Cisco and Google announced on Tuesday the release of its industry-first SD-WAN cloud hub. The application-focused multicloud networking fabric will guarantee applications and networks have shared service-level agreement settings, compliance, and security coverage, as well as provide reliable application performance and optimized user experience. 

SEE: Google Cloud Platform: An insider’s guide (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

“It’s clear that enterprise customers are consuming applications in multiple clouds. They are doing it from multiple SaaS providers as well as continuing to run applications on-prem,” said Sachin Gupta, senior vice president of product management in Cisco’s intent-based networking group.

“It’s truly a hybrid multicloud world. And in this environment, what they’re looking for is the policy, the control, the security that they have when they do things on premise. They’re looking to combine that with the agility and the scale that they can get through the cloud,” Gupta said.  

The initial response for connecting users to applications was software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), Gupta noted. 

“With SD-WAN, the first use cases were about connecting sites to other sites, maybe your own data center. And doing that more efficiently in a more cost effective way,” Gupta said. “But more and more [companies have] looked to, ‘How do I incorporate connectivity, security, application experience with application workloads that are inside the cloud?'” 

This is where the Cisco SD-WAN cloud hub with Google Cloud comes into play.

What the SD-WAN cloud hub does 

“Customers and IT can now take that secure SD-WAN fabric–that connectivity fabric–and extend it all the way into Google Cloud,” Gupta said. “Now the cloud site looks like something that’s on-premise for me and I have the same policy and control capabilities.”

Google’s significant market presence and backbone allows enterprise users to easily leverage its services to scale up or down depending on demand, Gupta added. 

The last element is security. The access control that is enabled on-premise is brought to applications in the cloud with this service, he said. The end-to-end security on the platform integrates network control and application-layer security controls based on the user’s identity and workload, according to a Cisco press release.

The SD-WAN cloud hub also features automated application and path-aware routing. 

“One key aspect of this is the API integration we have with Google Service Directory. Think of Google Service Directory as a universal directory for all your application environment inside Google Cloud. Or, if you’re using some of the Google technology on-prem, it’s a directory mapping of all of your applications and what their needs are,” Gupta said. 

“By integrating with what the application needs are and what the application experience is at a particular time, we can share data bi-directionally,” Gupta noted. “For example, if Google Cloud tells us through their service directory that there’s something not happening correctly, or there’s more load in this particular portion of their cloud, and the Cisco solution can dynamically redirect the traffic to another portion of Google Cloud, or another instance of the application.” 

Enterprise professionals are looking to the cloud to scale quickly and effectively more than ever. Cisco and Google’s collaboration aims to provide a flexible option, while maintaining security, Gupta 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.

For more, check out 3 things to consider before making the leap to SD-WAN on TechRepublic. 

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