet traffic from the expensive MPLS line to the direct Internet
access (DIA) traffic line and immediately aligning the right application with the right resource.
●
Application Visibility and Control (AVC) gives PfR the ability to recognize the applications and
automatically match it to the right WAN connection to increase performance and decrease resource cost.
●
Cisco Prime Plug-and-Play Application enables you to automatically deploy a new router on the network
with low-touch interaction simply leveraging the Cisco Prime infrastructure.
These capabilities save time: a huge amount of time, potentially quadrupling the productivity of your staff compared
to the time it takes to do these things manually. They also make your network much more scalable and your
business more agile. Because adding a new device anywhere in your environment now requires one step: plug it in.
The network handles the rest.
Programmability
The next step in simplifying networking is SDN, the ability to implement network capabilities in software, where they
can be programmed and reprogrammed at will. Cisco can unlock the business benefits of SDN today, in the network
you already have deployed, with the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Enterprise Module (APIC EM).
The solution provides an intelligent, two-way control layer that lets you use SDN capabilities to make your network:
●
Simpler, by letting you make network policy changes and configurations once and automatically
programming them everywhere
●
More open, with an architecture that uses open APIs and open standards to integrate Layer 4 through 7
services, virtualization, and management vendors
●
More innovative, by allowing you to bring in state-of-the-art third-party applications that use your network’s
programmability to deliver new business capabilities
Simplifying with SDN
Cisco APIC EM lets you make network changes and configurations everywhere, dynamically throughout the
network, independently of device-specific limitations. SDN enables you to shift away from appliance-based
networking to intent-based networking: your network is managed and optimized for the business results that you
want to achieve. You can now shift the time that your IT team spends on configuring network components to
delivering services towards business goals. For example, you can:
●
Simplify access control list (ACL) management: Managing ACLs is complex and time consuming
because you have to do it manually for each of the hundreds of devices on your network. It is also prone to
errors, so IT managers are often afraid to make a change. APIC EM monitors your entire environment and
automatically identifies ACL duplicates, inconsistencies, and misconfigurations. So security and regulatory
policy compliance become much easier.