Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Reviews

The main use cases for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN are in the retail sector and enterprise. The product is used for Cisco routing, specifically for configuring traffic engineering with protocol BGP.

With Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, I have centralized orchestration and management. The transport independence of MPLS or connectivity and internet connectivity is another excellent feature. End-to-end segmentation is also provided.

I use the application-aware routing feature. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN supports dynamic police-based routing decisions based on application type or different performance metrics such as jitter or latency.

The benefit of that feature is that it improves user experience. The principal benefit of application-aware routing is that critical applications are prioritized or routed over the best performing paths to reduce outages and service degradation. There is full visibility of applications.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has integrated security features which include base firewall, URL filtering, IPS, and secure segmentation, and it supports integration with other Cisco products such as Umbrella or Snort. This feature is beneficial for the client because the information is secure.

It is important that Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN supports cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments for my organization because it allows for scalability and faster deployment in the cloud. It reduces operational needs because I don't need to manage physical controller hardware, and updates and maintenance can be centralized and automated.

The zero-touch provisioning feature is very important for the speed of deploying new branch locations. I can deliver the device to the branch, and it is important because simplified deployment makes the implementation start more easily since devices are auto-configured and authenticate without manual intervention.

Cisco can improve Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN by simplifying licensing and platform integration with other Cisco products such as Catalyst Center or solutions with Meraki.

A license needs to be permanent for me. The client feels that it is very expensive.

I have used Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for two years.

I have experience with the Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance, but I haven't configured it. I am currently working in pre-sales.

I would rate Cisco's support, their customer service, and technical support as excellent. The support of Cisco is very good, and the attention is immediate.

I have sixteen years of work experience in enterprise architecture with Cisco, including networking, switching, routing, and solution SD-Access.

AWS is the main cloud provider in my use cases.

My company, Sonda, is a Gold partner of Cisco.

I am a solution architect at Sonda.

I rate this solution 10 out of 10.

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 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.

The main use cases for Juniper vSRX would be primarily for a data center scenario device, and there's a significant focus on the other core elements.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's main use cases for us will be data center deployment for enterprise level.

The most useful feature for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is the single pane of glass management because we also use Meraki onsite. It's a standard Cisco solution, and because Cisco is who they are and what they can provide, we use Cisco for compute and network, and we use NetApp for storage, so that's what we generally do.

I have absolutely seen scenarios where the decentralized management capability improved operations and workflows.

There's nothing I could put my finger on right away for improvements in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. There is definitely nothing that Juniper does that Cisco doesn't do. Cisco will do everything Juniper does and then some. The negative, or the downside of Cisco is the knowledge base; you need to be a little bit more tech-savvy and network-savvy to work with Cisco, while Juniper is a lot more user-friendly from what I can see, especially in terms of configuration and any kind of roll back. But in terms of market leaders, Cisco is capable of doing anything you want it to do, as far as I can see.

I have just recently been working with Juniper.

I have contacted Cisco support for one-on-one support for a very unique or bespoke configuration where there are a lot of rules and policies going on in the background, maybe some interconnecting or conflicting with one another, but in terms of the actual product or problems with the product, nothing I'm aware of.

I would consider Cisco support a 10 out of 10.

Positive

In my experience, customers are realizing the return on investment with Cisco in 12 months. Within the year, I've done work with customers in the last couple of years that we've upgraded from Avaya six to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN in a Cisco network environment, and they are now back to do that with the remainder of their company, so they've realized the value in 12 months and are willing to invest in the remainder of their organization.

I am working on the Juniper vSRX solution.

I work with switches, routers, firewalls, and any IT consultant tasks, and I work at the core. I have a CCNA, and I'm actually doing a Juniper certification exam in 3 hours, so I continually work on upskilling, as part of what I do.

If it's enterprise level, you'll deploy your Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN in a couple of hours. You can draw it down there if you've already got a Catalyst or an existing environment. If you are starting up from scratch, it's hard to put a timeframe on it because it depends on criteria, but if you're replacing something with a Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and you know what you're doing along with using the CLI and your backups, a couple of hours would be plenty of time, a half a day or maybe a little bit more wouldn't hurt.

There are AI features, and I'm not 100% privy to them because I just haven't been involved in that element, but they do exist.

I would rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN an eight.

My title is Information Technology Consultant at a company named Island Networks.

My main use case for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is the encryption of data in transit. I connect all my branch networks to my data centers through Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for encrypting data in transit and to protect the data so that if someone spoofs the data in the middle, it remains encrypted and protected. This approach is also based on my licensing requirements from a security point of view.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has positively impacted my organization because I see this as a cost-saving initiative for us in the long term. By implementing Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, I can get the best out of the service provider's connectivity links and optimize my network.

