Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Reviews

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. the primary use case is interconnecting offices.

The main functionality includes a secure firewall, cloud access security broker (CASB), and zero-trust configuration.

It is very simple and easy to manage, compared to other methods.

They should enhance the reporting because, as it is today, they need more executive-level reports.

If in the future they can support Cisco SASE then it would be good.

We have been using Cisco SD-WAN for the past years.

As of now, the stability is fine.

We have not tested the scalability because the volume of traffic is not very high for us. We didn't have to look at it.

My team has been in contact with technical support, but I have not personally had experience with them.

Prior to Cisco SD-WAN, we were using a manual configuration. We used to achieve the same functionality; however, in order to make it simple and easy to manage, we switched to this solution.

I have not worked with other similar products and have no experience with them.

The initial setup is straightforward, and not complex.

It took us almost two months to deploy because we were connecting with a few offices outside of the country. We had to send the equipment to those countries, which was time-consuming.

Our clients have made decisions related to pricing, but we are not involved at this stage.

With respect to security, we did not use the functionality because we were mainly using it to interconnect offices. Security was not a big concern for us. Had there been a requirement for direct connectivity to the internet or accessing the public cloud, then security might have been needed. We were establishing IPsec VPN, which accomplished this task.

This is a product that I can recommend. I am satisfied with it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are a service provider and we plan to provide a managed service to our customers using this product.

The most valuable feature is the ease of central management. That is the main thing for us.

The licensing model needs to be improved.

Sometimes we feel that the choice of models is very limited, so we would like to see additional devices made available.

We have been evaluating Cisco SD-WAN for the past two months.

We have not experienced any issues with stability over the past two months.

We have about 16 users. Because we are just evaluating, we don't have a forecast at this point.

We contacted support because we needed some initial awareness about configuration-related issues.

The initial setup is very difficult. We did not find it easy because we hardly have any experience. This is just the first one that we are setting up.

The costs are a bit on the high side.

We are currently conducting a PoC. We did evaluate two solutions, and Cisco was the one chosen for the proof of concept.

Although we are still in the initial stages, I feel that this is a product that I can recommend. In general, we are satisfied with it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

One of our customers has approximately 100 branches that were linked together using Cisco SD-WAN in multiple phases. In the first phase, they started with 40 branches. In the head office, they have two MPLS links and two internet links. In each branch, they have one of each. Before implementing this solution, they could not do both things at the same time.

With Cisco, you can optimize and design the solution in the way you want. For example, you can have 1,000 branches with three or four data centers, and if you can reroute the traffic from one branch to the nearest data center in order to inspect the traffic.

The most valuable feature is the application-level routing. One of our clients used this solution to route VOIP and video calls using MPLS.

The single dashboard makes the management very easy.

This solution has a built-in firewall that handles URL filtering and functionality, but you have to buy other cisco services like, Umbrella. Some of the customers would rather just use Fortinet or Palo Alto. This solution should include a fully functional firewall at no extra charge. At this time it supports layers three, four, and five, but it needs support for a level seven firewall.

Cisco SD-WAN is stable. There might be minor bugs in a few of the features, but overall, the product is stable and the customers are happy with it.

This solution is highly scalable. We have heard that you can have 10,000 or 20,000 servers.

Our clients are medium-scale customers, as opposed to really large enterprises. They are retail stores, organizations in the hospitality industry, and pharmaceutical companies.

We have also worked with Meraki SD-WAN, but the choice of solution depends on the customer's size and requirements. Meraki is for smaller clients. For example, Meraki only supports two landings, whereas Cisco supports more than that.

The initial setup is not that easy, although there is training that is available for it. It will take time to create templates and the other configuration that needs to be done.

it will take between five and ten days to complete the basic, initial setup, which includes changing the IP addresses. After that, you can migrate two or three branches a day if you have the devices.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is to consider the size of the environment. If they have 100 to 150 branches, then they should also look into other solutions such as VeloCloud by VMware.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Full replacement of office to office, office to data center, and data center to data center MPLS and private lines with commodity Internet and SD-WAN.

80% reduction in WAN costs.

New sites can be onboarded in hours or days versus many months with carrier based technology. 

The most useful feature for our organization is the combination of on-prem and cloud-based deployments. We connect securely to our hybrid cloud using transit VPCs and cloud on-ramp for fast deployments. We have recently started using deep packet inspection allowing the use of the transit path as the firewall instead of putting firewalls on both ends of the mesh.

The inexpensive Viptela hardware may be replaced with overpriced Cisco routers. This would be a tragic mistake for Cisco as the lightweight commodity platform built by Viptela is the reason to own this solution. 

Since it was Viptela in 2017.

It is extremely stable. You can set it and forget it, if that is your thing. There are a lot of improvements with each full version release. As with all things Cisco, if you have the chance to wait for a few months before deploying the latest release, do it. They can be buggy for the first few months. 

It is very scalable. We have it deployed to 23 countries, AWS, Azure, and our data centers. 

MPLS, P2P lines and multi-point VPN mesh. These were either too expensive or required too much operational overhead. 

The team at Viptela,and subsequently at Cisco, were extremely engaged and ready to help ensure we had a successful deployment. The concept of an overlay and underlay can be intimidating if you are used to conventional networks, but you will get used to it. 

We deployed it ourselves with our own network engineers. 

80 percent reduction in WAN costs. There are no MPLS or P2P circuits left in the organization. 

Cisco, Citrix, and Fortinet.

Map out all of the applications that use your WAN today. If you have assets like physical phone systems or dedicated VPN devices that are not ready to be off-the-books, start the project anyway. As contacts and hardware become end of life, onboard those sites. You will have a full mesh in no time. If you wait for all of your existing technology to be end of life, you are missing the point.

