At Gartner's Data Center Conference this year, everyone is talking about how Data Centers are evolving to meet the needs of mobile, social, Big Data, and cloud native applications. The Data Center, People, and Processes are the focus as IT organizations look at supporting their traditional core enterprise applications (Mode 1) and new cloud native (Mode 2) applications to become Digital Enterprises. The organization transformation most often mentioned has been the integration of Development and Operations -creating DevOps processes, culture, and teams.
Applications, cloud, and security management stacks and architectures must evolve as well to support the needs of these distributed applications in distributed data centers.
Microsegmentation
To support cloud native and multi-tier applications, Cisco ACI takes an elegant approach to provide fine grained security with microsegmentation which uses policy-based automation for enhanced security for east-west traffic within the data center. Its true value lies in its integration with application design and holistic network policy, and it interoperates transparently with a wide variety of hypervisor switches (VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS), Microsoft Hyper-V virtual switch), bare-metal servers, L4-L7 devices, and orchestration platforms. Microsegmentation provides internal control of traffic within the data center and can greatly enhance a data center's security posture. Cisco ACI is the only solution available today that enables true microsegmentation with the performance, scalability, and visibility that modern applications demand.
Application Leaders Embrace ACI
New ACI Ecosystem partners using the northbound open APIs of the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller in ACI allow the automation of entire application suites, Software-as-a-Service, and Platform-as-a-Service for application development teams creating applications to engage with their enterprise's customers in new and valuable ways. These partners integrate or monitor applications, cloud management platforms, security and application policy across compute, network, and storage infrastructure for distributed applications. Hear from some of these leaders directly in the video here.
These northbound APIC integration partners are bringing application management and monitoring capabilities across compute, network, and storage to help application developers and IT managers to simplify operations, deliver more agile, programmable infrastructure-as-a-service, and with greater security from threats within the Data Center.
For More Information on Microsegmentation:
ACI Microsegmentation Overview (New)
An Overview of Network Security Considerations for Cisco ACI Deployments
New Innovations for L4-7 Network Services Integration with Cisco's ACI Approach
Microsegmentation: Enhancing Security and Operational Simplicity with Cisco ACI
For More Information on Automating Application Suites, PaaS:
Application Leaders Embrace ACI
Apprenda -secure PaaS with Cisco ACI
CliQr CloudCenter and Cisco ACI Simplify Application Deployment Lifecycle
DataTorrent -Cisco ACI and Secure Big Data
KillerIT -Automatic Policy Creation and Cisco ACI
One Convergence -OpenStack Network Service Delivery for Cisco ACI
ScienceLogic -Visualization and Application Dependency Maps for Cisco ACI
Vnomic -Policy Driven Software Defined Everything and Cisco ACI