I am still in the process of rolling out Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN completely across my network, but the sites I have already rolled out have proven that I can actually eliminate expensive links because those links were not fully utilized, allowing me to save thousands of dollars every month.

The operational overhead when managing hybrid WAN transport links through Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is definitely less than with traditional networks because many things can be automated and managed easily with the tools that come with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.

In my experience, the best features Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers are the user interface, which is very user-friendly, and the ability to push configurations easily through it, saving a lot of time for engineers.

The user interface of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN stands out compared to other tools because with some of the other tools I have used, I need to go into a command line interface and type in different commands to get things done. In this case, I can use a graphic user interface to easily accomplish the right tasks and validate any configurations.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN could be improved by having a centralized console-type system through which I can manage all aspects of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN.

When setting up dual connections for edge devices within Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and enabling automated failover, I have noticed some tradeoffs such as decreased resiliency and quality of service from the backup link compared to the primary link, which has good SLAs.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for 12 months.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is stable in my experience.

The scalability of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is as expected.

The customer support for Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is good, and I have no complaints about it.

Before Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, I used Citrix SD-WAN, but I switched because that solution was end of life.

I manage migrating routing protocols and active traffic cutovers from legacy BGP or DMVPN WAN topologies to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN overlay using redundancy options, allowing me to migrate traffic to another route without any downtime.

I have not seen any return on investment yet with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, but I expect it in the next three to four years, aiming for a 20% to 30% return on investment as I continue stabilizing after rolling it out over the last 12 months.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that I signed up for an Enterprise Level Agreement with Cisco, where I chose the optimized option, which was slightly complex to understand, but my finance and commercial team ensured I got the best deal.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. I opted for Cisco because I already had other products from them and wanted to keep everything with one vendor.

I rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN an eight out of ten because it is probably the best product in the market, but it is slightly on the expensive side.

I expect 90% accuracy from Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's AI because Cisco is a leader in what they do, so if they have developed this AI, it definitely needs to have a high accuracy rate.

My advice to others looking into using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is to ensure your team is well prepared to deploy, operate, and maintain the whole system before making a decision.

The primary use case for Cisco SD-WAN is the standard configuration across all sites, facilitated by templates. This solution helps in the ease of management and compliance configuration, which is deployed everywhere. 

It also simplifies troubleshooting and provides full mesh topology for branch connectivity to data centers. All branch locations, along with central locations, are on SD-WAN and gathered in the data center. Many customers combine it with local Internet breakout for SaaS applications.

The valuable features of Cisco SD-WAN include its security policies and zone-based firewall that are applied to every site, as well as application-aware routing. Security is standard compliant, eliminating config drift that was prevalent before manual configurations. Application-aware routing offers flexibility in using different lines for traffic, depending on the policy implemented.

The main area for improvement in Cisco SD-WAN is the lack of documentation, which often lags behind the software releases. This is especially notable since Cisco acquired the solution and is still integrating it into its overall environment.

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

I would rate Cisco SD-WAN an eight out of ten for stability. While some software-related issues and bugs were encountered, they did not cause the whole environment to crash. Sites were able to continue functioning, although there were limitations in making changes at those times.

The ease of configuration and features like zero-touch provisioning enhance the scalability of Cisco SD-WAN, especially in disaster recovery situations. I would rate scalability a nine out of ten. The initial implementation faced some issues, but it has improved with newer software versions.

The customer service and support for Cisco SD-WAN are satisfactory, rated as eight out of ten. 

However, Cisco's ongoing reorganizations have affected the quality of technical support, which varies depending on the engineer handling cases.

Positive

Before Cisco SD-WAN, I used traditional MPLS or eVPN, IPVPN networks. The switch was made for easier management and standard compliance, which is enforced by the SD-WAN product itself.

The initial setup involves getting the underlay and controllers in place to migrate from the old to the new network. I deployed in parallel, allowing both networks to coexist, and then migrated sites to the new central control plane.

For a complete project, we had two central administrators and designers, along with three or four teams managing the remote locations. The process took approximately one year to migrate about 280 sites.

The pricing for Cisco SD-WAN is rated eight out of ten, with some variability depending on the reseller discounts and the size of the enterprise. It is also relatively cost-effective for smaller businesses when using the Meraki version.

We evaluated other solutions but chose Cisco SD-WAN due to its flexibility, support for our requirements, and the preference of many of our customers who were already using Cisco-based solutions.

I would recommend working out detailed use cases and requirements before implementation. Cisco SD-WAN is quite flexible, however, without a solid foundational design, users might struggle with too many options, leading to a poor rollout design. 

Overall, I rate Cisco SD-WAN as nine out of ten.

In my view, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN would be less effective when it comes to SD-WAN functions compared to Versa.

The overall operability of Versa is better than Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN. As a seller, I still find Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN to be a little complicated.

The ease of use, interface, and implementation are better with Versa.

