by Cisco today became the latest firewall vendor to add support for Alkira’s multi-cloud networking platform. Beginning early next year, customers can deploy Cisco’s Secure Firewall Threat Defense platform directly from Alkira’s Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) via a bring-your-own-license model.
Alkira’s CSX connects to the leading cloud service providers to streamline and simplify multi-cloud workloads’ deployment, management, and networking into one simple point-and-click solution. The platform also allows WAN network connectivity over the cloud provider’s backbone network for branch-to-branch connectivity.
The multi-cloud vendor’s integration Cisco lets customers apply the same security policy employed to safeguard workloads on their premises and colocation facilities to those hosted in the cloud Cisco Security Solutions architect Anubhav Swamy wrote in a blog article.
He explained that the firewalls could also be utilized to ensure east-west communication between branch offices.
The deployment of Alkira’s CSX offers numerous advantages, including automation of deployment and configuration and licensing, auto-scaling according to network traffic. In addition, better visibility of both north-south and east-west traffic inspections, Cisco claims.
As well as Cisco’s threat defense firewall, the licenses also include the network giant’s SecureX enhanced detection and response platform for the detection of threats, investigations, and remediation.
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Alkira Expands Security Focus
The announcement of today’s date is made in the context of Alkira is looking to improve its security abilities.
Alkira has added the support of Palo Alto Network’s VM series of firewalls in the spring of this year. The integration helped secure one of Alkira’s multi-cloud provider’s most significant customers to date: Koch Industries.
A combination of the Alkira’s CSX and Palo Alto Networks’ firewalls helped Koch dramatically reduce its infrastructure size, which includes multiple cloud providers and more than 700 sites in 70 countries, Matt Hoag, CTO at Koch Business Solutions, told SDxCentral at the time.
As of September, Alkira added a similar integration with the Check Point CloudGuard firewalls.
The announcement came as Alkira CTO Atif Khan touted a “SASE plus plus” approach, which enables customers to integrate both their existing SD-WAN and security systems that have the multi-cloud features of SD-WAN.
“No one company can do everything at a top-notch level,” said he explained. “I give you this capability of building a global, best-of-breed, worldwide network using the infrastructure that Alkira provides, and then you can bring in your third-party services and plug them in if you want to.”
However, it must be considered that Gartner analysts specifically recommend against the use of secure access service edge (SASE) structures that rely on more than 2 security or networking platforms.
Source – Alkira’s Blog
