Teridion tapped Cisco Meraki security and SD-WAN to integrate routers with its public cloud-based WAN service.

The network services provider’s cloud-based WAN service, which it calls Teridion for Enterprise, helps to improve the performance of internet services. According to Pejman Roshan, vice president of products and marketing at Teridion, the service includes 25 global public cloud provider networks and more than 400 points-of-presence (PoPs) around the world.

“Enterprises use their WAN routers or SD-WAN appliances (such as the Meraki MX series) to connect to the Teridion network via a secure IP-sec connection, and traffic routed through the Teridion network gets optimized routing (loss and latency comparable to MPLS) and TCP protocol acceleration,” Roshan explained. He added that this is for site-to-site traffic, traffic to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and to workloads in the cloud.

The service is delivered to enterprises via an IP-sec integration with branch office routers and SD-WAN appliances. Roshan noted that the Cisco Meraki partnership is a “snap-in integration,” making it easier to use, manage, and secure.

Teridion has current integrations with Silver Peak, VMware-VeloCloud, and Citrix for SD-WAN, as well as branch office routers from Cisco, Fortinet, and others.

The new integration between Teridion and Cisco Meraki offers a new approach to branch networking, according to the companies. The auto-virtual private networking functions and SD-WAN capabilities of Meraki’s MX applications will work on top of Teridion’s high-throughput and low-latency public cloud-based WAN. It also unites centralized cloud management, enterprise-grade security, and WAN performance.

The service is fully cloud-managed, and provides throughput improvements of up to 300% and better performance for latency, loss, and jitter.

Cisco has multiple SD-WAN offerings, including service based on its acquisition of Viptela. Raviv Levi, director of product management at Cisco Meraki, said that Meraki was the best for the Teridion integration because of the operator's “emphasis on simplicity and the appeal to the distributed enterprise and SMB [small/medium business].”

Roshan was as complimentary, explaining that Meraki made the most sense because it had a like-minded approach to solving customer problems — “focusing on bringing strong networking capabilities that are easy to use and deploy, and as cloud networking pioneers they understand the value of addressing SaaS and public cloud-based workloads as part of the WAN.”

He also noted that Meraki’s focus on simplicity and ease-of-use is what separates this integration from its other branch and SD-WAN integrations. He claimed that the combination of Teridion and Meraki reduces application deployment time in the public cloud from weeks and months to just hours and days.

Teridion boasts that its public cloud-based WAN service has a different approach to routing.

“Teridion recognized early on that given that the internet is not built for performance (it is designed around resiliency), there were two approaches to take to improve WAN and cloud performance,” Roshan said.

The primary approach that many others take, according to Roshan, is building a private parallel network. However, Teridion instead augments internet routing with performance-based routing metrics. The provider built “a network that monitors and measures internet performance globally and uses that monitoring data in routing decisions.” This, he adds, is important for maintaining the performance of throughput-heavy and real-time applications.