Functionality-wise, both Versa and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN possibly would be at par. I would not comment on that for sure, but from the deployment perspective, I still feel Versa has got an easy interface to get things managed.

The integrated threat protection and end-to-end encryption features in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN are good.

More or less, it's the same with Cisco in terms of complexity and pricing, so there's not much of a difference. They might want to consider incorporating features seen in Versa or other competitors to improve their points.

I would rate the technical support by Cisco as nine out of ten.

That's even a little bit better than what Versa has, because Cisco engineers can be found everywhere compared to Versa. This is an advantage that they carry.

Positive

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is positioned ideally where customers already have Cisco routers and other equipment, making migration to Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN easier. In these use cases, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is very competitive.

When discussing application-aware routing features, this is a standard feature all the OEMs are offering.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN would be more expensive compared to Versa. I have been a partner and reseller of both Versa and Cisco.

I rate Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN eight out of ten.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for some time, and my use case involves IPsec encryption.

I use Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN to manage a large number of sites from one GUI and manage all the IPsec encryption tunnels.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN helps me manage a large number of sites from one GUI and manage all the IPsec encryption tunnels on a day-to-day basis.

The best features Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN offers include a centralized spot to manage all of my sites.

Having one place to manage the sites significantly reduces the amount of time my engineers need to spend troubleshooting and deploying sites.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing the deployment time from days down to a couple of hours for a site.

A typical site deployment now saves us one to two days compared with the old process.

My network operations teams approach day-to-day policy and template changes across Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, also called vManage, by making changes as part of standard changes instead of having to go to CABs, which has reduced the time and allowed us to mass push it out to all sites at once.

With dual connected sites and automatic failover between links such as MPLS and public internet, I have noticed previously we used to have outages of up to a minute swapping over from carriers, and now it is normally within a couple of seconds, which is good.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN can be improved by enhancing the flexibility on the forms that I have to fill out or the feature templates so I can toggle certain VRFs, for example, to deploy to specific sites.

Other improvements that would make Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN easier include more support for ruggedized devices, such as IR devices in SD-WAN, so instead of having to use CLI templates.

Regarding Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN's governance and security, I have noticed there have been a lot of vulnerabilities at the moment, which are concerning, so I think more work needs to be put on the security side of it.

I have been using Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN for about six months.

When managing hybrid WAN transport links, such as MPLS alongside broadband and cellular, through a unified overlay, I have observed it has been really good so far.

I find Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN stable.

The customer support has been good so far; TAC has been pretty good.

I previously moved from MPLS BGP to SD-WAN as a different WAN solution.

I previously used other SD-WAN providers before switching.

During migration, I was fortunate to have outages for the sites, so I did not have to do any active cutovers; I just completed them during business hours.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been that it is expensive and confusing.

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

I give Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN a 7 out of 10 because it significantly reduces my deployment time, which is why it gets a seven, but there are still some improvements around new devices that are coming out.

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

My recommendation to others reading reviews on PeerSpot is to be careful of the licensing and work out exactly what licensing you need, as it can be a bit complicated, and work out what deployment you want to use early on, whether it be on-premises or cloud.

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 primary use case for Cisco SD-WAN is to connect multiple offices or branch offices across the globe or within a country securely. It facilitates branch-to-branch or office-to-office transactions and provides easy access to primary data centers.

Cisco SD-WAN is valued for its operational efficiency and ease of operation. It allows prioritization of packages based on production requirements, and integration capabilities provide comprehensive security. Integration with Cisco ISE, Cisco Firewalls, and other Cisco solutions is beneficial. Furthermore, it is appreciated for its insights, visibility, and ease of use.

Integration with other OEMs and the API part needs improvement to be more user-friendly, especially in terms of GUI. Including more features like integrating with Splunk for monitoring vulnerabilities would help eliminate the need for other SOC solutions.

I have been working with the Cisco SD-WAN solutions since 2018.

I have not faced any stability issues with Cisco SD-WAN.

Cisco SD-WAN is highly scalable and can be expanded to more than 10,000 sites, so there are no issues with scalability.

The initial setup is not straightforward, as it requires experienced personnel to size and optimize the solution. Otherwise, it could be costly.

For Cisco SD-WAN deployment, following Cisco's published best practices is advisable, starting with vManage and then adding all devices for better remote control.

Operational ROI is observed by cutting down internet and branch connectivity costs, while securely accessing hosted applications using various types of connectivity like 3G, 5G, or MPLS.

Cisco SD-WAN is a premium product priced on the higher side, however, its pricing is justifiable due to the comprehensive solution it offers.

I have evaluated Aruba and Fortinet SD-WAN solutions.

For enterprise customers with significant security concerns, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN is a recommended choice. It offers comprehensive integration under a single umbrella, which is advantageous compared to other OEMs. 

I would rate the overall solution as a ten out of ten.