Cisco announced a string of enhancements to the company's Microsoft Azure cloud on-ramp and virtual WAN (vWAN) integrations during the cloud-provider's virtual Ignite conference this week.

The improvements seek to address challenges faced by customers using Microsoft's Office 365 platform.

"Having multiple applications in one platform also means Microsoft 365 must juggle many different types of traffic at once — and that's where users sometimes struggle with performance," wrote Ian MacLaughlin, Cisco product manager for SD-WAN, in a blog post. "When traffic accessing Word and traffic accessing video conferencing are treated with the same parameters while occurring simultaneously, the resulting performance may be less than optimal."

To mitigate this, Cisco has implemented URL categorization features that enable its Viptela SD-WAN platform to differentiate the various components of Office 365 as well as various components of other software-as-a-service apps. This means enterprises can apply different policies for Microsoft Word and Teams.

Additionally, Cisco is rolling out enhanced application experience metrics which will be presented in conjunction with networking metrics.

"By having both data sets readily available, Cisco SD-WAN can take a deeper dive into how well applications are performing and remediate sub-optimal performance with enhanced automated dynamic path selection," MacLaughlin wrote.

Cisco is also integrating its SD-WAN Cloud Onramp for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) into Azure vWAN.

According to MacLaughlin, together these platforms allow customers to extend their Cisco SD-WAN to workloads running in Azure.

Cisco's SD-WAN onramps for IaaS are nothing new. Introduced in 2016, the offering allowed enterprises to interconnect infrastructure using virtualized routers.

This "is an over-the-top solution which leverages the networking in the underlay and thus does not have access to all capabilities that can further simplify cloud deployments," MacLaughlin explained.

By combining this with Azure vWAN, customers can now automatically connect to networking gateways and routers within virtual WAN hubs. MacLaughlin explains that this allows enterprises to apply policy to workloads running in Azure as if it were just another branch or data center.

It also means that users "can benefit from enhanced WAN performance without sacrificing security, which is always of utmost concern, especially at the intersection of the cloud and the network," he wrote.

This functionality is available today, and it's accessible from Cisco's vManage panel.