According to the 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey, the majority of IT decision makers cite a cloud-ready network as the biggest requirement to enable the migration of business applications to the cloud.

To meet these challenges, Cisco launched the Cisco Cloud Connected Solution, introducing cloud-enabled routing and wide area network (WAN) optimisation platforms, along with innovative Cloud Connectors, an open architecture that enables users to intelligently connect to cloud services.

With more than 500,000 worldwide customers and 78.6% of the global enterprise router market share, Cisco is uniquely positioned to lead the transformation of the WAN with its enterprise routing platforms and the introduction of the Cisco Cloud Connected Solution.

The Cisco Cloud Connected Solution is a foundational element of the Cisco Cloud Intelligent Network, which together with Cisco Unified Data Centre and Cisco Cloud Applications and Services enables the world of many clouds. In addition, Cisco is introducing enhancements to existing routing, security and WAN optimisation solutions, including WAN innovations as well as new features and models on the ASR, ISR G2 and WAAS appliances.

The primary new products in the Cisco Cloud Connection Solution include:

• Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v: Provides Cisco's rich networking and security services in a virtual form factor for deployment in cloud environments. This enables enterprises to extend and control various facets of their enterprise network to clouds, while providing cloud service providers (CSPs) with increased revenue opportunity though an on-demand, flexible "network-as-a-service" model.

• Cisco WAAS 5.0 with AppNav: Enables customers to virtualise WAN optimisation resources by pooling them into one elastic resource in a manner that is policy-based and on-demand with the best latency performance. Cisco WAAS 5.0 with AppNav provides highly secure application delivery and cloud connectivity, along with an elastic "scale-as-you-grow" deployment model that enables enterprise-wide application acceleration and performance visibility.  Cisco AppNav can be installed as a hardware module on existing Cisco Wide Area Virtualization Engine (WAVE) appliances or as software on the new Cloud Services Router (CSR).

• Cisco ASR 1002-X router: Enables organisations to increase their WAN performance by up to 7 times and enhance deployment agility with an easy “pay-as-you-grow” performance upgrade model that delivers up to 36Gbps performance with services turned on for the WAN Edge, Internet Edge and Managed Services environments. Cisco is also introducing the ESP-100G, a forwarding processor for the ASR 1000 Series in cloud edge deployments, in addition to FlexVPN on ASR 1000, for highly secure IPsec site-to-site and remote access VPN.