Cisco and Google Cloud partner to create new hybrid cloud solution

Cisco and Google Cloud today announced a partnership to deliver a hybrid cloud solution.

The companies assert this will enable them to provide a unique and open hybrid cloud that enables applications and services to be deployed, managed and secured across on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform.

The two tech giants will be working together to provide a solution that delivers cloud speed and scale with enterprise-class security.

"Our partnership with Google gives our customers the very best cloud has to offer— agility and scale, coupled with enterprise-class security and support," says Chuck Robbins, chief executive officer at Cisco.

"We share a common vision of a hybrid cloud world that delivers the speed of innovation in an open and secure environment to bring the right solutions to our customers.

The offering provides enterprises with a way to run, secure and monitor workloads, thereby enabling them to optimise their existing investments, plan their cloud migration at their own pace and avoid vendor lock in.

This means companies are now in a position to develop new applications in the cloud or on premises, consistently using the same developer tools, run time and production environment.

CEO of Google Cloud, Diane Greene says the partnership will help developers to leverage managed Kubernetes, GCP Service Catalog, Cisco networking and security, and Istio authentication and service mesh monitoring. 


"This joint solution from Google and Cisco facilitates an easy and incremental approach to tapping the benefits of the Cloud. This is what we hear customers asking for," says Greene.

Enterprise app developers can securely access cloud APIs, and cloud developers can securely access enterprise APIS and on-premises resources.

Some of the highlights of the Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution include:

• Orchestration and Management– Policy-based Kubernetes orchestration and lifecycle management of resources, applications and services across hybrid environments 

• Networking– Extend network policy and configurations to multiple on-premises and cloud environments 

• Security– Extend Security policy and monitor applications behavior 

• Visibility and Control– Real-time network and application performance monitoring and automation 

• Cloud-ready Infrastructure– Hyperconverged platform supporting existing application and cloud-native Kubernetes environments 

• Service Management with Istio– Open source solution provides a uniform way to connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices
• API Management – Google's Apigee enterprise-class API management enables legacy workloads runnin on premises to connect to the cloud through APIs
• Developer Ready– Cisco's DevNet Developer Center provides tools and resources for 
cloud and enterprise developers to code in hybrid environments 

• Support –Joint coordinated technical support for the solution

The solution is set ot be available to a limited number of customers during the first part of 2018 with general availability planned later in the year.