Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Reviews

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is for WAN connectivity only. When customers have a lot of workloads available on cloud and they need use cases like direct internet access, encryption, and better centralized control and centralized management of their complete WAN environment, those use cases generally fall under Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.

When customers are distributed across different locations, all the management, control and data plane are specific to those branches. From the management perspective, from the life cycle management or upgrade and update, we need to work on each and every branch. Once Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is deployed, all of that can be done from a centralized location using the different management and control tools that Cisco has. Additionally, from the distributed perspective, if they want to access any application from the cloud, they would have to backhaul to their central data center and then access their applications on cloud. With Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, direct internet access can be configured and they can reach out to the respective cloud locations directly. Zero-touch provisioning is something that can be implemented where you just create the formats and accordingly provision the new sites with zero-touch. You just bring the device and it will be automatically configured from the centralized management tools. There are multiple such features where Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solves problems for customers.

One valuable feature is the scale at which it can be deployed for big enterprises. The application-aware routing they provide is another important feature. They have over 4,000 signatures of applications where the system can identify those applications and accordingly create the profile so that those applications can be given the best possible route depending on their requirement.

Since we have a centralized control and a centralized management plane, for a distributed organization that has a lot of different offices, we can have complete visibility from a single point of connect. Accordingly, we can do the provisioning and configuration everything from a central place. This is a very useful architecture for an organization that is distributed or has multiple offices across different geographies.

Having complete visibility into the complete Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN fabric helps not only to troubleshoot but also from a traffic engineering or capacity planning perspective or to ensure that proper uptime is maintained because we can proactively sense the issues in the network. This could be related to any malfunctioning at the product layer or it could be related to the sizing.

All of those things actually add to the operational efficiency where we have vManage, vController, and all these tools to have centralized management, zero-touch provisioning enabled for the complete fabric. This actually gives real-time telematics of all devices. We can have complete visibility into the network on a real-time basis. That way we can ensure that we have better uptime for the overall Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN fabric.

If they can have better firewall features as their competitors have, such as Fortinet and Versa, that would help to place this solution better so that we can address security related things. If they can have all the IPS, IDS, everything built on all the edge devices, whether physical or virtual, that could be one improvement.

Actually, if customers are existing Cisco customers, if Cisco can be more flexible to leverage the existing investment, that could be another important aspect to save on cost and be more competitive from a pricing perspective. Overall, the pricing or the segment that Cisco deals with is a bit premium, which they charge a bit premium against the competition on the licensing, hardware, and services.

The implementation is not straightforward. You need a specialized partner or specialized people who can implement this. It can be simplified a bit from that perspective as well.

Mostly the way we implement the policies for a big environment requires a lot of things that we need to take care of. If that can somehow be improved, because they have different components, like they have vManage, they have vSmart, and vBond and all these components have to work with a certain flow that they need to follow.

I have been using this solution for around 8 or 9 years now.

Once it is set up, as I mentioned there are certain complexities in the initial configuration, but once it is customized or commissioned properly, then it is very smooth. We have a lot of visibility into the fabric and it performs well. For example, with zero-touch provisioning, if we are adding new sites, we can do it with a few simple clicks. That way it is very flexible.

I think recently they have changed their licensing which was earlier on a per device bandwidth basis. Now licensing has gone in the new routing direction. Otherwise, it was a problem where we had to define the bandwidth for every router. I think it is one of the most costly solutions in this segment when we compete it with players like Fortinet. The cost is at the higher side.

Cisco is more advanced since they have more granular based insights of the network. They have a dedicated controller unlike Fortinet where they have the control plan mostly built with the edge devices. That way we have a more granular way to implement the policies than Fortinet. If we are dealing with a very big network, then Cisco has an advantage of managing the big networks.

Cisco TAC is one of the best. They are technically qualified and responsive.

There are many scenarios where we replace MPLS with the internet because now we have the flexibility to migrate to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and we do not need private connectivity such as MPLS. This cost optimization on the circuit is one part where we can leverage on all the available bandwidth unlike in MPLS or the traditional way where we have one active link and one passive. Here we can leverage on all the available transport and we can leverage on any type of connectivity because it is transparent to the transport that we are using, whether it is 5G, LTE, MPLS or whatever. Since it has centralized management from the operations perspective, it certainly adds value because now we can manage things from a centralized point. Earlier we were taking days to upgrade and update the edge devices, but from the centralized vManage or vControl, we can do it in a few hours. That way we can capture all these ROIs and can create a matrix and then share or present it to our customers.

