Cisco, the worldwide leader in IT and networking, is expanding its partnership with Google Cloud around network connectivity to cloud-powered applications. Specifically, the companies will integrate the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) of Cisco with the global network and Anthos of Google Cloud to provide full WAN application integration with cloud workloads to joint customers.
Interestingly, Cisco’s integrations with Google Cloud go down the memory lane to 2017 when both companies started a hybrid cloud partnership that was aimed at connecting the infrastructure of Cisco with the services of Google. Istio, Kubernetes, and Apigee served as the glue in the initial Google-Cisco effort.
The latest integration is centered around Google Anthos, which is a platform launched last year to manage apps on-premise or in any cloud environment. Google and Cisco said they can provide a new turnkey, multi-cloud networking fabric called the Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud by tightly integrating Cisco SD-WAN services with Google Cloud and Anthos.
The service will assist enterprise customers to simplify enterprise networking and bolster security capabilities. It will also help IT teams meet application service-level objectives and minimize operational costs. For instance, the integration will enable cloud apps to dynamically request network resources by publishing application data in the Google Cloud Service Directory. The service communicates the app’s metadata from there and allows the network to provision itself for appropriate SD-WAN policies and access.
Shailesh Shukla, VP of Products and GM of Networking for Google Cloud, in a blog post said this solution with tighter integrations between Cisco and Google Cloud will bring an end-to-end network that adapts to application needs, and that enables secure and on-demand connectivity from a customer’s branch to the edge of the cloud, through Google Cloud’s backbone, and to applications running in Google Cloud, a private data center, another cloud or a SaaS application.
Shukla added we believe by combining the core technology strengths of both Cisco and Google Cloud, we can provide best-in-class, cloud-delivered enterprise networking solutions that make network management easy for our customers and allow them to meet their business needs with agility.
Google Cloud and Cisco will invite select customers to preview the solution by the end of 2020. General availability is planned for the first half of 2021.