Cloudflare today bolstered its secure access service edge (SASE) platform with the launch of a new network-as-a-service (NaaS) offering alongside hardware partnerships with VMware and Aruba Networks.

According to Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming, the new service, called Magic WAN with Magic Firewall, is essentially a software-defined underlay built on the company’s massive private backbone network and designed to replace slow and expensive MPLS connections.

Magic WAN integrates with customers' existing WAN infrastructure, including gateway appliances from VMware’s VeloCloud and Aruba Networks' Silver Peak SD-WAN. Magic Firewall is, as its name suggests, a network-layer firewall service that runs in Cloudflare’s data centers and points of presence (PoP). Cloudflare's network currently spans 100 countries and more than 200 cities around the world.

According to Cloudflare, Magic WAN is able to offer much of the flexibility of routing traffic over the internet, while delivering reliability and security akin to MPLS at a much lower cost.

And because it's delivered as a software-as-a-service application, Graham-Cumming said users don’t have to rely on a service provider to manage their WAN links and instead can “just go into a UI and say this branch office connects here, these are the firewall rules, what it gets to connect to, and you're building your WAN on screen.”

He added that customers in many cases have existing WAN infrastructure and aren’t ready to give that up. So, instead of building their own SD-WAN appliance and connecting it back to their network, the company is integrating with existing offerings.

“We're not trying to replace SD-WAN and say you don't need that equipment. There's a group of customers who don't care about WANs at all. What they want is zero trust and to use the internet for everything.”

That’s what its Cloudflare One SASE platform is for, he said, adding that it also understands there are many companies out there that do care about the WAN, and Magic WAN is one way of addressing those customers as well.

However, Graham-Cumming notes that Magic WAN isn’t limited to branch connectivity and can be used to connect branch offices to data centers or data centers to the cloud. To this end, the company is also announcing integrations with data center providers Digital Realty, CoreSite, and EdgeConneX to help businesses move their network to the cloud with existing hardware.

Cloudflare: The SASE CDN

Cloudflare officially entered the SASE market with Cloudflare One back in October 2020.

The platform combined the company’s Access zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and Gateway secure web gateway (SWG) products with its Warp gateway client, as well as its forthcoming next-generation firewall and remote browser isolation.

Today’s announcement expands the scope of the company’s offering by making it easier for customers to connect their existing SD-WAN and WAN networks to Cloudflare’s SASE security stack.