Today, Cisco is making a bold statement. Known for best-in-class data center solutions across all industries around the globe, we are announcing that there is nothing centered about data centers anymore. This doesn’t mean data centers are going away; in fact, they are expanding. Now there are no boundaries.

Businesses must deliver service to their customers at unprecedented speed and agility to stay competitive, and applications are at the core. Relying on data that is created everywhere to deliver the best customer experience, disbursed data must often be processed closest to the source – at the edge. That is where value is created and why customers need flexibility across their multicloud environments.

Removing the boundaries of the data center

There are three key drivers impacting data centers today:

• Applications are evolving: Customers need to capture data and deploy applications throughout the extended enterprise – from branch and field locations to the edges of the network and the cloud. With data being created outside the data center, applications must be able to act immediately on data while maintaining consistent policy, with assurance, across the global network in a secure manner. All of this must be delivered to apps and data, extending to wherever these go.
• Workloads continue to be more distributed: From on premises to the edge, remote locations or branches – data centers must compute where the data is for timeliness, locality, volume and scale – no matter the industry.
• Increased demand for multicloud environments by developers: This demand is fueled by economic drivers such as buy- versus-build, or consume-versus-acquire. Having the choice of cloud offerings, like AWS and Microsoft Azure, can increase speed and agility for developers. Business continuity and disaster recovery also lead to the cloud. To ensure data is safe or applications are resilient, customers are using the cloud to augment on-premises data centers.

Cloud has been one of the most significant technology innovations over the past decade. But IT teams have been forced to make a hard choice – stay with their on-premises data centers with a rich set of tools of their choice for automation or assurance or security, or move to the cloud – where a different set of capabilities can make consistent compliance a true challenge.

Let’s not forget geography and locality. Data may be bound by regulatory or geographic constraints, such as data privacy requirements like GDPR. In this case, many customers find cloud the only practical option.

With applications active at all points on the network, the data center can no longer be confined to a specific place. It must act as more of a nerve cluster situated where the data is or where the application is conveniently developed or deployed—anywhere. At the edge, where new data is generated. In the cloud or on-premise, where it’s processed. Wherever it makes the most sense to execute at speed. Ready and able to provide intelligence on the spot. Ready for change. Ready for growth. Ready for whatever the organization needs next.

At Cisco, we are embracing this lack of a “center” by announcing a new architecture for the data center without boundaries. One that delivers security and consistency across the network, with simplicity and management from a single pane of glass, all with a multicloud strategy that starts at home – with your existing data center. Now IT teams don’t have to make that hard choice anymore.

Three major innovations that remove data center boundaries

Today, we announced:

• ACI Anywhere, with new Cloud ACI fully integrated in AWS and Microsoft Azure IaaS environments;
• HyperFlex Anywhere, now delivering hyperconverged infrastructure to remote and branch locations at a global scale; and
• CloudCenter Suite, now available in a SaaS option to simplify and automate multicloud management.

On prem, in the cloud, or at the enterprise edge, Cisco delivers the data center anywhere the data and the applications are.

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