TelecomNewsroom interview with Lloyd Noronha, Cisco SD-WAN Marketing Manager
By Contributing Editor Anne Whealdon
Lloyd Noronha is a senior manager on the SD-WAN marketing team at Cisco, the worldwide technology leader that has been making the Internet work since 1984. As an early member of Viptela, Lloyd played a crucial role in defining the SD-WAN category and driving its widespread adoption in Fortune 500 financials, retailers and healthcare providers, which led to the acquisition by Cisco. At Cisco, he is driving the adoption and success of integrated solutions with the enterprise, telecom and influencer community. He leverages twenty years experience with silicon valley tech/networking companies.
With ONUG Fall 2019 just around the corner, TelecomNewsroom sat down to chat with Lloyd about Cisco, the hybrid cloud and more.
TelecomNewsroom, Anne Whealdon (TNR-AW) Question: Tell us about what you do and what problems Cisco is solving.
Cisco, Lloyd Noronha (C-LN) Answer: As head of global marketing at Viptela until 2017, I was responsible for defining the new industry segment and driving adoption of Viptela SD-WAN within Fortune 500 financials, retailers and healthcare providers. Since August 2017, after Cisco acquired Viptela, I have been driving market adoption of the Cisco SD-WAN integrated solution across the wider industry.
Cisco’s SD-WAN solution is laying the foundation that enables enterprises to connect their users to any cloud over any infrastructure in a secure and reliable manner. It is built within the broader Cisco vision around intent-based networking, which is a framework that unifies end-to-end policy, assurance and application experience from the WAN to the campus, data center, cloud and security infrastructure.
TNR-AW Q: What is the one thing that differentiates Cisco within the industry?
C-LN A: In the SD-WAN market, Cisco is the only company that integrates sophisticated networking capabilities with best-of-breed security protection under unified operations and management. The Cisco SD-WAN solution covers the broadest of feature requirements and deployment options, ranging from simple, lean IT teams to the sophisticated requirements of global Fortune 500 companies. Cisco’s Secure SD-WAN offerings allow IT teams to modernize their WANs with one integrated, feature-rich solution; no compromises.
TNR-AW Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the enterprise market today?
C-LN A: Complexity in operations continues to be a top challenge for IT. This not only slows down innovation for the core business teams, but it also leads to lengthy response times for major incidents. Much of the complexity arises due to managing disparate technology pieces for infrastructure, security and cloud. The lack of unified view on application visibility hinders the fast troubleshooting of problems and intelligent planning for future needs. Furthermore, the lack of unified manageability poses similar problems and lengthier delays. Much of the complexity can be solved if the SD-WAN solution itself has native security, cloud and analytics features. Additionally, there needs to be multi-domain integration across campus, datacenter and cloud, such that policy and SLA are enforced across the entire architecture based in intent-based networking principles.
TNR-AW Q: What is the one thing that enterprise companies need to be aware of as they embrace hybrid multi-cloud computing?
C-LN A: The multi-cloud transition is one that involves diverse applications, cloud vendors and service types, and this has made customers’ considerations quite complex. Cloud providers have different architecture guidance for application optimization. The enterprise security landscape has also been redefined with more DIA and direct cloud access, opening new requirements for threat mitigation as well as compliance. Within this multi-cloud context, enterprise companies must have a holistic view when evaluating an SD-WAN architecture. They must demand native capability for simplifying public cloud workflows, optimizing Office365/SaaS and delivering a hybrid, on-prem/cloud security architecture that serves all threat and compliance scenarios.
TNR-AW Q: What products or services are you most excited to share with the enterprise community at the ONUG Fall event?
C-LN A: It’s no secret that the digital enterprise — with its internet-enabled branches, remote workers, IoT devices and other connected sensors — must be able to deliver consistent bandwidth at enormous scale while securing the data that traverses the WAN and beyond. At ONUG, Cisco is excited to showcase its Cisco SD-WAN, with its dynamic path selections, application Quality of Experience and end-to-end segmentation, integrated with Cisco Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway to help protect employees no matter where they work.
TNR-AW Q: Thanks for these great insights. To learn more about Cisco, please visit www.cisco.com. To register for the upcoming ONUG Fall event, please click here.