All their network products include LAN, WAN, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, and firewalls. As a Gold Partner, mostly the controller part is on cloud in most cases, while the edge device is on-premises. We sometimes purchase virtual firewall and virtual router to extend Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN fabric to these hyper-scalers. I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10.

I have used Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN as a customer. I am a customer of Cisco, and I have been a customer rather than a partner of Cisco.

The features are useful, but it is more about how insightful these features are and how easily you are able to understand the flow and mitigate a threat. Although those features exist in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, the lack of visibility makes it very difficult to find out what precisely is being monitored through the advanced threat prevention features of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela solution.

The features are undoubtedly useful, but at the end of the day, it boils down to how easily you can see the insights provided by the solution. I feel Cisco slightly lacks in that aspect. It could be because the hardware itself is a router with added security functionality, while in Fortinet or Palo Alto, those systems are intrinsically firewalls with security capabilities built-in, and routing added on top. Hence, the visibility part in those solutions is better compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, since it is not a logging device.

I have found some other solutions more insightful and user-friendly as compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, but the basic SD-WAN functionality is good enough. I am using it only because it was done as a pilot project, specifically for my 60 to 70 sites. For the majority of the sites, I am using Fortinet's Secure SD-WAN solution and I found that more viable and more in alignment with my requirements.

For example, there is not any Internet Service Database available in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN intrinsically. If I want to write a policy based on applications, I am not able to write it, at least in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela deployment that we have done, and that is fairly easy to do in Fortinet. The second issue is the logging capability. I think the visibility that Fortinet Secure SD-WAN has is not even comparable. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN does not provide that sort of insight or control as far as traffic steering is concerned.

With respect to the SLAs, I barely know which sort of SLAs are violated in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, so I do not have clear visibility on where the traffic is moving from at my spoke or hub locations. I believe Fortinet gives me a very clear picture of where the traffic is going. Overall visibility, whether it is data traffic or logs, is much better in Fortinet compared to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.

The complexity of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela is noticeable and quite complicated to configure. If something breaks, you have to involve TAC and others to fix it. On the contrary, you can work with underlays. Even if your IPsec overlay tunnel is down, it does not impact your production. Thus, we find Fortinet's solution significantly better than Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution.

I have used Application-aware Routing in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. However, I found it to be very complicated, especially regarding policy writing. For my breakout of VC traffic, we had to write a bunch of IP addresses for Zoom, Webex, and others. Presently, it can only identify Webex as an application, and I highly doubt whether there is any application identification for Zoom and other platforms, as we were not able to find it during our implementation. It is done through static whitelisting of the IPs, which is not a scalable solution since IPs can change at any time. Overall, the application-aware routing policies are not as flexible and scalable as the Internet Service Database feature of Fortinet provides.

The struggles encompass policy writing, logging capabilities, traffic visibility, and complex configuration. There is also the issue of load balancing. We have faced considerable challenges with traffic load balancing between the links. Although the SLA targets are configurable, understanding how traffic flows is challenging, making troubleshooting exceedingly difficult. Overall, I find it a quite complicated solution with not that much operational usability.

I have been working with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for close to two and a half years now.

The basic functionality and the control connections created are complicated, and a simple issue in the control connections between the fabric causes numerous complexities that demand extensive troubleshooting time.

It is done through static whitelisting of the IPs, which is not a scalable solution since IPs can change at any time.

The complexity of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela is noticeable and quite complicated to configure. If something breaks, you have to involve TAC and others to fix it.

We are using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN infrastructure primarily because we have invested in it after using ISR 4K routers and the legacy IWAN solution, which is the predecessor of SD-WAN, Intelligent WAN. Since the devices still have an operational life left, we want to leverage that.

I have already settled with Cisco ISE after visiting the website a few months ago where I researched Cisco ISE and other Cisco products. I have already procured the Cisco ISE solution. There are some other products as well.

