Cisco today became the latest firewall vendor to add support for Alkira’s multicloud networking platform.

Beginning early next year, customers can deploy Cisco’s Secure Firewall Threat Defense platform directly from within Alkira’s Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) via a bring-your-own-license model.

Alkira’s CSX integrates with the major cloud providers to automate and abstract the process of deploying, managing, and networking multicloud workloads into a point-and-click service. The platform also supports WAN networking over the cloud provider’s backbone networks for branch-to-branch connectivity.

The multicloud vendor’s integration with Cisco enables customers to extend the same security policies used to protect workloads on premises and in colocation facility to workloads running in the cloud, Cisco Security Solutions Architect Anubhav Swami wrote in a blog post.

The firewalls can also be used to secure east-west communications between branch offices, he added.

Deploying on Alkira’s CSX has numerous benefits including automated deployment, configuration, and licensing; auto-scaling with network load; and improved visibility for both north-south and east-west traffic inspection, Cisco claims.

In addition to Cisco’s Threat Defense firewall, licenses include the networking giant’s SecureX extended detection and response platform, for threat detection, investigation, and remediation.

Today’s announcement comes as Alkira looks to bolster its security capabilities.

Alkira added support for Palo Alto Network’s VM-series firewalls this spring, an integration that was influential to securing one of the multicloud vendor’s largest customers to date: Koch Industries.

The combination of Alkira’s CSX and Palo Alto Networks’ firewalls allowed Koch to vastly simplify its network, which spans multiple public clouds and more than 700 locations across 70 countries, Matt Hoag, CTO at Koch Business Solutions, told SDxCentral at the time.

In September, Alkira extended a similar integration to Check Point’s CloudGuard firewalls.

The announcement came as Alkira CTO Atif Khan touted a “SASE plus plus” approach, which enables customers to integrate both their existing SD-WAN and security platforms with its multicloud capabilities.

“No one company is able to do everything at a top-notch level,” he explained. “I give you this capability of building a global, best-of-breed, worldwide network using the infrastructure that Alkira provides, and then you can bring in your third-party services and plug them in if you want to.”

However, it should be noted Gartner analysts specifically advise against secure access service edge (SASE) architectures that rely on more than two networking or security platforms.