Cisco to integrate security capabilities with SD-WAN

Cisco wants to bring its security capabilities to its growing SD-WAN business with a handful of new integrations announced during the opening of the Cisco Partner Summit in Las Vegas this week.

First, Cisco is bringing its security offerings to SD-WAN devices, such as enterprise firewall and intrusion prevention and URL filtering. Cisco has also integrated its cloud security platform, Cisco Umbrella, into SD-WAN to help block access to malicious destinations.

There will also be two new integrated services routers on offer from Cisco which are designed for small and large branches.

The vendor said it was also opening up more APIs, which would allow partners to create new services with Cisco DevNet, which has also created new SD-WAN learning labs.

To help customers deploy SD-WAN environments quicker, Cisco will release the Quick Start Service at a fixed price that will give customers access to remote implementation and knowledge transfer capabilities.

Cisco also announced a new partnership with Microsoft to optimise the performance of Office 365 on its SD-WAN. Customers accessing Office 365 from an SD-WAN will see 40 percent faster performance, according to Cisco, as the network will monitor all available paths to the nearest instance in real time.

“The emergence of the new Cloud Edge is disrupting our customers’ network and security architectures. Today, every WAN device must become software defined and secure,” Cisco SVP of enterprise networking Scott Harrell said.

“Cisco’s SD-WAN makes it easy for customers to get the very best of networking and security. We are building a bridge to a new business world that speeds our customers’ ability to unlock the power of the cloud — faster with less risk.”

As for the channel opportunity, Cisco’s VP of worldwide sales Nirav Sheth told partners that 95 percent of customers would look at some level of SD-WAN deployment in the next 24 months, and that the market would be worth US$10 billion by 2022.

“Our partners have an incredible opportunity to go back to their existing customer base and take a look at how that customer might want to rearchitect how they’re consumer services and layer on those SD-WAN capabilities on top,” Sheth said.

The new security integrations and Office 365 will launch globally by the end of the year.

The journalist travelled to Cisco Partner Summit as a guest of Cisco.