Cisco and Google have deepened their relationship with a turnkey package that lets customers mesh SD-WAN connectivity with applications running in a private data center, Google Cloud or another cloud or SaaS application.
The jointly developed platform, called Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud, combines Cisco’s SD-WAN policy-, telemetry- and security-setting capabilities with Google’s software-defined backbone to ensure that application service-level agreement, security and compliance policies are extended across the network.
“For customers looking to support multiple clouds while preserving on-prem data centers, this is how they can effectively connect all their sites,” said Sachin Gupta, senior vice president of product management with Cisco’s Intent Based Networking Group. “The integration will extend into hybrid and multi-cloud environments, like Anthos, Google Cloud’s open application platform, supporting the optimization of distributed, multicloud microservice-based applications,” he said.
The Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud enables a number of capabilities. For example, applications typically do not have a way to dynamically signal SLA requests to the underlying network, Gupta wrote in a blog detailing the integration. “With this new integration, applications will be able to dynamically request the required network resources by publishing application data in Google Cloud Service Directory. The network will be able to use this data to provision itself for the appropriate SD-WAN policies.”
A business-critical application that needs low-latency would have that requirement in its Google Cloud Service Directory entry. The appropriate SD-WAN policies would then be applied on the network. Likewise, as Cisco’s SD-WAN controller, vManage, monitors network performance and service health metrics, it could intelligently direct user requests to the most optimal cloud service nodes, Gupta stated.
The platform also has the ability to divert traffic automatically to more highly available or better performing links should latency-sensitive applications require it. With network reachability metrics from Cisco SD-WAN, Google Anthos can make real-time decisions to divert traffic to regions with better network reachability, Gupta stated.
With Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub for Google cloud, customers can extend the single point of orchestration and management for their SD-WAN network to include the underlay offered by Google Cloud backbone. Using Cisco Cloud Hub, policies can be extended into the cloud to authorize access to cloud applications based on user identity, Gupta stated.
“We think this platform offers a simple and consistent way for IT to handle complex applications running on-premises or
