Service providers face big challenges along with tremendous opportunities. Maturing technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV), cloud, and open-source software are enabling exciting business innovations and market disruptions. To keep up with the pace of change today, you need to rethink how to engage with your customers to meet their business needs. At Cisco, we have the right approach to harness the transformative power of the cloud, SDN, and NFV. The Cisco® Virtual Managed Services Solution portfolio provides a rich set of secure cloud-based network services with prepackaged software capabilities over any access technology. The Cisco Virtual Managed Services solution makes it easy for you to deploy, manage, and sell new premium cloud managed services while reducing current operating expenditures (OpEx) and accelerating time to revenue.

1. Solution Overview
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Cisco Virtual Managed Services:
Transform Your Business with Cloud-Based
Innovations
Service providers face big challenges along with tremendous opportunities. Maturing
technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN), network function
virtualization (NFV), cloud, and open-source software are enabling exciting business
innovations and market disruptions. To keep up with the pace of change today, you
need to rethink how to engage with your customers to meet their business needs. At
Cisco, we have the right approach to harness the transformative power of the cloud,
SDN, and NFV. The Cisco®
Virtual Managed Services Solution portfolio provides a
rich set of secure cloud-based network services with prepackaged software
capabilities over any access technology. The Cisco Virtual Managed Services solution
makes it easy for you to deploy, manage, and sell new premium cloud managed
services while reducing current operating expenditures (OpEx) and accelerating time
to revenue.
Overview
We offer a comprehensive approach to help you to evolve your physical and virtual infrastructure to an open,
programmable, agile, and application-centric architecture, as shown in Figure 1. We’ll help you achieve your
primary business outcomes: making money and saving money.

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Figure 1. Cisco Open Architecture for Service Providers
Cisco SDN and NFV solutions for service providers are built upon the innovative, open, and programmable product
and solution capabilities and the interactions between complementary Cisco platforms:
● Cisco Evolved Services Platform (ESP) uses SDN, NFV, open APIs, and advanced orchestration
capabilities in a flexible and modular platform that lets you quickly deploy new services tailored to your
customers’ needs.
● Cisco Evolved Programmable Network (EPN) is designed for web-speed agility with an open, elastic, and
application-centric network infrastructure to help you transform and expand your business, and accelerate
time to revenue while reducing costs and complexities of deploying new services.
● Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) enables agile deployment of applications and helps you
automate the orchestration of your cloud environment with consistent policy-directed profiles while reducing
your costs.
Combining the synergies of these complementary Cisco platforms within an open multivendor ecosystem will
provide advanced orchestration and virtualization capabilities that are prepackaged to help you create, automate,
and provision innovative new services in minutes at the click of a mouse.
Success can now be defined by automated, orchestrated service-based solutions that take advantage of
bidirectional APIs across the Cisco open application-centric architecture. They can flexibly combine best-in-class
capabilities that help you deliver services in the way your customers expect and demand them. Imagine being able
to respond to market opportunities quickly, while supporting the business models you need and greatly reducing
the total cost of capturing new revenue streams.
Virtual Managed Services
Are you tired of the swivel-chair environment? Tired of manually interconnecting and provisioning all physical
devices involved in services separately, using multiple management applications or operations environments?
Using the automation and programmability capabilities inherent in the Cisco ESP and Cisco Virtual Managed
Services software portfolio provides significant advantages over the traditional managed services approach. You
can realize a revenue increase of up to 15 percent from accelerating deployments; generating higher attach rates,
cross-selling services, and expanding offerings to serve down-market customers. In addition, you can reduce your
operating expenses (OpEx) by up to 65 percent with savings from customer acquisition, service fulfillment, time to
repair, and maintenance activities. (ACG Research, 2014).

