Branch offices — and thus enterprises requiring SD-WAN — are driving Cisco’s security strategy and helping grow its security business revenue, said Gee Rittenhouse, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group. The vendor reported security revenue increased 21% year over year during its fiscal third quarter of 2019.

“The enterprise market has fundamentally changed,” Rittenhouse said during Bank of America Merrill Lynch tech talk. “They no longer have just a firewall, just a web proxy. They now have direct internet access with their branches. They have direct internet access with their branches. They have mobile users and things like cloud and SaaS.”

To accommodate these new environments and security requirements, Cisco over the last few years expanded its portfolio into the cloud and endpoint markets and added next-generation firewall capabilities for visibility and security across east-west traffic, he added.

Fast forward to today, where networking and security are becoming more tightly integrated and “that buying center has merged,” Rittenhouse said. Instead of only having a conversation with security analysts about standalone security products and features, the new buying center has become security and networks operations teams. “So we have integrated security back into our routers,” including its ISR EdgeRouters and Meraki routers, he explained.

At the same time, next-generation firewall capabilities and routers are merging into a single appliance. The driver for this integration is two-fold. First, small- and mid-market companies that “don’t want the complexity,” Rittenhouse said. And second: SD-WAN. “Now they are exposing every branch to the internet and they want that security built in so they don’t have to manage, upgrade, and install lots of boxes at the branch,” he said.

Up next is a shift to the application lines of business as enterprises move to the cloud and cloud-native services, Rittenhouse added. This is where Cisco’s AppDynamics application performance monitoring tool comes into play. “We’re pivoting and building [security] into our App Dynamics go-to-market as well,” he said.