We are using Cisco ACI as well. Cisco ACI stands for Application Centric Infrastructure. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Viptela is also being used and we are using Cisco ACI as well. I am not sure how Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN supports cloud environments because our deployment is on-premises. Therefore, I cannot comment on the vAnalytics and other solutions that could enhance security or visibility since I have not used them myself.

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is to connect my 30 branch offices across the country with my central connection since I faced challenges regarding connectivity. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN provides a secure tunnel to connect all these branches, ensuring data traffic is managed smoothly while considering security and maintaining stable data traffic.

The secure overlay has massively changed the way my team manages branch connectivity day-to-day because monitoring and downtime are minimal, allowing my team to see what is happening via dashboards and deploy any changes quickly through a single console, making my life easier as an IT leader.

I no longer have to worry too much about updates since I have a specific roadmap for securities and version updating, which is a significant improvement compared to the challenges I faced in the past with siloed platforms.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN positively impacts my organization as we produce life-saving drugs, necessitating a secure model to meet regulatory demands, and its compatibility with other devices adds to my advantages.

The regulatory and security assurance is important because it meets audit requirements enforced by bodies like the US FDA and EU GMP, ensuring my security measures and data roadmap are well-documented.

Regarding Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, it is crucial for compliance with EU GMP and GXP regulations; deploying the solution while considering security and audit requirements adds value to my operations.

I have observed significant differences in operational overhead when managing hybrid WAN links, as previously I had to manage them separately, but now they are unified under a single umbrella, providing significant ROI and ease of troubleshooting through a centralized dashboard.

One of the best features of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is the secure platform it offers, particularly the individual and secure tunnels that are essential for my operations.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN helps protect access between my branches, plants, and central systems by ensuring seamless data traffic through its secure tunnel, which is crucial in my pharmaceutical environment where data is vital, especially related to life-saving drugs.

I also want to mention the secure features, including the Cisco live product that enhances observability and monitoring, as well as live detection of threats, which significantly strengthens my platform.

My network operations teams are gradually starting to use AI-driven network analytics and automated event correlation to investigate network anomalies, leveraging some built-in features of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, although adoption is still in progress.

My network operations teams handle day-to-day policy and template changes centrally through Catalyst SD-WAN Manager (vManage), allowing for easy management as one expert can push all changes in a single shot.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN could be improved as the deployment of new features can be challenging, given that not all team members are experts with these technologies, which sometimes necessitates support from the Cisco team.

I acknowledge that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's roadmap is promising as improvements happen quickly every quarter, which is favorable for me.

I find Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's AI capabilities in governance and security are crucial; however, I am still exploring better tools, as AI is relatively new for me. I have roadmaps and am working on it, but there is still a need for more clarity on proper AI tools compatible with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, which is a specific demand I have.

Concerning the accuracy and reliability of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's AI capabilities, I notice that accuracy can be better, but I also consider the performance, as I still lack specific use cases to examine.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for the last three years.

I have not found any challenges with automatic failover for branches with dual connections, such as MPLS and broadband or cellular, as I have redundant lines and auto-failover in place since deploying Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, and I have not encountered any issues.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is indeed stable in my environment.

As I add branches, plants, or cloud connectivity, the scalability of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN works well since I have integrated Meraki devices that connect my 30 branch offices efficiently.

Customer support for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is good. I would rate customer support a 10 out of 10.

I did not use a specific solution before but had some components connected through various ISPs and Telcos.

I am currently working with an expert team on migrating routing protocols and cutting over active traffic from my previous WAN setup to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN overlay, which is a complex process given my existing setup.

I have seen a return on investment; relevant metrics show reduced costs in data traffic and latency, increased throughput, and the establishment of a secure data channel, making it a significant advantage.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN indicates that while pricing is slightly higher, the ROI justifies the initial investment, proving flexible and beneficial in the long run.

Before choosing Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, I evaluated Fortinet and Cisco VMware SD-WAN; however, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN was more suitable for me.

I rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN a 10 because it fulfills all my demands, and I experience very few issues with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, making me happy with it.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is deployed in my organization in a hybrid model, with some parts on-premises and others in the cloud. I am using AWS, and some parts are with Google for my cloud services.