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Offer your business customers self-service portals that allow them to easily create and customize the services they
want in minutes with a few clicks of a mouse (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Customer Self-Service Portal Speeds Ordering and Delivery
The Cisco Virtual Managed Services solution portfolio uses a rich suite of virtual network functions (VNFs),
advanced services orchestration, lifecycle VNF manager (VNFM), and dynamic virtual forwarding and control
software technologies. Integrated by Cisco, these solutions automate the secure delivery of prepackaged services
to your business customers from an open multitenant virtual private cloud environment automatically and on
demand. They support bidirectional RESTful APIs to communicate among multivendor physical and virtual
elements and management and orchestration tools. And they integrate smoothly into your operational support
systems and business support systems (OSS/BSS). The Cisco Virtual Managed Services solutions use the
emerging virtualization and SDN technologies such as Border Gateway Protocol-Ethernet VPN (BGP-EVPN),
Virtual Extensible Local-Area Network (VXLAN), Network Configuration (NETCONF) Protocol, the YANG data
modeling language, OpenStack, and service function chaining (SFC), to create openness and flexibility for you to
easily add VNFs from any vendor to customize your cloud-based services dynamically across your infrastructure.
This flexibility is possible because each of the virtual managed service capabilities - such as firewall, load balancer,
and wide-area acceleration - are deployed on demand as a VNF operating on standard compute server
technologies located in a service provider data center or point of presence. The business logic of the Cisco ESP
network service and resource orchestration modules automate the startup of the virtual machines, activation of the
VNFs, and dynamic creation of the specific service function chain, which creates appropriate linkages that support
the service profile and steer the customer traffic through these functions.
The Cisco Virtual Managed Services portfolio currently enables the following types of cloud-based business
services:
● Cloud VPN, including automated and flexible delivery of secure virtual private network (VPN) and Internet
access services, is complemented with an open, modular set of firewall, Network Address Translation
(NAT), intrusion protection, content filtering, and web and email security applications (Figure 3).
● Cloud Security, including open, modular delivery of hosted firewall, NAT, intrusion protection, content
filtering, and web and email security applications that your business customers access through any WAN
connection to your data center interconnect (DCI) infrastructure, is supported.
These prepackaged software solutions allow you to serve your customers better by offering them a flexible
selection of VPN connectivity and security applications.

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Figure 3. Virtual Managed Services - Cloud VPN
In Figure 3, a Cloud VPN service activation request proceeds with these steps:
1. Business customers access the self-service user portal to create, order, and activate a Cloud VPN service
offering from the active service catalog.
2. The service provider automatically ships the required CPE hardware to be installed and connected.
3. When business customers receive and connect their CPE, it is automatically provisioned through a secure
connection from the cloud.
4. The network service orchestration engine software modules automatically bring up the required VNFs based
on the business service profiles and steers the traffic between the multivendor physical and virtual network
infrastructure (NFVI) to the business customer premises locations.
5. The secure Cloud VPN service capabilities are automatically activated and connected to the business
customer locations and business users are notified through their self-service portal.

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Figure 4. Virtual Managed Services - Cloud Security
In Figure 4, the Cloud Security service activation request is supported through the following steps:
1. The business customers access the self-service user portal to create, order, and activate a Cloud Security
service offering from the active service catalog.
2. The network service orchestration engine software modules automatically bring up the required VNFs based
on the business service profiles and steer the traffic between the physical and virtual network infrastructure to
the business customer premises locations.
3. The secure Cloud VPN service capabilities are automatically activated and connected to the business
customer locations and the business users are notified through their self-service portal.
Flexible Deployment Models
Software function packages play a central role in the ability of the Cisco ESP to transform service provider
business models. In today’s environments, many service deployments require a complex operation of hardware,
management tools, and business processes. As a result, deploying new services often takes many months. You
can take advantage of the Cisco Evolved Services platform in a number of ways, depending on your business
needs. Cisco Virtual Managed Services solutions may be deployed as individual functions, flexible software
packages, fully integrated solutions, or in a pay-as-you-go software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Cisco Cloud VPN
and Cloud Security solutions may be deployed as software function packages (Figure 5), enabling customer
services that can be turned up in minutes and scaled elastically as business needs dictate.

