Google and Cisco team up on hybrid cloud solution offering
Google and Cisco recently announced they are teaming up to provide a hybrid cloud solution that allows applications and services to be launched, managed and secured over on-premise environments and Google Cloud Platform.
The collaboration indicates the companies recognize that although public cloud growth is increasing, several organizations are not yet ready to abandon their legacy infrastructure and private data centers. The hybrid offering shadows Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has teamed up with several vendors to design its Azure public cloud to run in customers’ private data centers.
“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 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.”
What makes the offering unique, according to the companies, is it helps customers deflect vendor lock-in by providing a way to manage and oversee workloads along their journey to the cloud. Companies can create new applications in the cloud or on premises using the same developer tools, run time and production environment.
In particular, the Cisco and Google cloud offering allows developers to leverage open source platforms like Kubernetes and Istio, GCP Service Catalog and service mesh monitoring. App developers are able to access cloud APIs securely, whereas cloud developers are able to access enterprise APIs and on-premise resources securely.
Cisco stands to reap from the partnership be attracting more customers in the foreseeable future with its hybrid cloud offering. Google, on the other hand, is able to tap root into a customer base for Kubernetes and container orchestration tools.
“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.
As with many partnership announcements, details of what the combined solution might look like are ambiguous. The solution will also encompass various components, like hardware, software and cloud services, which can be customized to meet each customers’ needs, whether purchased together or separately. Cisco software components will be licensed on one to five-year terms. Google services can also be purchased on a subscription basis through Google or a GCP reseller. Beta testing starts next year and is expected to be made generally available halfway through 2018.
