Airtel taps Cisco for Managed SD-WAN, SASE

Bharti Airtel today expanded its relationship with Cisco to bring secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities to its SD-WAN customers.

Founded in 1995, the New Delhi-based communications service provider serves more than a million businesses and in excess of 450 million subscribers across 18 countries in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa.

Airtel Intelligent VPN builds on the provider’s existing Cisco SD-WAN offering, which launched in 2019, and provides branch communications over multiple network underlays regardless of whether it’s using MPLS, broadband, or dedicated internet access. Once deployed, the platform intelligently routes traffic based on network bandwidth, quality of service, or security policy over the most appropriate WAN link.

Airtel customers can now extend additional protections via Cisco’s SASE offering, which includes zero-trust network access, cloud access security broker, secure web gateway, and cloud-based firewall functions.

The new offering is the latest in a long relationship between Cisco and Airtel. In 2018, the companies teamed up to optimize customer experiences using predictive analytics to detect and respond to network degradation.

Meanwhile, Cisco has been influential in Airtel’s 5G push. In 2019, Airtel deployed Cisco’s IP routing portfolio in support of its 5G rollout. And early last year, Airtel and Cisco partnered to launch an automated Ethernet over fiber network to improve availability and extend services to rural communities.

NourNet adds Cisco SD-WAN, SASE
The announcement comes less than a month after Saudi Arabia-based managed service provider NourNet extended support for Cisco’s SD-WAN and SASE platforms.

As enterprises continue to adopt software-as-a-service applications and shift on-premise workloads to the cloud, SD-WAN and SASE are increasingly in demand, the company claims.

NourNet’s enterprise customers can now deploy Cisco’s Viptela platform on Cisco Catalyst integrated service and aggregated service router families. Meanwhile, for smaller branch communications the service provider also offerings Cisco’s Meraki SD-branch platform, which offers SD-WAN.

“For businesses to achieve a successful digital transformation, they need to have optimized cloud connectivity, visibility in their networks, and robust security,” Nournet CEO Amjad A. Hafez said in a statement. SDxCentral