I advise others considering Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN to look into my use cases as it has potential for pharmaceutical companies similar to mine.

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN involves SD-WAN, specifically internet only SD-WAN for 1800 stores.

For those 1800 stores, we have an internet only setup where all branches head to the data center where Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN hubs are located.

My network operations teams are not using AI-driven network analytics and automated event correlation to investigate network anomalies yet.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has positively impacted my organization with the amount of customizations we can do, and there are no limitations.

That flexibility has changed things for my team by providing enablement for the team to perform traffic engineering.

The best features Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers include customizations.

Regarding customization, I can tailor pretty much everything; whatever an SD-WAN can do, it is the top-tier SD-WAN product.

I have observed that managing hybrid WAN transport links through a unified overlay is quite straightforward; to steer traffic, I utilize active-active setups, forward error correction, duplication of packets, dynamic forward error corrections, and lots of options there with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.

Day-to-day policy and template changes across Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager and VManage are approached quite straightforwardly; a single template gets pushed across lots and lots of branches.

When configuring dual-homed edge connectivity and automated brownout or blackout failover mechanisms across heterogeneous transport types, I encounter operational tradeoffs that are all doable in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN; it looks at something such as reachability on the other end, and if not reachable, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN will automatically steer the traffic on the next best link.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN can be improved with one dashboard for SD-WAN, SD-LAN, access points, Catalyst Center, and everything; all of that should be a single dashboard.

I would like to include auto failovers and failbacks with the use of ThousandEyes inbuilt as additional improvements.

Regarding Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are just okay, not the best in the world.

To make governance and security better for me, I would improve the fire-walling components and bring them at par with something such as Palo Alto.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for more than five years.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is stable.

The scalability of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is good; we're running it across 1800 stores.

The customer support for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is good.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate customer support an 8.

I have always been working with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, so I did not previously use a different solution.

Migrating routing protocols and active traffic cutovers from legacy BGP or DMVPN WAN topologies to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN overlay is quite straightforward for me.

I have seen a return on investment with time saved; we do see a bit less operational tickets.

I estimate that the number of operational tickets has dropped by approximately 20% since using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that Cisco is pretty much on the expensive side; if you have the money, you know you get the best, but compared to Fortinet, Fortinet wins on the commercial side every single day.

Before choosing Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, I evaluated Fortinet, Palo Alto, Versa, VMware, and VeloCloud SD-WAN.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN a 10.

I choose a 10 because it is really good.

The accuracy and reliability of output from Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN should be all right.

My advice to others looking into using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is to take it; it is worth the investment, and do not go towards Fortinet.

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is managing SD-WAN access.

A specific example of how I manage SD-WAN access day to day is that we manage the end-to-end connectivity of our various partners, including all management of the connectivity, service provisioning, and policy access using SD-WAN access.

Regarding how it has changed the way my team handles policy access or service provisioning compared to before, we used to have IPsec channels, which we typically built with commands from the command line, but it required a lot of effort.

I would add that visibility has improved significantly, and connectivity is now more reliable compared to traditional IPsec tunnels with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has positively impacted my organization in terms of visibility and operational effort. Visibility has improved, and it has provided us with the flexibility to manage devices as infrastructure as code, integrating with tools such as Terraform for automation.

A specific outcome is the accuracy and uniformity of the configuration. Earlier, when users or engineers built the configuration, there was no instant processing, but now with this system, we have standard configurations across the partner devices and connectivity, which makes life easier.

My network operations teams approach day-to-day policy and template changes across Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager by simplifying the overall provisioning configuration for branch connectivity.

The best features Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers include central management of end-to-end connectivity for all of our partners from a single management plane.

This single management plane helps my team respond when a partner has a connectivity issue by allowing us to pinpoint the issues easily, as all logging is centralized and we have visibility for the devices sitting in the department networks. This makes life much easier for us compared to when the client or partner was managing their own devices, where we had no visibility into what was happening, especially during tunnel flaps. Now I can identify issues from Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN that we manage.

I observe that the strongest point of SD-WAN is that it combines all those hybrid WAN transport links, such as MPLS alongside broadband and cellular, presenting them as a single pipe, regardless of the unrelated complexity.

