Citrix is stoking a wall of fire around its SD-WAN castle and Palo Alto Networks is fueling the flames.

The two companies announced a new partnership that puts Palo Alto's virtualized firewall technology in the hands of Citrix SD-WAN customers looking for additional security. Citrix claims the partnership will allow customers to deploy security anywhere its needed across the WAN.

“Applications and workloads are migrating to the cloud at a very aggressive rate and security needs to follow them,” said Chalan Aras, VP of SD-WAN and intelligent traffic management at Citrix, in a statement. “With Palo Alto Networks we can deliver an advanced SD-WAN security solution that enables companies to protect users, data, and applications across branches, data centers, and public clouds in a simple, flexible way.”

Citrix customers can automatically provision Palo Alto's firewall on Citrix's 1100 appliance as a virtual network function (VNF) or automate connections to Palo Alto's Prisma Access cloud-based firewalls.

Citrix's collaboration with Palo Alto, however, is nothing new. Palo Alto previously supplied firewall protection for Citrix's enterprise data center applications and handled policy enforcement across the company's SD-WAN.

“In today’s hybrid, multi-cloud world, security needs to be as agile as your applications, data and users,” said Adam Geller, SVP of products at Palo Alto Networks, in a statement. “Together with Citrix we can deliver an integrated set of products that provide a consistent level of protection to users across the network and both public and private clouds.”

In the past few months, Citrix has dug in on security, fortifying defense across its product line.

In March, it announced a string of new automation and security features including integration with the zScaler cloud security platform.

However, that same month saw the company's internal network breached by a group of international cybercriminals that reportedly accessed and downloaded an assortment of business documents. The company only became aware of the breach after it was contacted by the FBI.

According to Stan Black, chief security and information officer at Citrix, the specific documents the hackers gained access to was unknown at the time. While no Citrix products or services were reportedly compromised, the breach was none the less embarrassing for the company, which has since taken numerous steps to bolster its security offerings.