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Cisco Systems, Inc. www.cisco.com
Cisco Extended Enterprise SD-WAN
Design Guide
Introduction
Extended enterprise is the extension of enterprise network to non-carpeted spaces in harsh environments that can span
across geographies. Typical examples include remote point-of-sale (POS), warehouses, distribution centers, remote
sites, kiosks, remote ATM sites, production centers, storage spaces, and outdoor spaces, all connected over private or
public Wide Area Networks (WAN) networks. This requires thousands of miles of remotely located assets to be managed
alongside information technology (IT) infrastructure with a central management platform as the single pane of glass.
The enterprise landscape is continuously evolving. Businesses are embracing digital transformation and rapidly adopting
technology to increase productivity, reduce costs, and transform the customer experience. Legacy WAN architectures
are facing major challenges under this evolving landscape. Legacy WAN architectures typically consist of multiple MPLS
transports, or an MPLS paired with an Internet or LTE used in an active/standby fashion, most often with Internet or
software-as-a-service (SaaS) traffic being backhauled to a central data center or regional hub for Internet access. Issues
with these architectures include inefficient bandwidth usage, high bandwidth costs, application downtime, poor SaaS
performance, complex operations, complex workflows for cloud connectivity, long deployment times and policy
changes, limited application visibility, and difficulty in securing the network.
Customers are using a fragmented WAN to support critical business functions. Multiple connections were being
controlled by several routers, all from different service providers. This created a complex IT environment where
applications were manually rerouted in case of link failure. The proposed extended enterprise Software-Defined Wide
Area Networking (SD-WAN) solution in this Cisco Validated Design (CVD) is based on the principles of Software Defined
Access (SDA).
SD-WAN is part of a broader technology of software-defined networking (SDN). SDN is a centralized approach to
network management which abstracts the underlying network infrastructure from its applications. This decoupling of data
plane forwarding and control plane allows customers to centralize the intelligence of the network and allows for more
network automation, operations simplification, and centralized provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Cisco
SD-WAN applies these principles of SDN to the WAN.
Customers can quickly establish Cisco SD-WAN overlay fabric to connect data centers, branches, campuses, and
colocation facilities to improve network speed, security, and efficiency. Cisco SD-WAN is an on-prem and
cloud-delivered, highly-automated, secure, scalable, and application-aware with rich analytics.
This CVD outlines the steps for both IT and operations teams to accomplish their business goals by realizing unified
SD-WAN-based management for enterprise and extended enterprise deployments with the Cisco IR1101 Integrated
Services Router Rugged (Cisco IR1101).
Scope and Audience
This design guide provides an overview of the requirements driving the evolution of extended enterprise network designs
followed by a discussion of the latest technologies and designs that are available for building an extended network to
address those requirements. It is a companion to the associated Implementation Guides (IGs) for Extended Enterprise
networks, which provide configurations explaining how to deploy the most common implementations of the designs
described in this guide. The intended audience includes technical decision makers, solution architects, and field