What Happens when you Fuse the Technology Visions of Two Global Titans: the Cisco SD-WAN and Google Cloud Concept is Born

Cisco published a blog on its newly-expanded partnership with Google. The companies intend to integrate Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub and Google Cloud. 

Analyst Quick-take: 

• This announcement promises to have a major impact on the SD-WAN and cloud services market segment, because both Cisco and Google each have massive market traction globally, and are very influential in enterprise WAN connectivity and cloud.
• The partnership between Cisco and Google is going to produce positive benefits to the enterprise for addressing IT and network operations bridging the divide between WANs and clouds. ​Network operational overhead will be reduced and IT managers will get better control over meeting application Service Level Objectives (SLOs). 
• Whilst SD-WAN benefits enterprise connectivity across multiple areas, the growing adoption of cloud and SaaS (indeed 'XaaS') can cause new complexities and challenges, such as security and management control of apps across public and private clouds, and on the public Internet. Adding emerging enterprise requirements for mobility, edge compute resources, and IoT, can compound these issues. Cisco and Google are responding to this with a plausible joint-approach that takes advantage of each partner's unique market position and technology strengths.

The partners have stated that the Cisco SD-WAN and Google Cloud is scheduled for launch during H1 2021. 

What does Google bring to the table?

• A software-defined global fiber optic cable network that is augmented to last mile connectivity via interconnects with 3,000 ISP peering partners in more than 200 countries and territories. 
• A Google network fabric that supports YouTube, Search, Maps and Gmail, and more, is the same infrastructure that provides connectivity to Google Cloud customers and their users. 
• Google Anthos developers can develop cloud-native apps on containers that can then be deployed with smooth IT operational efficiency across Cisco SD-WAN and Google Cloud environment.

What does Cisco bring to the table?

• Cisco SD-WAN offers single pane of glass for network management, plus flexibility for WAN optimization and applying various layers of network and cloud security. 
• Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub will enable customers to extend intent and policy to enterprise applications running natively in Google Cloud.