VeloCloud Networks almost a year ago began to cobble together an ecosystem of partners that can work together to provide consistent security measures across software defined wide area networks (SD-WAN). VeloCloud today formalized that activity by establishing the SD-WAN Security Technology Partner Program.

The initial set of partners include IBM Security, Check Point Software Technologies, Fortinet, and Zscaler. VeloCloud has been working with several other companies, and likely will add members to its partner program over time.

The SD-WAN market is new, still developing, and moving fast. Job One for companies providing SD-WAN was simply getting their own technology sorted out. The next step is to make sure the overall market will progress. That dictates the development of an ecosystem of companies that can provide some measure of interoperability.

VeloCloud is starting with security. VeloCloud VP of Marketing Mike Wood told SDxCentral, “There hasn’t been up to this point an ecosystem of partners that can offer assurances around interoperability. A lot of the time an enterprise or a service provider will have a security operations team that has already standardized on certain components for security. They’ve already decided on firewall, the universal threat manager, the secure web gateways, the datalink protection... These businesses have systems already deployed that the network team has to interoperate with.”

Because the companies in the SD-WAN Security program can interoperate, SD-WAN customers will be able to implement their networks with their preferred security products covering branch, data center, and cloud security.

VeloCloud said it has established a scalable framework that allows enterprises to seamlessly integrate their preferred security technology with cloud-delivered SD-WAN.

Wood said key to the announcement is the wider availability of application program interfaces (APIs) to its systems. He noted Earthlink/Windstream as an example of a company that has already made use of these APIs.

In addition to access to the extensible VeloCloud Technology Partner SD-WAN API (orchestration, control, and data), the company is also making available a software development kit (SDK).

VeloCloud also recently joined Fortinet’s Fabric-Ready Partner Program. It has worked closely with Fortinet to validate technology integration and interoperability.