Reaching for the Next Level Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud will be the way many companies, across industries, future-proof business and innovate faster than ever before. I recently shared my thoughts with Information Week about the evolution of customers’ hybrid cloud expectations and the new requirements that are impacting how customers think about their cloud strategy.  They want more choice, consistency, control, and compliance – anywhere. In a hybrid IT world, applications live everywhere, and it will take more than just connecting clouds to be successful.

Our recently announced partnership with Google Cloud is a great example of a major step forward in enabling our customers to address these requirements. If you look at most hybrid cloud solutions today, they look a lot like two clouds with VPN tethered between them. What we are building and what is different is a more integrated system and experience for developers, IT, operations, and security staff. We are enabling customers to extend their management frameworks and tools across on-prem and cloud, and treat those environments as a single system with the right policy or security controls, but without artificial barriers or differences between the environments to make it difficult to build applications that take advantage of these abilities in both of those environments. The Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid cloud offering opens the door for developers to combine emerging Google Cloud services with Cisco on-premises networking, hyper-converged, and security offerings. Together we are working on a complete solution to develop, run, secure and monitor workloads that enable customers to optimize their existing investments, plan their cloud migration at their own pace and avoid lock-in.

More to come. Our goal is to help our customers build cloud strategies based on their unique business needs and cloud providers they work with today. We’re complementing offers from major cloud providers and helping our customers navigate this new world, to bridge across a multicloud environment with critical areas like networking, security, analytics, and management.

If you had a chance to catch my commentary in Information Week, please share your thoughts.

For more information:

Cisco Multicloud Portfolio

Cisco+Google Hybrid Cloud Solution