Our primary use case is for the web gateway and VPN server and for access list control. We basically use the solution as a minimal requirement for the network gateway. We have about 50 users. I work as a network analyst and we're vendors, not a direct partner of Cisco. 

The regular net routing is a good feature. It's not just good for routing although like a lot of things it isn't linked to anything else.

On its own the product does what it's expected to do but if you're looking for more features you'd need to move to a dedicated firewall like the ISA firewall. There's something a little inconvenient and old style about it. 

The solution could have a better web interface to simplify changing configurations or see some statistics. I think the main weakness of the Cisco product is the user interface, I'd like to see things more clearly. 

I've been using the solution for five or six years. 

The stability of the solution is one of the better features. 

Scalability is somewhat limited, especially from the technical side. It's just a gateway with some routing and we don't use any dynamic routing. There's nothing fancy and the scalability is enough for our needs. 

Cisco is always good with technical support, it's easy and the contact is fast when you really need it. 

Initial setup is a little difficult but more or less straightforward. We have an older version which is not as flexible. 

It took us one day to implement and we didn't use any advanced features so it was quite quick. We migrated the set-up from the old device and put it on the new one. They're both on the same platform. We did the implementation ourselves and we have one staff member involved with maintenance. We're currently looking to switch our internet gateway so I'm not sure how long this situation will last. We're looking for a provider so we can outsource the network. 

There's not much advice I can give other than to suggest that people get familiar with using the command line.

I would rate this product an eight out of 10 because it has good reliability. We've rarely had any problems with it.  

We use this solution for our web gateway, VPN, and access control.

It is good enough to provide normal web access but it doesn't offer any add-ons. We plan to move away from this solution and use the cloud-based firewall that is managed by our provider.

The most valuable feature is the network routing.

The reliability is high and we have only had to restart it once or twice over the years.

I would like to see a better, web-based interface to make changes to the configuration or to view statistics. The main weakness of Cisco products is the user interface.

This solution would be improved with the inclusion of an ISA Firewall.

I have been using this solution for five or six years.

This is a stable solution. it does what it is supposed to do and is working fine.

I would say that the scalability is pretty limited, although we don't have any issue with it because we only use the basic features. For example, we don't use dynamic routing. We have 50 users.

The Cisco technical support is pretty good. They are easy to contact if you need support and they are pretty fast.

The initial setup is pretty bit straightforward, although it is a little bit hard because it is done through the command line. The web GUI is an old style and not really flexible.

It took us approximately one day to switch from our old solution. We don't use any of the advanced features so it was a simple migration for us.

Our in-house team implemented this solution.

One person is suitable for deployment and maintenance.

We pay for the Cisco Customer Care support, which is a couple of hundred dollars. There are no fees in addition to this.

This solution is only good for basic routing. I cannot map stuff to a network name because it is not linked to anything else. It is a standalone unit.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to familiarize themselves with the command line.

To summarize, the reliability is very high but managing it is a little bit inconvenient.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

There are a few use cases. We work, for example, with a telecom that provides end solutions to end users across different countries.

The product's brand recognition is one of the most valuable aspects of the solution.

We've just started using the solution, so I don't know if there are any features that are missing. We haven't used it long enough to find any faults.

The initial setup could be a bit less complex.

We only started using the solution a year ago.

The solution is stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. The solution is reliable. It just works.

The solution is scalable.

We have the technical knowledge on our side. We get very little support from Cisco, so we rely mostly on our own team.

We use both Cisco and Juniper.

The solution is complex. It's not straightforward. There's a lot of ways to configure it and they're not straightforward. There are two types of the solution as well, so a person would need to know how to deploy either one.

For us, the solution took two to three days to deploy.

I don't know much about the pricing because, at present, we used some simulators to test the software for clients. The pricing does not always match up with what our lab predictions are. We give information to the customers, and we give them some knowledge about the products and we explain the differences between the different vendors, like Juniper, and other vendors small vendors like Altera Technology. Ultimately, the client decides which vendor they will go with.

I'd recommend the solution. Instead of going to another vendor, it's best to go with Cisco, because Cisco has a level of longevity in the global market.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The solution allows us to manage a network or manage policies and goals from the cloud. 

The solution has a high trust-level with clients.

The solution offers the customer good cost savings.

Our organization has found that the solution has helped us increase our levels of security for client networks.

It's very easy to manage and monitor the network's health and security using the solution.

The solution is east to upgrade as necessary.

Since most user-data is going through the solution, we are concerned about security, as all the information is in the cloud and not on-premises. The user data authentification should be higher to better prevent malicious attacks.

I've only been working with the solution for about three or four months, so I am not what I would call an expert on the solution.

The solution is extremely stable. It's not something that has a lot of bigs and glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't crash.

The solution is easily scalable. A company would have no trouble expanding.

We've found the technical support to be quite helpful. We've used it both on desktop and in front of clients and we've been satisfied with their level of support. You can also go online and view solutions to queries.

The initial setup was not complex. It was straightforward. If we couldn't handle a technical aspect, we had technical people on hand who could assist us. The cloud version is easy to operate and manage. We didn't have any issues.

How long it takes to deploy depends on the size of the network, as well as the policies and how much there is to manage. It does take some time.

The pricing of the solution is okay. Previously we used Cisco Prime and found we were wasting a lot. This is much better for us and our clients. However, it's still expensive.

We're a Cisco partner.

I would recommend the solution. I'd rate it six out of ten. If it could guarantee better security, we would rate it higher. The cost could also be less.