Book excerpt: The complete guide to Cisco® IWAN: features, benefits, planning, and deployment Using Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN), businesses can deliver an uncompromised experience, security, and reliability to branch offices over any connection. Cisco IWAN simplifies WAN design, improves network responsiveness, and accelerates deployment of new services. Now, there’s an authoritative single-source guide to Cisco IWAN: all you need to understand it, design it, and deploy it for maximum value. In Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN), leading Cisco experts cover all key IWAN technologies and components, addressing issues ranging from visibility and provisioning to troubleshooting and optimization. They offer extensive practical guidance on migrating to IWAN from your existing WAN infrastructure. This guide will be indispensable for all experienced network professionals who support WANs, are deploying Cisco IWAN solutions, or use related technologies such as DMVPN or PfR. Deploy Hybrid WAN connectivity to increase WAN capacity and improve application performance Overlay DMVPN on WAN transport to simplify operations, gain transport independence, and improve VPN scalability Secure DMVPN tunnels and IWAN routers Use Application Recognition to support QoS, Performance Routing (PfR), and application visibility Improve application delivery and WAN efficiency via PfR Monitor hub, transit, and branch sites, traffic classes, and channels Add application-level visibility and per-application monitoring to IWAN routers Overcome latency and bandwidth inefficiencies that limit application performance Use Cisco WAAS to customize each location’s optimizations, application accelerations, and virtualization Smoothly integrate Cisco WAAS into branch office network infrastructure Ensure appropriate WAN application responsiveness and experience Improve SaaS application performance with Direct Internet Access (DIA) Perform pre-migration tasks, and prepare your current WAN for IWAN Migrate current point-to-point and multipoint technologies to IWAN