How do you integrate north/south or east/west traffic into the NGFW in Cisco ACI?

Integrating north/south or east/west traffic into the Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) in Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is effectively achieved through the use of Policy Based Redirect. This approach allows you to define specific policies for traffic that should be redirected to an external firewall for inspection, security checks, or other processing before reaching its final destination.

By deploying Policy Based Redirect, you can ensure that traffic flows are intelligently managed, based on defined rules that consider the context of the traffic, such as source, destination, and application. This mechanism enables seamless integration of the firewall into the overall architecture, allowing for comprehensive security measures applied to different types of traffic without requiring significant changes to the network infrastructure.

The other options, while relevant to ACI functionality, do not focus specifically on the integration of traffic types into the NGFW. Service Graph is primarily used for defining service chaining and orchestrating multiple services in the network rather than just traffic redirection. Contracts manage the communication between different endpoint groups and don't directly address traffic integration with a firewall. Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) relates to the management of virtualized resources and does not pertain to the specific task of redirecting traffic to an NGFW.