Cisco Cisco Application Performance Assurance Network Module Libro bianco
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WHITE PAPER
CISCO APPLICATION-ORIENTED NETWORKING
Cisco Application-Oriented Networking transforms the economics of interapplication communication.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Enterprises must contend with a level of complexity in their application infrastructures that is increasingly hindering their ability to respond quickly
and cost-effectively to new market demands. These complexities include the growing imperatives to keep pace with new compliance and security
regulations, the need for a single real-time view of customers and suppliers across disparate applications, and the imperative for business agility and
real-time responsiveness.
For enterprises, these capabilities are critical for exploiting market opportunities or fending off competitive threats. With application infrastructures
often containing hundreds of interdependent applications, enterprises are struggling to accommodate the increased complexity. Organizations have
therefore begun to consider new standardized architectures such as those based on service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web services*.
To address these needs, Cisco Systems
®
has introduced Cisco
®
Application-Oriented Networking (AON), the first network-embedded intelligent
message routing system for application interaction. Cisco AON acts as a platform or technology foundation for a new class of Cisco products that
provide an essential point of convergence between intelligent networks and applications. It is helping to realize a new vision of a network for
applications that provides a pervasive, nonintrusive application-oriented fabric built on the strengths of the existing packet-based network. With
Cisco AON, networks and applications work together—as an Intelligent Information Network—so that organizations can simplify, align, and
consolidate their IT infrastructures.
Cisco AON uses the underlying network to provide an essential communications infrastructure for messaging, security, and other shared services.
A Cisco AON-based network can transparently intercept and selectively filter all traffic, understand and translate relevant traffic across different
applications at the message level, and deliver wire-speed inspection and processing of information.
BUSINESS GOALS AND THE EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
A new approach is required to address the complexity of today’s application communication architectures.
A schism has developed in the application infrastructures of most enterprises. Within the past decade, newer distributed, loosely coupled
infrastructures based on SOA and Web services have joined the existing mix of proprietary, centralized application integration infrastructures based
on traditional middleware and enterprise application integration (EAI). Although these new technologies provide more flexibility and have begun
the shift to a nonproprietary, open environment, they suffer from a new set of problems. Among the most important: They lack the IT control and
security of the centralized environments for handling the fragmentation that is occurring across organizational boundaries. Individual departments,
for example, are developing and deploying applications and services independently, often using products and tools from new vendors in the
emerging Web services market.
*
Considered the next wave of application development, SOA is a technology model in which business functions are organized as a collection of services, each
with a clear business identity and strict formal interfaces. Web services generally refers to a simple, standardized way of integrating applications and is
recognized as the first universally accepted and supported interface standard.
with a clear business identity and strict formal interfaces. Web services generally refers to a simple, standardized way of integrating applications and is
recognized as the first universally accepted and supported interface standard.