Cisco, Google Buddy Up For Hybrid Cloud Push

Cisco and Google have announced a partnership that will see the two tech giants offering customers a new hybrid cloud solution.

This solution will allow customer apps to be located within on-premise environments, but it can also be expanded out onto the Google Cloud Platform.

Essentially, the partnership will combine Google’s expertise in building data centres and open source software, along with Cisco’s salesforce, customer support and security offerings.

Hybrid Solution

The two said that the new solution “delivers cloud speed and scale, with enterprise-class security.”

The partnership also extends Cisco’s multicloud portfolio and Google Cloud’s hybrid cloud technologies (including Kubernetes, Istio and Apigee).

Cisco and Google said that the new offering is aimed at giving businesses a new way to run, secure and monitor workloads. This will allow firms to optimise their existing investments, plan their cloud migration at their own pace and avoid vendor lock in.

This is because companies can now develop new applications in the cloud or on premises, using the same developer tools, run time, and production environment.

“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 Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. “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 at Google Cloud.

The joint hybrid solution means that developers can utilise “managed Kubernetes, GCP Service Catalog, Cisco networking and security, and Istio authentication and service mesh monitoring,” the two firms said. “Enterprise app developers can securely access cloud APIs, and cloud developers can securely access enterprise APIs and on-premises resources.”

Release of the new solution will start slow, with only a limited number of customers being able to receive it during the first part of 2018.

General availability is planned for later in the year (2018).

Google Cloud

Google’s cloud platform of course in locked in a three way battle between Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

The search engine giant is currently trailing its cloud rivals, but is working hard with others to expand its offerings.

Earlier this month Rolls-Royce said it would use Google’s machine learning technology to train intelligent, cloud-based systems for recognising and tracking objects at sea.

And Google come up with a way for customers of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to save money by using the public internet instead of its own private network.

The so called Network Service Tiers allows GCP customers to essentially choose between a ‘Premium Tier’ that utilises Google’s global network for those where performance and quality of service are paramount; or a ‘Standard Tier’ for the budget conscious.

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