SD-Access (SDA) Fundamentals: Campus Fabric Design

Cisco SD-Access (SD-Access, or SDA) is quickly becoming the standard way large enterprises design and secure their campus networks, and the engineers who understand it are in real demand. This course teaches it the way a real project actually unfolds: end to end, through one continuous, realistic deployment.
Designed as a conceptual framework, this video-and-article course details the fundamentals of SDA technology and network design methodology. Please be advised that the scope of this course is strictly theoretical, focusing on architecture rather than practical lab simulations or product demonstrations.

You will follow Northforge Industrial, a fictional mid-size manufacturer with roughly 1,800 employees, a headquarters campus with an attached production plant, a second manufacturing site, a distribution warehouse, and several small sales offices. Northforge is running an aging, flat three-tier network where a single infected laptop can reach the plant floor, onboarding a new production line takes days, and nobody can answer simple questions about what happened on the network without logging into switches one at a time. Your job across this course is to fix that, for real.

Across ten structured modules you will: understand why traditional campus networks break down and the three core ideas behind SD-Access; go deep on the fabric's machinery, underlay and overlay, LISP, VXLAN, TrustSec, and the fabric roles; design a complete High-Level Design for a real multi-site organization; stand up the controllers and underlay and bring sites online, both a brand-new greenfield building and a live brownfield migration with zero downtime; build macro and micro-segmentation with Virtual Networks, SGTs, and SGACLs; bring wireless into the fabric under one identical policy; secure the fabric's identity, control plane, and management systems; extend segmentation across multiple sites and into the WAN, data center, and cloud; and finally operate, troubleshoot, and automate the fabric you built.

Every lesson is grounded in a concrete example, real illustrative CLI output, real policy matrices, and real design trade-offs, not abstract theory. You will learn to think the way a network architect thinks: understand the problem before reaching for the product, design the policy before you build the boxes, migrate in small reversible steps, and prove your security controls instead of just trusting them.

Whether you are preparing for a real SD-Access project, studying toward a certification that touches SD-Access or TrustSec, or simply want to finally understand what LISP, VXLAN, and SGTs actually do, this course will take you from zero to confident.

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Disclaimer

This is an independent, unofficial training course. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or in any way officially connected with Cisco Systems, Inc., or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates.

Cisco, the Cisco logo, Cisco SD-Access, Catalyst Center, DNA Center, Identity Services Engine (ISE), TrustSec, and all related product names and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All product names, company names, and trademarks referenced in this course are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification and educational purposes only.

Northforge Industrial, the company featured throughout this course, is entirely fictional. It was created solely for instructional purposes, and any resemblance to any real company, organization, or individual is purely coincidental.