To improve Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, I suggest adding more visibility and monitoring capabilities, such as TCP level details into the logs, so we can identify exact connectivity drops in real time rather than diving into past logs. Building dashboards based on TCP data would be beneficial.

I have been managing Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN access for a long time in networking.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is stable, but due to recent vulnerabilities, we need to upgrade frequently, which causes some issues. Overall, it remains stable.

The scalability of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is good, but since we do not have much connectivity requirement at the moment, we have not reached a point where we feel there could be a bottleneck.

The customer support for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is good. I would rate the customer support as fine on a scale of one to ten.

We are still using BGP when it comes to migrating routing protocols and active traffic cutovers from legacy BGP or DMVPN WAN topologies to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN overlay.

I see a clear return on investment, mainly in the reliability of the services we provide, and I note a distinct difference from the past.

A rough metric for that improvement is fewer incidents, which is a clear metric for us.

Cisco is the only product we have evaluated and used.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN an eight.

I rate it an eight because, while it is a great product, there are a few other capabilities that could be added for a higher rating, and there is still room for improvement.

Currently, my network operations teams do not use AI-driven network analytics and automated event correlation much. We still rely on some of the same tools to feed log data, and AI-based analytics is not yet present.

We have not provisioned dual-homed edge connectivity and automated brownout or blackout failover mechanisms across heterogeneous transport types.

My advice for others looking into using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is that it is a fairly stable product and can be utilized for mission-critical connectivity.

The features I find most valuable in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN are the configuration of rules where we don't need to configure router rules. We can create a group and configure all of them. On the other hand, there is the load balancer. I have a load balancer with two lines, with two lines in each branch of my organization. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN makes a load balance between the two lines on a session here and a session there.

I don't think of something regarding weaknesses because I used to legacy routing. I think it is complete. Nothing is complete, but I think it is complete for me or for my daily work.

My impression of the end-to-end visibility offered by Cisco is that we have other tools for monitoring traffic and net flow. But I can see the users who are consuming the bandwidth, and I can see from the LAN to the server, not the user, for example an IP address. For example, 10.10.10.10 communicates or consumes bandwidth to 10.10.10.20, but it doesn't appear with the user name, such as Ali, Zain, or Mark.

I see room for improvement when it comes to visibility as there should be a direction they should go in the future to complete the monitoring of the user at the branch, which user at the branch consumes this bandwidth. This would make routing or configuration for routers easier.

Regarding additional features, I have not thought of any at this time.

I have been working with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for one year.

I have no problem with the technical support provided by Cisco.

I would rate their technical support at nine because for any problem, I receive an answer and the issue gets resolved. Nothing is a perfect ten, but nine is appropriate. I would rate it nine and a half.

I know the concept and how Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN works. I understand what I should do for configuration, such as the vManage, vSmart, vBond, and what it needs for HA.

It was not easy to implement it in my system as we did not do the implementation alone, but I could see how the vendors do it. I asked them about their procedures and requested a sub-plan and pre-requirements, but we did not do the implementation alone. However, for operation, we are working on operations without support.

I was involved in the implementation of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, but not enough to implement it alone. However, I know how to.

The pricing for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is something I don't know as the tender is not in my department or at my level, but I know it is very expensive.

I did consider other products before choosing Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, and they are different in configuration and how they work. Forti doesn't have a centralized configuration in the way that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN does.

I don't remember which version I am currently using.

I would rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN ten out of ten overall.

In Egypt, regarding Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN popularity, fintech or big companies have many branches, such as fintech or telecom companies. Its popularity is high, and all of them want to have or already have Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. However, other sectors know that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution is very expensive and is not useful for them if they don't have many branches.

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is branch network connectivity.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN helps me manage and connect those branch networks day-to-day through template deployments and centralized control. I can also mention local internet breakout.

My network operations teams approach day-to-day policy and template changes across Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager and vManage by trying to keep it to three different types of branches, so the templates for those three branches remain constant as much as possible with some CLI template add-ons.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has positively impacted my organization by lowering the cost of bandwidth and minimizing deployment time.

At the start, the cost of bandwidth was probably 50% of our MPLS cost, and today it would be different.

