Cisco firewall solutions latest to be integrated into Alkira

Alkira partnered with Cisco to make the firewall vendor’s Secure Firewall Threat Defense platform deployable directly through Alkira’s Cloud Services Exchange using a bring-your-own-license model, SDxCentral reports. The feature, which will become available in early 2022, will allow users to protect their workloads in the cloud with the same security policies they employ for protection of on-premises and colocation-based workloads, according to Cisco Security Solutions Architect Anubhav Swami. Cisco says its Threat Defense solution, when deployed on Alkira’s CSX, will provide automated configuration, deployment and licensing; auto-scaling with network load; and enhanced visibility during inspection of both east-west and north-south traffic. Alkira’s CSX is currently supported by a number of firewall solutions providers, including the VM-series firewalls by Palo Alto Network and most recently, Check Point’s CloudGuard firewalls, in line with Chief Technology Officer Atif Khan’s proposed “SASE plus plus” approach to allow the integration of users’ existing SD-WAN and security platforms into its multi-cloud capabilities. “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,” Khan said.