Cloudflare executives claim with the recent addition of the Magic WAN Connector, the company now offers one of the most comprehensive secure access service edge (SASE) platforms. And CTO John Graham-Cumming argues that the defining features of single-vendor SASE are unified configurability and control.

Gartner defines a complete SASE solution as combining network edge capabilities – most notably SD-WAN – and a set of cloud-centric security services edge (SSE) capabilities, including secure web access gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker, and zero-trust network access (ZTNA).

Cloudflare launched its Cloudflare One SASE platform in 2020, which included SWG, CASB, and ZTNA capabilities. It offers network edge capabilities through its Magic WAN SD-WAN alternative along with its Network On-Ramp partnerships with SD-WAN vendors including Aruba Networks, VMWare, Arista Networks, Cisco, and SonicWall.

Graham-Cumming argues the network connecting components such as SD-WAN and Magic WAN Connector “are not necessarily part of the SASE solution,” and the key to a single-vendor SASE is for the vendor to provide unified management across all SASE capabilities.

“It's a question of whether you have the configurability and control within this thing,” he told SDxCentral. “If [a SASE solution] is well architected, then it will all work together, hence the partnerships with the SD-WAN vendors.”

“What people are looking for is controllability of their entire new network and not to have 10 different vendors involved,” Graham-Cumming added.

The vendor's Cloudflare One capabilities are “converging on a single control plane,” he noted in an earlier interview.

Cloudflare One Adds Magic WAN Connector

Cloudflare introduced its Magic WAN service in 2021, which is a software-defined underlay built on the company’s massive private backbone network and designed to replace slow and expensive MPLS connections.

To help customers more easily connect their network to Cloudflare, the vendor this month announced the Magic WAN Connector, which is an open source software-defined package designed to offer traffic routing, load balancing, failover, application-aware traffic steering and shaping, and automatic configuration and orchestration.

“The Magic WAN Connector can be deployed in any physical or cloud network to provide automatic connectivity to the closest Cloudflare network location, leveraging your existing last-mile Internet connectivity and removing the requirement for IT teams to manually configure network gear to get connected,” Cloudflare product manager Annika Garbers wrote in a blog post.

For customers who already have SD-WAN, they can “mix-and-match” it with the Magic WAN Connector, Graham-Cumming said. “In some instances, you might want to use the Magic WAN Connector, maybe there's something that's not in your SD-WAN, [or] maybe there's a data center you want to hook into Cloudflare directly.”