Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud perfect for multi-cloud solutions

Google is expanding its partnership with Cisco to bring the best of both Cisco and Google Cloud technologies together with a new turnkey networking solution: Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud.

Enterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid and multi-cloud to deliver the best experiences for their customers. The network is at the foundation of this transformation but is getting exponentially more complex to manage, secure and scale throughout an enterprise footprint that can include multiple clouds, SaaS applications, on-prem locations and geographies.

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 centre, another cloud or a SaaS application.

Google Cloud provides industry-leading hybrid and multi-cloud services, robust connectivity and security solutions. Google has developed technologies that give its customers the freedom to develop, deploy and secure applications anywhere including Anthos which simplifies hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. The network that supports services like YouTube, Search, Maps and Gmail is the same infrastructure that provides connectivity to Google Cloud customers and their users. It consists of a system of high-capacity fibre optic cables across the globe and peers with 3,000 internet service providers (ISPs) in 200+ countries and territories for “last mile” delivery. Google’s network is also completely software-defined which allows them to consistently select the best egress point to optimise performance and availability.

Many customers rely on Cisco technologies to build and manage their enterprise networks. Cisco SD-WAN is an industry-leading solution that provides enterprises with a single pane of glass to manage their entire WAN network, optimises and secures connectivity between enterprise footprints and simplifies IT operations by automating routine tasks. By combining the core technology strengths of both Cisco and Google Cloud, you get the best-in-class, cloud-delivered enterprise networking solutions that make network management easy for you and allows you to meet your business needs with agility.

Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud will bring a new set of capabilities to customers to simplify enterprise networking and advance security capabilities while helping IT teams minimise operational costs and meet application service-level objectives (SLOs):

• A flexible, on-demand network that allows customers to automatically provision a reliable, global network that grows with enterprises’ business needs. In most cases, customer traffic enters Google’s network directly from their last-mile provider and stays on Google’s network while it traverses the globe. Combining Cisco’s advanced SD-WAN capabilities with Google’s software-defined backbone, customers get an end-to-end network that not only optimises connectivity between branches, stores and to the cloud but also provides telemetry for troubleshooting and diagnostic purposes. 

• Automated application and path-aware routing take the complexity out of mapping business services to the appropriate network. The Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud solution allows customers to publish all of their services in a single place with the ability to define the intent of how the network should treat those services in an automated fashion, reducing time to onboard new services on to the network. With a combined view of network telemetry, this solution also provides the most optimised path to interconnect Anthos-based services hosted in hybrid/multi-cloud environments. 

• Stronger, smarter security thanks to Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud’s end-to-end security which seamlessly integrates network control and available application-layer security controls based on workload and user identities. With this rich set of controls, customers get security at multiple layers, resulting in stronger protection for their applications.

Cisco and Google Cloud intend to invite select customers to participate in previews of this solution by the end of 2020. General availability is planned for the first half of 2021.