News Summary: 

• Cisco introduces new Wide Area Networking (WAN) edge platform to deliver secure and automated access to applications.
• Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform accelerates cloud adoption by providing businesses with flexible options for secure connectivity and visibility to applications across cloud, data center and edge.  
• Cisco Catalyst Cellular Gateways support connecting remote sites using the latest wireless WAN technologies, paving the way for 5G connectivity in the branch office.
• Adventist Health System plans to deploy the Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform to support real-time connectivity to applications across its hospitals and physician practices.

SAN JOSE, Calif — October 20, 2020 – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced its new Wide Area Networking (WAN) edge platform to help customers accelerate cloud adoption and deliver secure and automated connectivity to applications across cloud, data center, and edge.

A foundational piece of Cisco’s intent-based networking portfolio, the Catalyst 8000 Edge family provides customers with an innovative and high-performance routing platform.  Through built-in analytics, the new platform delivers greater visibility into network or application problems and drives informed decisions to optimize user experiences.

As organizations accelerate their adoption of cloud and place more computing power at the edge to run a wider range of applications and improve performance, IT teams are faced with increased complexity, and less control and visibility over the applications running on their networks.  These challenges are restricting agility and the ability to deliver secure, connected experiences. The new Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platforms transform the WAN edge, helping customers be more agile by delivering automated and secure connectivity to applications across cloud, data center and edge.    

“With the proliferation of applications, workloads and services becoming more distributed across the edge-cloud continuum, organizations are facing new realities at the WAN edge,” said JL Valente, Vice President, Product Management for Cisco’s Intent-Based Networking Group. “In building secure multicloud access architectures, IT organizations need the agility to change course and scale quickly along with the needs of business.  The Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform bridges the WAN edge and the cloud edge, providing secure, high-performance connectivity for distributed users to any cloud while delivering IT visibility and business agility.”

With the proliferation of applications, workloads and services becoming more distributed across the edge-cloud continuum, organizations are facing new realities at the WAN edge

JL Valente, Vice President, Product Management for Cisco’s Intent-Based Networking Group

The new platform allows customers to adopt cloud solutions at their own pace. For those looking to adopt a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture, Cisco SD-WAN converges cloud-managed SD-WAN and cloud-delivered security into one solution. For customers requiring an on-premises solution, full-stack SD-WAN security is supported.   

“Adventist Health System has experienced an increasing need for high-performance WAN Edge services across our widely dispersed hospitals and physician practices,” said Ed Vanderpool, IT Technical Manager at Adventist Health.  “Fueled by a growing use of cloud-based applications, tele-medicine, ultra high-definition imaging and remote collaboration, our network must deliver secure, highly resilient and scalable connectivity, and enable agility so we can address our patient care and business requirements. As we expand our intent-based network, the Cisco Catalyst 8000 Series Edge Platform checks all the boxes for a flexible SD-WAN solution that can deliver the performance, visibility, and security needed to deliver these real-time connected experiences.”

..Cisco Catalyst 8000 Series Edge Platform checks all the boxes for a flexible SD-WAN solution that can deliver the performance, visibility, and security needed to deliver these real-time connected experiences

Ed Vanderpool, IT Technical Manager at Adventist Health

The Catalyst 8000 family are built to address today’s most pressing WAN edge issues, and flexible enough to tackle the challenges of tomorrow. Three models are available, designed for multiple use cases:

• As a high-performance SD-WAN solution, the Catalyst 8500 Series Edge Platform is ideal for data center, colocation, and aggregation sites, and features the industry’s highest performing SD-WAN offering with integrated 40G and 100G Ethernet ports in a compact single rack unit form factor. It is powered by Cisco’s third-generation Quantum Flow Processor, a proprietary Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) built to provide high performance, pervasive security and rich network services. 
  
   
• The Catalyst 8300 Series Edge Platform is made to handle edge connectivity at branch sites, offering modular access with a diverse set of connectivity choices for customers to deliver services on-demand to quickly adapt to changing business requirements. It also provides customers with up to four times better SD-WAN service performance than the current Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISRs). 
  
   
• The Catalyst 8000V Edge Software delivers all the same capabilities in software. It can be deployed in the cloud or virtualized on a platform such as Cisco’s 5000 Series Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS). 

Wireless mobility via cellular is becoming critical in modern WANs, and Cisco is enabling customers to easily migrate to an Advanced 4G LTE and 5G wireless WAN:    

• The Cisco Catalyst Cellular Gateway helps customers deploy wireless WAN without changes to existing infrastructure.  It elevates cellular to a primary SD-WAN link option with gigabit connectivity to any cloud or location.  The initial release supports Advanced 4G LTE CAT 18 speeds, with 5G versions coming soon.   
  
   

The Cisco Catalyst 8300 and 8500 series and Cisco Cellular Catalyst Gateways are available today, with the Cisco Catalyst 8000v planned for availability in December 2020.  All are delivered through a flexible subscription-based offer, so customers have continuous access to Cisco innovations as they are added to the subscription.  To learn more, join us for Business Continuity to Resiliency: IT Innovations to Power IT Agility where Cisco engineering leaders and our customers will share perspectives regarding strategies and innovations that will enable IT teams to reimagine their organization's future of work.

Supporting  Resources: 

• Blog: Catalyst 8000 Edge Family: Cisco's New SD-WAN Platform
• Learn more about the: Catalyst 8000 Edge Platform Family
• Learn more about Cisco Catalyst Cellular Gateway
• Infographic: 8 Ways to Enable the Cloud Edge

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