The world is changing fast. And demands on the network are growing exponentially. More than ever before, businesses need technology to provide speed, flexibility, and information in a cost-effective manner across their systems and processes. The Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) helps companies in any market segment connect the lifeblood of their organization—their branch locations—to business value located anywhere on the network. Whether your branch is a retail store, a healthcare clinic, or a remote office, branches are a critical component of business. These are the places where organizations interface with customers and other citizens, where most business intelligence is acquired, and where the bulk of employees work. It’s crucial that the branch play a large role in any organization’s plans for digitization and value. As the leader of the Cisco Systems Engineering team, I have the privilege of working with the best networking professionals in the industry. Working on the front lines of the customer relationship, our SE teams are uniquely positioned to provide feedback from our vast customer base back to the Cisco innovation engine, our development team. Cisco has thousands of systems engineers globally working with our customers every day, and they gain great insights into the top issues facing IT and our customers’ businesses in general. The feedback collected from our customers and Systems Engineering team led to the development of IWAN. In many traditional WAN implementations, customers, vendors, suppliers, and employees who are located in the branch often cannot receive optimal service, and their capabilities are limited. The Cisco IWAN allows IT to remove those limitations by enabling intelligence on the WAN. With IWAN’s ability to simplify VPNs and allow more control, applications such as guest Internet traffic, public cloud services, and partner cloud applications can be offloaded immediately with the appropriate quality of service levels. And with visibility to the application level, applications that are dependent upon data center connectivity can perform better. Last, given the need for all these use cases to be secure, you will see the value of IWAN in providing secure connectivity for your applications while providing better service and improved performance. This book was written by an all-star team, including Brad Edgeworth, one of the key leaders in our Systems Engineering organization. Holding multiple CCIE certifications, this team of contributing authors present at both internal and external events, which means they can explain the technology and how it helps businesses. Their depth of experience and knowledge is demonstrated in this book as they address IWAN, its features, benefits, and implementation, and provide readers insight into the top issues facing IT: security, flexibility, application visibility, and ease of use. These are the most important issues facing the WAN and IT in general.