Cisco and Google Cloud forge hybrid cloud partnership

The partnership with Google gives Cisco customers agility and scale, coupled with enhanced security and support, says Cisco's Robbins.

Cisco and Google Cloud have announced a new partnership to help customers deploy more efficient hybrid cloud solution.

The hybrid cloud offering enables applications and services to be deployed, managed and secured across on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform.

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

“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,” said Diane Greene, CEO, Google Cloud.

The joint Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution helps developers leverage managed Kubernetes, GCP Service Catalog, Cisco networking and security, and Istio authentication and service mesh monitoring. Enterprise app developers can securely access cloud APIs, and cloud developers can securely access enterprise APIs and on-premises resources.

Some key highlights of the Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution include, policy-based Kubernetes orchestration and lifecycle management of resources, applications and services across hybrid environments; network policy and configurations extended to multiple on-premises and cloud environments as well as extending security policies and more efficient monitoring of applications behaviour.

Additionally, the joint solution comes with more visibility and control, i.e. real-time network and application performance monitoring and automation while delivering cloud-ready hyperconverged platform supporting existing application and cloud-native Kubernetes environments.

Customers will also benefit from joint coordinated technical support for the solution.

In support of this partnership, DevNet – Cisco's Developer Network – offers a set of tools for enterprise and IoT developers to explore open source technologies, build hybrid cloud solutions, and further develop IoT opportunities. The Cisco DevNet Sandbox provides instant access to hardware and software developer environments at no cost to help developers quickly explore and create solutions. Developers can get started with Kubernetes and container networking using Contrive in the Sandbox, or take a DevNet learning track on cloud-native development or edge computing to get started

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