Cisco's Viptela SD-WAN platform can now be deployed using the vendor's secure access service edge (SASE) product, joining current support for Cisco's Meraki SD-WAN platform.

Omri Guelfand, VP of SASE product management at Cisco, said this is part of the vendor's “interconnect everything” product principle, adding customers that leverage both SD-WAN fabrics can “harmonize” the two network fabrics via the vendor’s Secure Connect SASE product. This will support connectivity between sites regardless of the underlying SD-WAN architecture.

“Customers with Viptela SD-WAN can now enjoy all the benefits of Cisco+ Secure Connect, and enable fast, secure private, and internet access anywhere work happens,” he told SDxCentral. “It targets Viptela customers that are looking to secure their branches and enable remote workers to access resources behind Viptela SD-WAN sites.”

Guelfand explained that the SASE framework's ability to securely connect users to applications provides it with two primary use cases: secure private access and secure internet access. Supporting both the Viptela and Meraki SD-WAN platforms makes SASE management easier by extending the benefits of both use cases.

Secure private access allows users to securely connect to private applications organizations can be running in the data center, private cloud, public clouds, and or as software-as-a-service (SaaS). Secure internet access secures users that are connecting to the internet, offering a common set of security tools such as firewall, secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB) and data loss prevention (DLP).

Cisco's interconnect everything principle means “anything that attaches to the Cisco+ Secure Connect is inherently connected, allowing seamless access of users, devices, and locations to resources and applications across the fabric, controlled by the policies the customer sets,” Guelfand said. “Admins do not need to worry about different architectures and technologies or where different resources are.”

Raj Chopra, chief product officer of Cisco Secure, noted the vendor witnessed strong growth of applications and multi-cloud deployments last year, as well as attacks becoming more sophisticated and frequent. This led to organizations increasing networking segmentation and deploying wider and more integrated security capabilities.

This year Chopra expects to see customers demand “simplified and smarter user experiences," and as a result there will be an increase in “common, unified policies, removing the onus from the user to harmonize various policy engines across products themselves."

This will simplify the experience for users and reduce translation errors and any associated risks.

“SASE is an evolving category that is continuing to be defined,” Chopra added. “That being said, now is the perfect time for organizations to reflect on their goals for 2023, and outline a journey to security resilience, focusing on modernizing their secure connectivity infrastructure and prioritizing ways to deliver a consistent experience to their user ecosystems.”