Cisco announced today that its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) technology has extended its reach into Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure's public clouds.
The announcement, which took place today at Cisco Live in Barcelona, is part of Cisco's "data center anywhere" strategy.
"ACI Anywhere enables automation, security, and intent-based networking to optimize data center operations, protect digital businesses, and accelerate our customers’ expansion into the multicloud," said Ronak Desai, Cisco's vice president of ACI engineering, in a blog post. "Once implemented, ACI Anywhere helps with network connectivity, application segmentation and compliance."
ACI Anywhere puts ACI on any workload and cloud across any location. Cisco's software-only Virtual ACI supports bare metal clouds and remote locations. With Cloud ACI, those capabilities, which include automation, manage and security, are integrated with AWS' and Microsoft Azure's infrastructure-as-a-service environments.
Companies like Cisco, VMware, HPE and IBM are forging partnerships with the hyperscale cloud providers to automate data center workloads in the cloud.
RELATED: VMware kicks off conference with raft of cloud-related announcements
The battle between Cisco's ACI and VMware's NSX has moved to the cloud. VMware announced last summer that it had signed a two-year partnership with AWS that extended their previous relationship.