CloudGenix today added functionality to its software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) so that remote offices can access applications in the data center.

“We’ve been able to stretch an application fabric all the way from the data center to the remote office,” says CloudGenix CEO Kumar Ramachandran.

CloudGenix has been providing enterprise customers with SD-WAN for a couple of years with its ION system. The hybrid WAN software has helped customers to reduce WAN costs at their remote offices.

But customers have recently been saying they’d like to specify an application policy for performance, security, and compliance. And they’d like to have it delivered from the data center or the cloud, across the WAN, to the remote office.

Today’s CloudGenix announcement does all that via its ION 3000v Application-Defined Fabric.

Enterprises that use ION 3000v are able to eliminate a lot of hardware at the branch. They only need an x86 server, or possibly two servers for larger complexes, as opposed to a deployment of physical boxes: routers, firewalls, and WAN optimization devices. “We’ve eliminated the need for routing,” says Ramachandran.

CloudGenix has also worked with VMware and Palo Alto Networks to demonstrate the interoperability of its ION 3000v with VMware’s NSX software defined networking (SDN) for the data center and Palo Alto’s security software.

“We’ve worked with VMware NSX to chain multiple virtual services together,” says Ramachandran. And providing cloud security directly to the remote office ensures that malicious traffic is prevented from entering or leaving the branch.

“A big part of the challenge is to ensure that traffic in the virtual world is still chained,” says Ramachandran. “VMware and Palo Alto came up with a solution.” But he stresses that VMware and Palo Alto are just examples of vendors CloudGenix can work with. CloudGenix is neutral as to security and data center vendors. “We are agnostic to which solution is deployed; it could even be hardware,” says Ramachandran.

The company is offering ION 3000v as a zero-cost upgrade to its existing customers, and it’s now available to new customers as well.