Cisco and Google are deepening their partnership between Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Cisco SD-WAN. The two companies announced that they are now integrating vManage, which is Cisco’s SD-WAN management platform, with Google Cloud’s Connectivity Center, making it possible for enterprises to use GCP’s backbone network and have a unified user interface for workflow as well as automated backend processes.
In a blog post, Cisco’s JL Valente, VP of product management for Cisco enterprise routing, SD-WAN and cloud networking, said that new integration will give global enterprises the ability to connect their various sites together using GCP’s backbone network coupled with a unified cloud-scale SD-WAN fabric that can then be managed using vManage.
Valente said that not only does this give enterprises a simplified network design, it also allows them to use the same set of infrastructure for both the workloads and the site-to-site connectivity.
Related: Cisco and Google partner on SD-WAN application integration across clouds
Google also announced that its Network Connectivity Center, which is currently in preview, will provide a single connectivity model giving enterprises the ability to provision and manage VPNs, interconnects and SD-WANs with a single dashboard. In addition, the Network Connectivity Center unlocks VPN-based cloud connectivity directly and allows enterprises to consume resources spanning multiple clouds.
Google said its Network Connectivity Center can be configured to work other hardware and software platforms, but by using Cisco SD-WAN, enterprises will get automated provisioning of site-to-cloud connectivity as well as better reliability and performance.
This latest announcement builds on a solution that Google and Cisco announced last April, which extended the SD-WAN overlay from campus and branch locations into Google Cloud and also extended security, encryption and more.