The best features Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers include zone-based firewalls.

They have helped me control and secure traffic at the branches by minimizing cost through providing internet connectivity to the sites and securing the devices.

I have observed that managing hybrid WAN transport links, such as MPLS alongside broadband and cellular through a unified overlay, makes level two and level three troubleshooting much easier to manage and very streamlined from an operational perspective, though more expertise is required when the underlay becomes a problem.

When a branch has two internet connections, such as MPLS plus broadband or broadband plus cellular, the tradeoffs I have seen with automatic failover when one link slows down depend on the link. Bandwidth performance, latency, and jitter occur; in some cases, AI comes in handy, while in others, I just take the tradeoff from a redundancy perspective.

I am satisfied with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, but I think it could be improved.

Licensing could always be easier with Cisco.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for five years.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is stable.

The scalability of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has shown no problems so far and is very good.

The customer support has been quite good.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer support a seven.

Previously, at very remote sites, I had no network connectivity, and SD-WAN with Starlink is a game changer for me.

I approached migrating routing protocols and active traffic cutovers from legacy BGP or DMVPN WAN topologies to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN overlay by standing up.

I have seen a return on investment.

While I do not have the exact money saved, the metrics I do have show that the deployment time has reduced, as I can deploy to remote areas now with Starlink and SD-WAN, which I was previously unable to do.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was not bad, although licensing, as usual, is a little challenging.

I evaluated other options before choosing Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, specifically VeloCloud.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN a nine.

I rate it a nine because it is quite easy to deploy, serves its purpose, has very secure performance, and includes all the features that I need.

My network operations teams are not quite there yet in using AI-driven network analytics and automated event correlation to investigate network anomalies.

I would advise others looking into using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN to conduct their research, as it is a very good product.

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is managing and monitoring SD-WAN connectivity across branch locations. I primarily use it to monitor network health, troubleshoot tunnel and routing issues, configure policies, and ensure stable connectivity between branches and the data center. It also helps me quickly identify network problems, reduce downtime, and maintain secure, reliable application performance. In my day-to-day role, it plays an important part in incident management, network monitoring, and troubleshooting.

One example from my daily work is when a branch office reported an intermittent connectivity issue. Using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, I checked the tunnel status, link health, and reviewed routing information from the central dashboard. This helped identify that one WAN link was unstable. After coordinating with the ISP and verifying the link was good, the branch connectivity was restored with minimal downtime. The centralized visibility and troubleshooting feature made it much faster to identify the issue and resolve it.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a valuable solution for my organization. It provides centralized management, good visibility, and helps us to reduce issue resolution time and improve network reliability.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has had a positive impact on my organization by improving network reliability and simplifying branch connectivity management. The centralized dashboard provides better visibility into the network, allowing us to identify and resolve issues more quickly. It has reduced troubleshooting time, improved application performance through intelligent path selection, and minimized downtime. Overall, it has increased operational efficiency and helped my IT team to manage the SD-WAN environment more efficiently.

Since implementing Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, we have seen faster troubleshooting and improved network visibility. The centralized dashboard allows us to identify connectivity issues much more quickly, reducing the time needed to diagnose and resolve incidents. We have also experienced fewer service disruptions because traffic failover maintains connectivity when WAN links have a problem. Overall, it has improved operational efficiency, reduced downtime, and enabled my team to manage the network more efficiently.

The features I find most valuable in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN are centralized management, real-time monitoring, and policy-based automation. The centralized dashboard gives me a clear view of all branch sites, making it easy to manage and monitor tunnel health, bandwidth usage, and device status from one place. Real-time monitoring helps identify issues quickly, while automation simplifies configuration changes and reduces manual effort. These features have improved operational efficiency, reduced troubleshooting time, and helped maintain stable connectivity across the SD-WAN environment.

One additional feature I value in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is the centralized dashboard, which gives a complete view of the SD-WAN environment from a single interface. It makes monitoring devices, link performance, and tunnel status much easier. The built-in troubleshooting tools reduce resolution time, and the policy-based management ensures consistent configuration across all branch locations. Overall, these features simplify day-to-day operations.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a strong and reliable SD-WAN solution, but there are a few areas where it could be improved. The user interface could be more intuitive for new users, and reporting and analytics could provide deeper insights with more customizable dashboards. I would also appreciate faster software upgrades, better log correlation for troubleshooting, and more built-in automation features to reduce manual configuration. It is a robust platform that has significantly improved network management and operational efficiency.

