SAN DIEGO — Cisco today revealed a series of updates to its intent-based networking architecture, including software and integrations designed to simplify IT management and ensure a seamless experience across every domain of the network.

“We understand that you are building and delivering more applications to your business than you ever have before, and we understand that they’re running anything and everywhere,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said during his opening keynote at Cisco Live.

“I started messing with routers in 1989, and I don’t think we’ve seen as big an architectural shift” as the market is undergoing today, he said. Dynamic changes brought on by new technologies and enterprise trends are fueling new complexities for IT professionals — disrupting security architecture, policy enforcement, and traffic flow predictability — but Cisco is committed to building a new foundation of architecture that resolves these challenges over the “next several years,” he said.

Intent-based networking — Cisco’s answer to growing IT complexities in campus, branch, WAN, IoT, data centers, and the cloud — is now powered with a completely refreshed portfolio of networking gear and software specific to each domain in the network. The cloud was supposed to simplify IT management and centralize operations but it “turned out not to be that way,” Robbins said. Many enterprises today grapple with multiple providers for software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, private applications, IoT, and edge computing, he explained.

“We have everything coming at us,” he said. “These are all technologies that are going to infiltrate everything we do every day.”

A group of new integrations announced by Cisco today aim to create a more secure and consistent experience across the network without regard for where, when, or how devices connect to different parts of the network. Network segmentation, which integrates software-defined access with SD-WAN and Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), helps IT teams authorize, onboard, and segment users and devices across parts of the network, even as users status or mode of connectivity changes.

Cisco is also working to automate application requirements between the data center and the WAN, enabling the network to determine the best path to prioritize traffic accordingly. The vendor also highlighted new security tools that allow enterprises to set and manage policy across hybrid environments and hundreds of devices from a single display.

At a high level, new software and hardware for multi-domain networking is a “fundamental underpinning of what’s going to drive everyone’s business outcomes,” said David Goeckeler, executive vice president of networking and security at Cisco, during the keynote. “We have to rearchitect the entire portfolio for the world we live in today.”

Under a challenging dynamic wherein users, devices, applications, and data are constantly changing, Cisco and its partners has to figure out how integrate network domains in ways never done before, Goeckeler explained. “We’ve been bringing out technology to build this multi-domain, intent-based network.”

New capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning have also been developed to improve IT operations through automation. Cisco AI Network Analytics, which will be a standard part of Cisco DNA Center Assurance and included in the next version due this summer, is designed to continuously collect relevant data from local networks and correlate it against aggregated data sets to create network baselines that can learn and adapt as environments change. It also, according to Cisco, tackles network complexity by discovering patterns so IT can preemptively address issues before they become a problem and use algorithms to perform trouble shooting that can analyze the root cause and resolve problems faster.

Finally, Cisco revealed a new group of rugged IoT switches and access points for IoT applications in extreme environmental conditions. The Cisco IR1101 Router is available now, followed by the release of the Cisco Catalyst IE3400 Heavy Duty Series Switch this summer, and the Catalyst IW6300 Heavy Duty Series Access Points in the fall. The router supports Cisco SD-WAN capabilities, making it what Cisco calls the “first SD-WAN solution built for industrial IoT,” and all of the new ruggedized products will be managed by Cisco DNA Center.