Cisco unleashed a bevy of new features in its latest SD-WAN release today, including enhanced cloud integrations, improved multi-tenancy, and an updated management console. According to Raj Gulani, senior director of product management for enterprise cloud and SD-WAN at Cisco, the release comes as SD-WAN customers ask more than ever from their WANs.

“Security turns out to be a foundational capability of SD-WAN,” he told SDxCentral in an exclusive interview, adding that customers don’t think of security as a bolt on. Making things more complicated, customers now expect that security to span multiple domains, including the campus, WAN, and multicloud, he added.

Today’s update builds on several recent collaborations with colocation and cloud providers.

First teased this spring at Cisco Live, the vendor’s integration with Equinix allowed customers to automatically route traffic between the colocation provider's network of more than 225 data centers. The integration allows for both branch-to-workload and/or branch-to-branch communications.

This capability is now automated in Cisco IOS XE version 17.6 and offers similar functionality to the vendor’s integration with Megaport last year.

The latest release also introduces Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud Service Directory, which enables customers to automate routing policy for custom applications running on the public cloud provider’s infrastructure. This means DevOps teams can now define traffic profiles in Google Cloud that NetOps teams can then translate directly into network policy, the company explained.

“We have truly achieved SD-WAN for DevOps,” Gulani said. “DevOps can talk to your APIs though the service directory without even requiring a bridge.”

And as enterprises scramble to contend with the rising wave of ransomware and supply chain attacks, customers using Cisco’s Microsoft Azure vWAN Hub integration can now take advantage of Azure Firewall. Cisco claims to be the first “enterprise SD-WAN” partner to support the platform, which promises to secure connectivity regardless of its origin or destination.

“Now the same vManage can not only be a first-class citizen of the vWAN hub, but we can also light up the Azure firewall as part of the enterprise policies,” Gulani said.

Beyond cloud interconnects and security, Cisco is scaling up its SD-WAN to support larger deployments with more tenants. Cisco SD-WAN customers can now manage up to 200 tenants for an aggregate of about 5,000 devices using a single instance of vManage.

In addition to traditional managed service provider use cases, Gulani argues this opens the door for large enterprises to segregate traffic based on the business unit rather than relying solely on traditional traffic segmentation.

Cisco’s vManage portal also received a fresh coat of paint, boasting an updated user interface the vendor claims will make managing the network easier and more intuitive.

Finally, alongside the software update, Cisco revamped its SD-WAN appliances with broader 5G support.

The company’s new 5G pluggable interface module and mGig WAN modules eliminate the need for a separate gateway for cellular connectivity and support up to 3.3 Gb/s of throughput.