Megaport this week released its Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) network-as-a-service (NaaS) offering alongside tighter integrations with Cisco's SD-WAN.

MVE is an on-demand NFV service designed to improve branch office to cloud connectivity by limiting the amount of time traffic is traversing the open internet. It’s composed of two parts: an edge compute offering capable of running virtual network functions, like virtual routers or SD-WAN controllers, and a middle-mile transport service.

“The ability for Megaport customers to easily, and in minutes, spin up SD-WAN virtual appliances around the world on our platform is a big enabler for global organizations,” Megaport CEO Vincent English said in a statement.

Megaport claims to offer secure connectivity to more than 360 service providers, 700 data centers, and 200 cloud interconnect points. And thanks to an integration with Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Interconnect, customers can now automatically spin up connections over Megaport’s low-latency network.

“The internet offers only best-effort connectivity with inconsistent network quality, which can significantly impact application performance, while direct cloud interconnects require customers to plan for capacity and global reach upfront, which can lead to underutilization and spiraling costs,” Jean-Luc Valente, VP and product manager for Cisco’s enterprise routing and SD-WAN division, wrote in a blog post.

This week’s update addresses these challenges by automating the process of provisioning these networks, Valente added.

The integration not only allows branch-to-cloud connectivity but can be used to automatically provision branch-to-data center or branch-to-branch connectivity over MVE. Megaport’s Cisco integration is available now for customers running SD-WAN version 17.5.