Cisco and Rackspace are taking on multicloud security, with Rackspace offering Cisco’s next-generation firewalls to its customers, integrating them directly into managed cloud services.

The two companies, which have collaborated on networking and security for more than 20 years, say the latest partnership around Cisco’s Firepower product line will provide advanced protection to Rackspace customers as they move into multicloud environments.

Twenty-seven percent of security professionals are using off-premises private clouds, according to Cisco’s annual security report, published this week. Of that 27 percent, more than half said they host networks in the cloud because of better data security; 48 percent because of scalability; and 46 percent because of ease of use.

However, hackers are also increasingly using the cloud, according to the report, and workloads moving to the cloud are at risk of creating new threat vectors. These can come from the companies’ on-premises data centers, to the cloud, and to threats coming directly from the Internet.

“Cisco and Rackspace started with networking products and firewall products, and today, moving to our network threat defense portfolio, we can now protect against URLs, and applications and identities over the perimeters that span customers’ premises, private cloud, and public clouds,” said Shawn Henry, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s security business group.

Rackspace is one of Cisco’s largest firewall customers. It previously deployed and was a testing partner for Cisco’s stateful firewall, the ASA series, as well ast the ASA 5500-X Series. The managed cloud provider now deploys more than 22,000 Cisco firewalls for its customers.

“A lot of other security technologies lack the supportability at scale,” said Brian Kelly, chief security officer at Rackspace. “That’s one of the real strengths in how we work with Cisco. When we upgrade or modify systems, we’re having to do that across a huge fleet and do that in a way that is not disruptive to users of the cloud and Cisco clearly gets that. Together we’ve been very effective in being able to support a large fleet of security devices.”