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Figure 5. Virtual Managed Services - Flexible Deployment Models
Capitalizing on NFV
NFV is an essential capability for enabling new business models and cloud-based service offerings. Cisco is a
leading member of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which is shaping the standards-
based approach for NFV. The goal of NFV is to take network functions normally built into hardware and implement
them in software on standardized compute platforms. Cisco has developed an extensive set of VNFs across all
technology domains. The Cisco Open architecture for service providers automates services orchestration and
management aspects of NFV across the multivendor physical and virtual infrastructure (NFVI) to harness all of
these networking capabilities to help operators deploy cloud-based virtual services that customers can order and
activate in minutes.
Expand Your Business While Reducing Investment Risk
Cisco Virtual Managed Services lets you efficiently deliver the service capabilities that both enterprise and small
and midsize customers desire while addressing a greater portion of the US$62B managed services market
opportunity (MarketsandMarkets, U.S. Census, and Cisco Analysis) to help you grow your business. Deployed in
minutes and easily scalable, Cisco Virtual Managed Services solutions combine software and optional hardware to
help you automate a new class of carrier cloud services.
Cisco Services has teams of experts that can help you develop the right strategy to achieve current and future
business goals. We’ll design, deploy, manage, optimize, and support your Cloud VPN and Cloud Security offerings
to minimize risks, increase productivity, and deliver greater operational efficiency even in a multi-vendor
environment. We bring industry leading cloud, datacenter, and systems integration capabilities with proven best
practices, and a comprehensive, integrated approach to help you realize the full business value of your Virtual
Managed Services Solutions.
Our support services are tightly integrated with the Virtual Managed Services Solutions and customized for your
specific environment to shorten time to market for new service delivery and easily scale to meet new business
demands. Cisco solution level software support for Virtual Managed Services is bundled together with the software
packages as a renewable subscription service so you can maintain the best possible performance from all
applications. A single point of contact triages all service requests to quickly resolve any incident.

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Go-to-Market Advantage
To speed your time to market and time to revenue, Cisco has also created a powerful innovative integrated solution
platform known as a POD where you can test our automated service and device orchestration capabilities along
with Cisco and third-party VNFs. Our services teams can help you launch your virtual managed services offerings
from the cloud, either deployed in a Cisco data center or using Cisco Intercloud technologies in your facilities. We
can also help you smoothly integrate the advanced orchestration and automation capabilities of the Cisco ESP into
your existing OSS/BSS with minimal disruption, to fully use and differentiate your business and service assurance
capabilities.
Cisco Virtual Managed Services solutions may also be deployed in your cloud environments while taking
advantage of the Cisco Intercloud Partner Ecosystem and Cisco Cloud and Managed Services Program (CMSP) to
help you to differentiate your portfolios, reduce deployment risks with a variety of as-a-service deployment and
delivery options, and increase revenue through joint go-to-market support, financial incentives, and discounts. With
the push of a button, you can deliver new cloud service to your customers, partners, and cloud ecosystem on
demand.
Service Provider Benefits
The Cisco Virtual Managed Services solution portfolio provides the essential capabilities that you need to expand
your business models and accelerate time to revenue for new services. The solution portfolio offers benefits
including:
● Easy to buy: Flexible buying models are packaged according to your needs; they allow you to deliver your
services in the way that your customers and subscribers want to consume them.
● Easy to deploy: The solution requires fewer tools and is based on entirely open interfaces to enable
multivendor deployment.
● Easy to sell: Advanced automation and orchestration capabilities help simplify the creation of new services,
accelerate the sales process, and improve time to market, while increasing revenue growth from
personalized high-value services.
● Easy to manage: You can dynamically shift application and service workloads between resources to
reduce costs.
Next Steps
To learn more, contact your Cisco account representative, or visit the following resources:
● Cisco Virtual Managed Services
● Cisco Evolved Services Platform
● Cisco Evolved Programmable Network
● Cisco Solutions for Cloud Providers
● Cisco Cloud Consulting Services
● Cisco Services

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