Cisco Systems and Google Cloud aim to address the challenge of SD-WAN and cloud complexity with a new joint product, Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud. This comes as more enterprises adopt hybrid and multicloud platforms.

Networking is more intricate with hybrid and multiclouds. That reality is even more apparent as enterprises rush to support their workers from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud won’t be available until next year. But there is good news for channel partners, who will play a key role in distribution and deployment. They can launch and support customers’ coronavirus-fueled SD-WAN and cloud deployments now with the capability in mind.

Thus, it’s important to understand what Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud offers and accomplishes.

Google Cloud’s Shailesh Shukla

Shailesh Shukla, vice president, products, and general manager, networking, Google Cloud, explained the upcoming platform in a recent blog.

“This solution will bring an end-to-end network that adapts to application needs,” Shukla wrote. “And that enables secure and on-demand connectivity from a customer’s branch, to the edge of the cloud, through Google Cloud’s backbone, and to applications running in Google Cloud, a private data center, another cloud or a SaaS application.”

This is critical because managing, securing and scaling the network gets more difficult when accounting for multiple clouds, Shukla explained. The same goes for SaaS applications, on-premises locations and geographies. The combined Cisco SD-WAN and Google Cloud capabilities will “simplify enterprise networking and advance security capabilities, while helping IT teams minimize operational costs and meet application service-level objectives,” he said.

Google says most organizations’ traffic enters its network from last-mile providers, staying on the Google network while traversing the globe. By combining Cisco’s SD-WAN with Google’s software-defined backbone, then, “customers get an end-to-end network that not only optimizes connectivity [among] branches, stores and to the cloud, but also provides telemetry for troubleshooting and diagnostic purposes,” Shukla wrote.

The joint product also “provides the most optimized path to interconnect Anthos-based services hosted in hybrid/multicloud environments,” he said. And it ensures security at multiple layers, he added.

On the Cisco side, specifically, the SD-WAN Cloud Hub will handle the automation, security, observability and application experience among enterprise users and the cloud, whether hybrid or multicloud. Cloud Hub allows IT teams or partners to extend intent and policy to enterprise applications running natively in Google Cloud.

Multiple Channel Opportunities

Jason Gallo is senior director of enterprise networking within Cisco’s global partner organization. He told Channel Partners this arm of the Cisco-Google Cloud partnership invites numerous opportunities for the channel. Managed service providers, VARs and other partners specializing in networking and cloud will reach new buying centers, such as cloud, application and network managers, and seal larger deals, he said. Further, Gallo said, partners will “drive recurring revenue through SD-WAN subscription growth and software utilization.”

In addition, the joint platform and services will feature automation and prebuilt integrations; as a result, partners will be able to get installations done faster, Gallo said.

Cisco’s Jason Gallo

“As businesses grapple with a more remote workforce and as customers require more secure and scalable connectivity to multiple clouds, partners will serve a key role in helping implement solutions like the Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud,” Gallo said. (Google Cloud would only tell Channel Futures that its partners may resell the new platform.)

Due to COVID-19, partners are experiencing higher demand for fast, simple, secure networking that supports staff working from home. SD-WAN and cloud are proving critical to these deployments, according to Nemertes Research. And while Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud won’t launch until early 2021, the business impact of the coronavirus looks like it will remain high. As of March 30, Nemertes Research gauged 17% of WAN traffic as what it calls “outside-outside”; in other words, connecting a source outside the enterprise proper to another outside resource.

“The current tsunami of work-from-home will swell that volume enormously,” John Burke, CIO and principal research analyst at Nemertes, wrote in a blog.

It’s likely many enterprises will maintain a remote workforce into the foreseeable future. That’s a situation that will sustain demand for tools that facilitate easy network and cloud management — and holistic visibility.

Cisco and Google Cloud have collaborated since 2017.