Cisco is making it easier for Meraki SD-WAN customers to take advantage of cloud-hosted applications through a new collaboration with Microsoft Azure.

Cisco Meraki customers can now tie into Azure's virtual WAN (vWAN) service enabling connectivity to applications running in the public cloud directly from the branch. Many SD-WAN vendors see this as a way to eliminate the need for expensive and rigid MPLS links. Once branch traffic reaches the nearest Azure data center, it's routed across the cloud provider's network to its destination. This results in improved security over traditional internet breakout and higher performance over backhauling traffic to headquarters.

"As customer use of multi-cloud environments continues to increase, providing secure and optimized access to business-critical resources is more important than ever," said Lawrence Huang, VP of product management for Cisco Meraki, in a statement.

Using a co-developed toolkit, enterprises can tie Meraki appliances running in the branch office into the Azure vWAN service automatically. Cisco claims this automation enables a virtual WAN link to Azure's data centers to be spun up changed on a moment's notice. This is opposed to traditional MPLS links that can take months to deploy.

Azure vWAN is now available to existing Meraki customers at no additional cost.

Today's announcement comes nearly a year after Cisco rolled out Azure vWAN support to its flagship Viptela SD-WAN offering.

Azure vWAN has seen widespread adoption since it was first announced in 2018. Since then, major players in the SD-WAN space including VMware, Fortinet, Silver Peak, Nuage Networks, and CloudGenix have added support for the platform. And earlier this year, Barracuda Networks launched its CloudGen WAN platform, which is built on Azure vWAN, in a bid to fill out its emerging secure access service edge (SASE) offering.