Cisco ACI liberates your IT team to focus on initiatives that deliver value back to the business.
Cisco ACI (which stands for Application Centric Infrastructure) is a policy-based networking solution that supports a business-relevant application policy language with automation, providing greater scalability and network visibility. These benefits are achieved through the integration of physical and virtual environments under one policy model for networks, servers, storage, services, and security.
It also dramatically improves IT alignment with business objectives and policy requirements, and accelerates the deployment process for new applications to a matter of minutes instead of weeks or months.
Cisco ACI is agile, open, and secure.
ACI provides a network that is deployed, monitored, and managed in a way that benefits different teams in the IT organization including SDN Network, Cloud and DevOps, and Security. It supports rapid application change by reducing complexity with a common policy framework that can automate provisioning and resource management – powered by the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller, or APIC, a unified point of policy-driven configuration.
• SDN Network
Its application-based policy model offers speed through automation, reducing errors and accelerating application deployment and IT processes from weeks to minutes.
Application-based policies decouple high level application connectivity needs from the complicated details of network configuration. This results in automated IT processes that simplify networking operations.
• Cloud and DevOps
Cloud architects have to know what infrastructure design will support frequent application changes to performance, security, availability and scale. DevOps has to work with both application and admin teams to understand how numerous application changes affect the configuration of switches, ports, VLANs, firewalls, security appliances, load balancers and other application delivery functions.
Cisco ACI introduces a simple, application level, policy-based approach. This helps to enable policy-aware resource orchestration, real-time governance and open choice in cloud software.
• Security
Cisco ACI and the APIC controller allow for security policies down to the individual tenant, application, or workload. With built-in microsegmentation, communication occurs only where explicitly allowed, helping to ensure that policy omissions do not leave security vulnerabilities.
Through Cisco ACI, all security device provisioning and configuration can be automated according to the centrally managed application policies and requirements — simplifying IT security tasks.
Ready to explore Cisco ACI further?
WEI can set you up for success so you can accelerate the benefits of Cisco ACI. Contact us to learn about our experience implementing Cisco ACI in production environments.
