Networking
Cisco SD-WAN’s Cloud OnRamp for SaaS has already made great strides in optimizing users’ SaaS experience with features like direct internet access and automatic optimal path selection. These features enable admins to easily connect and integrate with many of the most popular SaaS platforms used by today’s businesses, including Microsoft 365.
Our customers have also called out challenges we could address to bring Cloud OnRamp for SaaS to the next level, as cloud-based computing increases in complexity and ubiquity. We’ve seen the performance challenges software suites like Microsoft 365 can bring, with multiple types of applications having varying sensitivities to network performance. Also, we heard clearly that users needed solutions to deal with each platform’s own metrics to better troubleshoot performance issues or architect superior solutions.
To address these issues, Cisco and Microsoft are rolling out several new features designed to improve the integration between Cisco SD-WAN Cloud OnRamp for SaaS and Microsoft 365. These enhancements will give users more control over traffic flow, insightful deeper metrics, and automated policy integration, allowing for a seamless experience with Microsoft 365. Let’s explore each of these improvements:
URL Categorization for Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 is one of the widest-used SaaS platforms among businesses and industries today, thanks to its ability to incorporate almost all the most commonly used applications under one umbrella (e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Video, Outlook for Email, Exchange, and a host of others).
Of course, having multiple applications in one platform also means Microsoft 365 must juggle many different types of traffic at once—and that’s where users sometimes struggle with performance. When traffic accessing Word and traffic accessing video conferencing are treated with the same parameters while occurring simultaneously, the resulting performance may be less than optimal.
Cisco’s new URL categorization feature provides a significant improvement in this area for those who use Cloud OnRamp with Microsoft 365. Now available with Cisco SD-WAN’s 17.3 software release, URL categorization allows customers to create separate policies around specific types of traffic feeding into Microsoft 365, giving them more detailed control over traffic management within the platform. By creating different parameters for different traffic types, users can route traffic more efficiently around their needs and usage habits for optimized response times.
“The new Cisco SD-WAN and Microsoft 365 integration allow customers to easily remediate sub-optimal application performance. With informed network routing, customers can improve their end-user experience via monitoring and automatic intervention whenever performance is deficient relative to Office 365’s specific expectations,” says JL Valente, Vice President of Product Management for Cisco Enterprise Networking.
Jim Klein, Technical Fellow for the Microsoft 365 team at Microsoft said,
