Google Cloud can tie together enterprise multicloud resources

Google Cloud has announced services for enterprises to more easily and securely connect distributed multicloud resources.

The chief service, Cross-Cloud Interconnect, provides dedicated high-speed connections between the Google network and customer networks hosted in other clouds—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or Alibaba.

“Cross-Cloud Interconnect lets organizations connect to any public cloud through a highly secure, dedicated-bandwidth network that has a much lower latency than going through an internet-based VPN solution,” said Muninder Sambi, vice president and general manager of networking for Google Cloud. “With the new service, customers can run their applications on multiple clouds, they can host SaaS applications that are multicloud, and they can also migrate workloads from one cloud to another.”

Enterprises are distributing workloads on-premises and in a variety of public clouds, but connecting, networking and managing these environments can be challenging, Sambi said, citing a recent IDC survey that found that 64% of enterprises use multiple cloud providers, but of those, few have interconnected provisioning, management, and monitoring tools.

With Cross-Cloud, customers choose 10Gbps or 100Gbps dedicated, encrypted links to connect Google virtual private cloud (VPC), other VPCs or virtual networks in different clouds, Sambi said. The service supports other security options such as IPsec VPN or MACsec if the customer wants that, he said.  

The service is potentially interesting to large enterprises looking to build seamless multicloud networks to interconnect SaaS and other workloads hosted on Google Cloud Platform with clients from on-prem or other cloud platforms, said Vijay Bhagavath, research vice president with IDC’s Cloud and Datacenter Networks group.

“Google Cloud has been steadily building traction in the multicloud space with enterprise customers, starting with Anthos, and now introducing the Cross-Cloud Interconnect offering for enabling enterprise IT to implement multicloud networks cost-efficiently for core business applications such as SaaS, with no requirements for on-premises hardware or software appliances,” Bhagavath said.

Cross-Cloud Interconnect is available now.

Private Service Connect upgrades

Google is also adding a new features to its Private Service Connect (PSC) offering that ties together groups, projects, and other organizations over encrypted links. PSC includes Layer 7-based security, routing, and telemetry to ensure consistent policy control across the service.

PSC is “a capability of Google Cloud networking that allows consumers to access managed services privately from inside their VPC network,” according to Google.

With PSC, customer-network traffic traverses only Google’s backbone network and isn’t exposed to the public internet, Sambi said. Customers connect to Google Cloud using PSC endpoints with private IP addresses on Google VPC networks.

A new PSC feature, Service Connection Policies, enables network admins to create policies that automate the connectivity of PSC for managed services. Available later this year, the feature can be used to update and delete published services connected by PSC without opening networking tickets, Sambi said.

In addition to Google services such as Apigee, BeyondCorp Enterprise, Cloud Composer, and Google Kubernetes Engine, PSC supports partner services such as Datastax, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and others, Sambi said.