Cisco has been rapidly unifying their core networking portfolio, enabling more simplified procurement and easier deployment. It's rare that we have an opportunity to look back across major shifts in the industry with the benefit of hindsight, but since the Meraki acquisition in 2012 (13 years and counting now!), it's easy to look back at one of the most successful technology adoption trends of our lifetimes – the move to cloud. We now have concrete data and a long history showing that organizations that move their network management to the cloud experience easier deployments, faster ROI, and operational improvements from AI and automation to outage resolution. The benefits are well demonstrated and universally loved – in most organizations.
Missing from Cloud architectures has been a data-plane aggregator. We're using to building Cloud based networks with our Wi-Fi traffic being terminated at the AP over a trunk link. This enables us to have multiple SSIDs each be logically segmented – Enterprise SSID goes to one VLAN, the Guest SSID goes to a different and dedicated VLAN. When deployed like this, both VLANs exist on all switches with APs attached. For campus networks, extending these security constructs out to the edge does not scale well, and those with on-premises controller-based solutions have long since had an elegant solution – to tunnel the APs data back to a central location (the controller). This creates what is effectively a hybrid-cloud WLAN model, with cloud-managed control plane and centralized physical data-plane.
The Campus Gateway, launched last year brought this centralized tunneling capability to a physical hardware appliance that is wholly managed by the cloud. From an architectural perspective, the APs don't now need to know anything about the underlying switched/routed network other than being able to reach the Campus Gateway to build it's tunnel – treating all of the network in between as a generic transport without extending your client VLANs into the switch that the AP is attached to. Not only does this dramatically simplify your network operations, it also provides a seamless dataplane for roaming scenarios.
While Cisco's Campus Gateway is one implementation of this idea, the broader architectural trend is the reintroduction of centralized data-plane aggregation into cloud-managed networks. This benefit has long been appreciated at scale on the largest of the campus networks, with the new Cisco Campus Gateway based on the smaller CW9800L formfactor brings these benefits at smaller scale. No longer are these features exclusively deployable on campus – with medium and small site architectures, especially around campus and branch projects, the Campus Gateway is now sized appropriately for much smaller deployments.