Cisco Secure Networking Cisco IT Experience with SASE

Sarvjeet Kaur and Claire Gobran of Cisco IT shared how Cisco became customer zero for Cisco Secure Access and moved its global workforce to SSE in phases. They covered the shift from on-premises VPN to zero trust access and generative AI protection, the architecture and support model behind the rollout, and the lessons they learned along the way. Both presented as part of Cisco’s appearance at Networking Field Day 41.

Gobran explained that Cisco’s roughly 120,000 employees connect through 12 global hubs, nine of which now run SSE. A few hubs will stay on-premises because of regulatory requirements. The team started with VPN because it was the most mature use case and the legacy hardware was due for replacement, then moved on to zero trust access and generative AI protection. Leadership made a go/no-go decision at every phase. Today the entire workforce uses the SSE VPN, 155 applications are enabled, and the team has submitted about 115 features and enhancements to the product group. Replacing 24 location profiles with automatic nearest-location selection cut incidents dramatically. Kaur outlined the architecture: SD-WAN peers with SSE over BGP, DNS security has moved from Umbrella to Secure Access, and weekly reviews have extended generative AI protection to roughly 3,000 applications.

The rollout began with engineering users on the product team, who expected hiccups, then moved to Cisco IT staff and then to wider waves. The VPN track alone took a year. Kaur named the biggest problems as applications that hadn’t allowlisted SSE public IP addresses, man-in-the-middle issues during decryption for DLP, and authentication failures. When asked about TAC, the presenters said Cisco IT opens and pays for cases like any other customer and needs leadership approval to escalate them. Splunk handles alerting, ThousandEyes monitors all nine regions, and an in-house AI chat tool now resolves about 84% of support cases without a human. Gobran closed with lessons on executive buy-in, a willingness to roll back changes, and communication campaigns that eventually required users to migrate. She noted that the same experience now follows employees from campus to home to the road.