Conquer Complexity – Cisco Unified Branch with Lee Peterson

Learn more about the latest routing and secure branch solutions from Cisco. Cisco is introducing a unified branch approach designed for deploying branches at scale with optimal reliability and security. This strategy emphasizes leveraging a cloud platform for consistent management, centralized intelligence, and streamlined assurance across both owned and unowned infrastructure. A core challenge in branch deployments is their widespread nature, lack of on-site IT staff, and inherent complexity, which often leads to configuration drift and increased security risks. To combat this, Cisco is advancing its branches as code initiative, treating network configurations like software, storing them in Git for version control, and integrating them into standard CI/CD pipelines.

This “branches as code” methodology, powered by a Terraform provider developed by Cisco, enables rapid and consistent deployment of new branch locations. The workflow demonstrated involves using GitLab to manage network configurations as code, allowing for pre-defined defaults, automated testing, and easy rollbacks if issues arise. This approach significantly simplifies the on-site deployment process, transforming it into a plug-and-play experience that can be handled by non-network engineers, reducing deployment times from hours to minutes. Complementary to this, Cisco is providing validated designs and blueprints for small, medium, and large branches across various verticals, ensuring best practices are embedded in deployments.

Cisco is also launching new hardware, including the Cisco 8000 series secure router, an extension of its existing Catalyst portfolio. This new router features a Cisco networking processor (merchant silicon with Cisco IP) specifically optimized for cryptographic workloads, ensuring high-speed IPsec and SD-WAN performance, and is positioned to be future-proof for a post-quantum cryptography world. It addresses security at multiple levels: secure boot, crypto, management plane, and data in transit. While the 8000 series continues to run IOS XE, maintaining continuity with existing Catalyst deployments, Cisco is also introducing an MX-based variant, the 8455-MX, which will operate with a cloud-native OS. This dual-stream approach, offering both IOS XE and MX operating systems, provides customers with optionality to choose the right tool for their specific needs, whether prioritizing traditional CLI-based management or cloud-native simplicity, with a future vision for greater normalization between the two.