SD-WAN: The Secure Foundation for The New Retail Landscape of Networking

As big box stores, QSRs and grocery stores rapidly adopt a cloud-first strategy, the IT landscape has become significantly different. Enabling secure access to applications wherever customers may be is a significant priority. While delivering speed and agility, the multicloud environment creates challenges such as an expanded attack surface and less control over the customer experience. Cisco SD-WAN helps you address these issues. 

With the power of multicloud access and integrated security, retailers can improve performance, reduce costs, and protect critical information. As a cloud-native WAN overlay, Cisco SD-WAN ensures application performance, adapts to changing conditions—with minimal manual intervention. Cisco SD-WAN is the foundation for a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)-enabled architecture and offers the ability to extend IT's visibility beyond the corporate office or the store and into the internet and cloud.

Today, your network must work harder than ever to deliver the customer and associate experience over the cloud that they expect. With Cisco SD-WAN Cloud OnRamp, you can enable applications on any platform with consistent, predictable performance in minutes. Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) helps you optimize your wide district area network, which means better experiences for everyone. 

Cloud OnRamp for Software as a Service (SaaS) uses real-time analytics to steer users onto the best-performing path for optimal application performance for applications like Microsoft 365, Google Docs, and other cloud-based apps. Enjoy up to 40 percent faster performance for Microsoft 365 with Cisco SD-WAN.²

Cloud OnRamp for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivers seamless, automated connectivity to the cloud. 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. Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.4% to total $678.8 billion in 2024, up from $563.6 billion in 2023.³

In addition, Cloud OnRamp 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.

With the expansion of hybrid work and online shopping, 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, retailers need to provide security closer to the customer and edge to support network agility and minimize network latency. 

Cisco SD-WAN provides full-stack multilayer security capabilities for both on-premises and cloud. It bridges institutions’ current security deployments with their SASE rollout by providing consistent security policy enforcement that can be deployed and managed anywhere. 

Data breach costs rose from $3.86M to $4.24M, the highest average total cost in the history of data breach report.

Applications and customers are more distributed than ever, and the internet has effectively become the new enterprise WAN. As retailers continue to embrace the internet, cloud, and SaaS, network and IT teams are challenged to deliver reliable connectivity, application performance, and security over networks and services they do not own or directly control. 

Network teams often carry the burden of proving the network innocent when something goes wrong. Application issues might manifest themselves 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.

Cisco SD-WAN and ThousandEyes integration extend visibility into the internet, cloud, and SaaS applications for actionable insights beyond the traditional corporate network. Whether moving to the cloud or transitioning to SD-WAN from legacy infrastructures, ThousandEyes can assist businesses make informed decisions by leveraging real baseline data. Enterprises can expedite ThousandEyes agent deployment with vManage integration to quickly pinpoint the source of issues, get to resolution faster, and manage the performance of what matters. vAnalytics correlates application behavior and Quality of Experience (QoE) with the underlying SD-WAN network, translating real-time data into visualized insights.

Managing multiple stores has always been a major challenge within traditional WAN architectures, and deploying security globally adds complexity. This makes consistent policy enforcement a distant goal, made even more unattainable when a change needs to be rolled out across all sites. SD-WAN makes consistency not only possible but seamless, with automated integration with Cisco Umbrella. 

Regardless of the number of stores you have, SD-WAN simplifies network management. With a single WAN fabric, all configurations 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. 

In addition, relying on the internet for enterprise cloud access on a global level adds even more complexity. Link quality and the ease of doing business with internet service providers can vary from region to region. Luckily, Cisco SD-WAN can scale your business, thanks to its support for multigigabit wireless. To do this, the Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms family offers multigigabit Ethernet interfaces. With these high-performance ports, customers 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 can 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.

The Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms family 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 as far as costs, 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 one to two store locations, then to expand SD-WAN across the rest of the sites rapidly. This is where services from Cisco Customer Experience can deliver the biggest value. Drawing from the best practices of successful deployments from multiple enterprises and industries, 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 organizations can reduce their total cost of operations by 38% over a 5-year period with Cisco SD-WAN.

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