Better documentation with real-world examples, improved third-party integration, and more detailed monitoring dashboards would make Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN even more effective.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for about one year in my current role.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is stable in the market, and many more organizations can use it because it is very simple to use and has no complexity for the user. It is very straightforward for both the user and the organization because all users in any organization have few problems with it, and it is more efficient to use and much easier.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN separates the control plane from the data plane. Its controller architecture is highly matured, making it one of the most valuable and reliable LAN platforms for large enterprises. This is why it has strong scalability. It can also be managed from a single dashboard for all branch locations from a single place. I do not have to travel to the branches for configuration or any troubleshooting steps. All of these steps I can do from a single place and a single dashboard.

Customer support is very appreciated.

We previously used a fragmented, multi-vendor legacy infrastructure combined with traditional MPLS circuits. Previously, we used a 1121 series SD-WAN router, which was impacting my organization's provisioning and management of the multiple branches from a single dashboard and from a single location. It is very amazing and useful, and very straightforward and easier to manage with every employee in the organization.

There is a tangible return on investment, primarily realized through a drastic reduction in network downtime and operational man-hours. The network provisioning and development time decreased by up to seventy to eighty percent. With Zero Trust provisioning via the Catalyst Center and Meraki dashboard, new branch offices are configured in hours instead of weeks, freeing engineering teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than manual deployment. This is a benefit of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and it is decreasing the manual work.

Cisco offers premium enterprise capabilities, but its pricing, setup cost, and licensing models represent the most significant hurdles for IT organizations. Cisco hardware commands a premium price tag compared to competitors like Juniper. Cisco provides good licensing models, and the cost is higher, but the product it is providing is amazing.

We evaluated several industry-leading SD-WAN platforms during our proof of concept.

Cisco's operational efficiency in an IT environment generally involves balancing its strong central automation features against its complexity. Tools like Cisco Catalyst Center, Meraki dashboard, and Intersight offer a unified control plane. They allow network teams to push global policy changes, software updates, and configurations to hundreds of devices simultaneously, instead of managing them individually.

Cisco optimizes the digital experience in hybrid and distributed setups by ensuring application performance, seamless collaboration, and deep visibility. Cisco achieves this optimization through three primary mechanisms. It automatically connects branch offices directly to cloud SaaS applications like Microsoft 365. Cisco SD-WAN routes traffic over the best path based on real-time latency.

Cisco's end-to-end visibility is industry-leading, primarily due to its integration of ThousandEyes and full-stack observability across traditional network silos. Traditional monitoring stopped at the enterprise firewall, but Cisco's ThousandEyes extends visibility across the public internet, ISP, and cloud provider networks like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN eliminates blind spots, instantly seeing outside the corporate network into the public ISP transit provider and cloud networks. Instead of chasing individual routers, engineers can pinpoint hop-by-hop latency or packet drop within seconds. A shared source of truth aggregates data across the application, security, and network, giving all teams identical metrics. System administrators, network engineers, and SaaS developers stop debating ownership and focus on identifying the problem.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has been deployed in a public cloud through Amazon Web Services. I gave this review a rating of ten.

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is to facilitate communication with our partner. A specific example is that we need end-to-end connectivity from our site to the partner site, which provides secure communication between these two endpoints.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has impacted my organization positively because it is a centralized management system, which is very helpful as we want simpler management from a BAU perspective.

The main outcome that highlights how Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has made things simpler for my team is time-saving, as we can reuse all the templates, making it very structured and useful.

The differences I have observed in operational overhead when managing hybrid WAN transport links, such as MPLS alongside broadband and cellular through a unified overlay, are mainly a reduced dependency on different service providers and a very structured and centralized management system that enables troubleshooting and monitoring from one dashboard.

The best features that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers are that it is more structured and centralizes the control plane, which is very helpful with the underlay and overlay.

