Palo Alto Networks' CloudGenix SD-WAN offering gained a spate of updates including artificial intelligence operations (AIOps) capabilities, tighter integrations with its Prisma Access secure access service edge (SASE) platform, and two new SD-WAN appliances.

Today's announcement marks the first major update to the vendor's SD-WAN platform since the company acquired CloudGenix for $420 million in April.

Kicking things off with the new appliances, the company seeks to address two disparate market segments. The ION 1000 is a small form factor appliance aimed at small retail or branch offices and remote workers, while the ION 9000 is designed specifically for use in large enterprise and campus environments.

The latter is the vendor's largest and highest performance SD-WAN appliance to date, according to Anand Oswal, SVP and GM at Palo Alto Networks.

Traditional WAN architectures are falling short as enterprises continue to move to the cloud and adopt software-as-a-service applications, the company claims. This is where CloudGenix's Layer 7 visibility makes a big difference by enabling customers to define service level agreements and apply policies for each application, thereby improving the overall user experience, Oswal said.

This enhanced visibility also enabled Palo Alto Networks to integrate machine learning-based analytics into the platform. The new capabilities dramatically simplify network operations, aid in capacity planning, and once in place, the system automatically correlates alarms to find the source of the issue and, where possible, automate the resolution, the company claims.

"It's a fully thought through closed loop where you can have statistical analysis of performance and automated problem remediation," Oswal said, adding that the only limiting factor is whether customers are ready for artificial intelligence to make changes on its own.

"You don't just automatically apply something because customers want to have control over it," he said.

Palo Alto Networks has also made it easier to integrate CloudGenix appliances with the company's Prisma Access SASE offering. Customers can now secure traffic inside and outside the branch or to any application running in a public or private cloud through a deep integration in the CloudGenix CloudBlades platform.

"Now I can automatically onboard CloudGenix devices from Prisma Access. We've taken the whole SASE concept to realization," Oswal said. "What we're really doing is enabling the secure, cloud-delivered branch in a few clicks now."

Both appliances are now available, and the machine learning and SASE integrations are available in CloudGenix 5.4 and CloudBlades 2.0 starting today.