The Critical Role of Google and Cisco to Cloud Computing

Cisco has partnered with the search giant, Google for the creation of a flexible cloud system that rivals Amazon and other key players in the cloud provider market. Cisco has revealed the plan during their Cisco Live 2018 conference. Mr. Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s CEO emphasized the partnership that will build on the fundamentals of mobility and distributed computing. Both Cisco and Google are concentrating on the rise of IOT devices as the strong base of the future of networking, evolving connectivity through multi-platform diversity.

Robbins said: “The network that we build, we will have to think about fundamentally differently.” Cisco for many months under the direction of Robbins is evolving from a networking hardware vendor to a capable software company. They target to grow their revenues beyond their hardware space, now through launching services including the partnership with Google.

Cisco wants to establish a new standard in networking by promoting intelligent network devices that do transparent connections regardless if through traditional private networks or various public cloud infrastructure. Robbins promised the platform shall be security-centric and welcomes developers to adapt it future modern web-applications.

Diane Green, the Google Cloud CEO vaguely hinted last October 2017 the launching of the said partnership. Focusing on a useful contribution from both companies in launching a complex, yet comprehensive cloud-service that fits businesses of all sizes. Easy migration to and from other cloud providers is defined by both companies as critical in their infrastructure. “You want to use this disruptive technology, but you need to move [to it] in a non-disruptive way,” Green added.

Both executives promised a strong union of Google Kubernetes Engine and Cisco Container Platform at the heart of their new cloud platform. This shall enable firms to address growing computing requirement through utilization of application microservices. Cisco has been experimenting with the integration of the Google back-end (Kubernetes), as they announced last May the launching of AppDynamics and CloudCenter. This expands Cisco’s potential to use container technology.

Robbins had a vision for Cisco, as just last year he insisted that the company was strongly focused on growing the Network Intuitive campaign. This initiative has the goal of a more automatic network maintenance, that eases the complexity for network administrators. This includes network capabilities like auto-configuration, auto-detection, and background network policy matching. The same goal has been evolved with their partnership with Google, with less moving parts that can lessen the deployment complexity for businesses that will choose to adapt it.

Cisco’s competitors, Juniper Networks, and Huawei Technologies are pushing for different technologies that mirror the goals of the partnership. While smaller market players like Veriflow Systems and Apstra are looking forward to maintaining their share and growth as the new technology develops. On Cisco’s part, as Robbins added more information during the Q&A portion after his speech: the company wants network administrators to stop worrying about the networks day-to-day runtime, everything in it should be transparently working as intended.

Hardware is still a big business of Cisco, as they earned a lot last year with them able to sell 5,300 Catalysts model 9000 switches. They plan to make it the very foundation of the Google-partnered cloud network. “It really is reflective of the fact that our customers’ environments have gotten even more complex than they were a few years ago when there was this thought of moving to the public cloud for the sake of simplicity,” he assured listeners.

Sussie Wee, the company’s VP, and CTO of DevNet group assured listeners that the platform is powered by 500,000 developers, making it one of the biggest development platform. While David Goecker, Cisco’s EVP and General Manager for the Networking and Security portfolio interjected that encrypted traffic analytics shall have a central role in monitoring the platform. This includes detection of exploits, malware and other aspects of security.

“They really are now dealing with a massive amount of SaaS [software-as-a-service] providers, multiple clouds that they’re consuming services from. They’re dealing with multiple devices, the IoT explosion that they’re dealing with at the edge, and private data centers have continued to grow during that period. The reality is that the network has a very strategic role to play in this new world,” Robbins concluded.