Megaport and Cisco announced a partnership that integrates Cisco SD-WAN with Megaport’s software-defined interconnects to cloud providers and services.

It’s part of a new product called Megaport Virtual Edge that hosts NFVs — such as SD-WAN — on Megaport’s global SDN. And, in fact, Cisco SD-WAN is the first use case Megaport Virtual Edge.

“multicloud and cloud access and direct access to that in a secure, open platform is a big ask at the moment, particularly with COVID-19,” said Megaport CEO Vincent English. “We’ve got access to over 700 enabled data centers and 200 cloud on ramps across eight different cloud providers across 24 countries.”

This includes the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba as well as cloud services like Office 365. Megaport also connected to 200 network service providers and 360 IT service providers.

“It’s that reach, that depth of access across our platform, the ease of use, and integrating that fully into the Cisco vManage platform that creates this vast reach for customers, particularly for branch access,” English said.

With the integration, Cisco customers can use vManage, Cisco’s SD-WAN management platform, to software-define their cloud interconnects to multiple clouds and software as a service (SaaS). The Cisco SD-WAN fabric acts as the overlay with the Megaport network as the underlay.

Customers want to use SD-WAN — not the internet — to connect directly into cloud and SaaS workloads, said Raj Gulani, senior director of product management for Cisco SD-WAN and cloud networking. “Classic internet is a best-effort approach,” he said, adding that connecting to the cloud over the internet doesn’t provide consistent network quality. “We are referring to these cloud connects as, as mid-mile, and that turns out to be a blind spot.”

Using Cisco’s SD-WAN fabric, on the other hand, provides observability, analytics, and security for these direct-to-cloud connects, Gulani said.

Cisco plans to develop multicloud, SD-WAN partnerships with other colocation providers, and it already partners with Equinix on that colocation provider’s Network Edge product. Network Edge lets enterprises deploy virtual network functions (VNFs) including Cisco SD-WAN within Equinix data centers.

On his company’s earnings call last week, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated businesses move to cloud services. Because of this, Cisco plans to increase its investment in cloud technologies and it’s also leaning into everything-as-a-service. “We will accelerate the transition of the majority of our portfolio to be delivered as a service,” Robbins said. “We will also accelerate our investments in the following areas: cloud security, cloud collaboration … increased automation in the enterprise, the future of work, application insights, and analytics.”

The Megaport partnership also pushes Cisco’s secure access service edge (SASE) strategy forward, Gulani said.

Cisco recently integrated its Umbrella secure internet gateway with its SD-WAN. “You have the SD-WAN fabric, you have the end-to-end cloud security, you have the programmable interconnects [with Megaport], and now you have this entire user-to-the-WAN proxies into the workload of your choice,” he said. “The more presence we have in the different parts of the network, the more rich our observability and analytics capabilities become for our customers.”