My network operations teams find it excellent using VManage as it is a centralized management system that simplifies change management and administration, allowing easy automation and guardrails monitoring.

Recently, the user interface of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN was changed, and I feel it would be better if it were made more user-friendly, as the current one is somewhat challenging to work with and while compatibility exists, I need more knowledge base documentation for the new GUI interface to be truly helpful.

I found a few restrictions about the routers in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, such as character restrictions for certain passwords, and overcoming those would be very helpful.

The character restrictions for different types of passwords need improvement, and there should be more knowledge base documentation for the new GUI interface to be more user-friendly.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for the last two to three years.

Regarding the failover mechanism, I have tried a few, and those were very successful, achieving my expected results. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is very stable in my experience.

I feel that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's scalability is good, but it can be made better.

Customer support is good, and I receive support whenever needed as I have just implemented it.

I approach migrating routing protocols and active traffic cutovers from legacy BGP or DMVPN WAN topologies to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN overlay by using route redistribution with my legacy BGP and all other routing protocols that SD-WAN supports.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is good; the centralized management system for all licenses makes it easy to manage and renew when any license is expiring.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN an eight. I chose an eight out of ten because all the suggestions I have made could help it become more mature and definitely improve it to a ten.

Regarding Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's AI capabilities, I have not used them yet, so I will not be able to comment on that; however, I hope Cisco will implement appropriate guardrails and governance to overcome security concerns and maintain security standards for large enterprises from a data center perspective.

Even though I have not used Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's AI capabilities directly, I feel that if we can build trust with AI and keep guardrails in place, people can use it with trust without fear of data loss or attacks.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is deployed in my organization using hybrid clouds. For my hybrid cloud deployment, I use Cisco only.

I would recommend everyone to use Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN because it represents a significant improvement for Cisco's routing system with its centralized control plane, making the processing centralized and logically managing data traffic.

I can provide the industry name for the use cases my clients are implementing with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, though I cannot disclose customer names. I utilize it for education, the federal government, and state government sectors.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has improved our network agility and resilience by simplifying centralized management and providing better visibility across WAN connections.

It has also enhanced application performance and reliability through intelligent path selection, while reducing operational complexity.

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Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN’s best features are centralized management, application-aware routing, real-time visibility, and automated policy control.

These capabilities simplify WAN operations, improve application performance and resiliency, and enable more efficient use of multiple WAN links.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN could be improved with simpler configuration workflows, faster troubleshooting, and deeper AI-driven analytics for proactive fault detection and root-cause analysis.

More flexible automation, enhanced multi-cloud visibility, and easier third-party integration would also reduce operational complexity in large enterprise environments.

I have 21 years of experience and have been working with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for approximately three to four years.

Yes. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is generally considered stable and reliable, particularly when deployed on validated software releases with appropriate redundancy. Its automated path selection and failover capabilities help maintain application availability when WAN links experience degradation or failure.

For large environments, stability also depends on careful software lifecycle management, testing upgrades, and consistent policy/configuration control.

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Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers strong scalability, making it well suited for large, distributed enterprise networks with many branches and WAN links. Its centralized management and policy-based architecture make it easier to expand the network while maintaining consistent configuration, security, and application policies across sites.

I find the technical support team from Cisco to be helpful. I would rate Cisco technical support at nine out of ten.

The initial Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN setup can be moderately complex, particularly in large enterprise environments where routing, security policies, segmentation, and existing WAN infrastructure must be integrated.

Once the initial design and templates are established, centralized management and policy-based configuration make ongoing deployment and expansion much more straightforward.

We are integrator itself we dont use any other third party integrator or consultant for deployment instead we have inhouse capability.

When discussing enterprise-level customers, large government entities, or similarly sized organizations, I prefer Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN over other products due to its stability. Small and medium-sized enterprises cannot afford Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, so I must recommend alternative vendors. If Cisco improves its pricing, it would provide better market competition.

The setup cost for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is on the higher side. Most customer (Mostly Small and Medium Industries)  prefer Fortinet/Meraki or other vendors due to lower pricing compared to Cisco.

My final rating for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is eight out of ten, where ten is the best. This rating reflects concerns regarding complexity and pricing, though it is otherwise a solid product.