Cisco renewed its partnership with Microsoft to address inconsistent software-as-a-service (SaaS) performance.

The expanded collaboration targets Microsoft Teams and Office 365, two of the most popular business collaboration apps. These applications have become paramount to supporting hybrid and remote workforces, wrote Jeevan Sharma, senior product manager for cloud networking and SD-WAN at Cisco, in a blog post.

However, as enterprises transition from hosting applications on-premises to SaaS apps, SD-WAN path selection has become a challenge, he explained, adding that there are a litany of routing options enterprises and managed service providers have for delivering services.

“They may backhaul the SaaS traffic through a corporate data center to run it through a security stack, or they may send the traffic to a regional data center first, or allow users at the remote branch to directly access SaaS apps over the internet,” Sharma wrote.

To address these challenges, Cisco introduced link-probing capabilities into its SD-WAN platforms to make it easier for network teams to identify and apply routing policy to Microsoft services.

The technology, which Cisco calls Cloud OnRamp for Microsoft 365, takes advantage of Microsoft’s URL structure to categorize Office 365 applications into three categories: optimized, allow, and default. Network teams can then dynamically route traffic based on these categories.

Cisco also takes advantage of Microsoft’s Informed Network Routing functionality. The opt-in service allows sharing of Cisco and Microsoft telemetry to glean greater insights into real-world application performance — something probing alone simply can’t achieve, Sharma said.

The networking vendor initially extended support for the platform late last year with a Microsoft Exchange Service integration. Cisco this month added Microsoft Teams and SharePoint to the list of support applications.

Cisco has invested heavily over the last few years to improve network and application visibility across its portfolio.

In 2020, Cisco snapped up network performance monitoring vendor ThousandEyes for $1 billion and paid $3.7 billion for application monitoring vendor AppDynamics in 2017. However, it wasn’t until early last year Cisco brought its monitoring capabilities to bear on its SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) platforms.

According to Cisco, the combination of Viptela SD-WAN, ThousandEyes, and AppDynamics allows network and development operations teams to accelerate root cause analysis. This is critical as enterprises adopt SaaS and cloud-based services at an increased rate, the vendor claimed.

Cisco also plans to utilize this telemetry to inform routing decisions and eventually automate the provisioning of middle-mile WAN links from cloud and colocation providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Megaport, and Equinix.