Cisco expands Google Cloud partnership with new SD-WAN cloud hub
Cisco announced Tuesday that it's expanding its partnership with Google Cloud around network connectivity to cloud-based applications. Specifically, the companies will integrate Cisco's software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) with Google Cloud's global network and Anthos, offering joint customers full WAN application integration with cloud workloads.
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For context, Cisco's integrations with Google Cloud go back to 2017, when the companies formed a hybrid cloud partnership aimed at better connecting Cisco's infrastructure with Google's services. Kubernetes, Istio and Apigee served as the glue in the initial Cisco-Google effort.
This latest integration is centered around Google Anthos, a platform launched last year for managing applications on premise or in any cloud environment. By tightly integrating Cisco SD-WAN services with Google Cloud and Anthos, the companies said they can offer a new turnkey, multicloud networking fabric called the Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud.
The service will help enterprise customers simplify enterprise networking and bolster security capabilities, while also helping IT teams minimize operational costs and meet application service-level objectives, the companies said. For instance, the integration will enable cloud applications to dynamically request network resources by publishing application data in the Google Cloud Service Directory. From there, the service communicates the application's metadata and allows the network to provision itself for appropriate SD-WAN policies and access.
"With tighter integrations between Cisco and Google Cloud, this solution 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," said Shailesh Shukla, VP of Products and GM of Networking for Google Cloud, in a blog post.
"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," Shukla added.
Cisco and Google Cloud will invite select customers to preview the solution by the end of 2020. General availability is planned for the first half of 2021.