Cisco Puts Intercloud In Higher Gear By Adding AWS, Microsoft Azure Functionality

Cisco Systems Wednesday stepped up its Intercloud offensive with new functionality for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Cisco, which has boasted that its recently launched Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud Bundle is 40 percent cheaper for large workloads than AWS, has now extended its virtual machine on-boarding to support Amazon Virtual Private Cloud as part of its Intercloud strategy, said Nick Earle, senior vice president of global cloud and managed services sales at Cisco, San Jose, Calif.

The AWS functionality enables Intercloud customers to view Amazon workloads directly from Cisco Intercloud and then "seamlessly move workloads" between the AWS cloud and Cisco's Intercloud, Earle told CRN.

[Related: Cisco Partners: OEM Agreement With Nutanix Would Put Pressure On Dell]

"You can see what applications you've got running in Amazon public cloud, then you can do a drag-and-drop if you want that application to run inside your private cloud," he said.

The AWS support comes as the Seattle-based public cloud provider is growing at a breakneck pace. AWS is now a $5.16 billion business that grew 49 percent in its most recent quarter.

Mont Phelps, CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based NWN, No. 70 on the CRN 2015 Solution Provider 500 list and a Cisco Intercloud Partner, said he sees Cisco's support of AWS as a market reality. "Amazon is a player and they will continue to be a player," he said. "We need to embrace it."

Cisco is stepping into the public cloud fray as a market leader providing the heterogeneous network framework to seamlessly move workloads between private and public clouds, said Phelps.

"This is a valuable service," he said. "Many of these public clouds didn't consider the idea of moving data back and forth between private and public. They were all built initially from the ground up to control and manage data as the sole provider. But it's a heterogeneous world."

In a blog post, Earle pointed to the threat posed by Shadow IT -- public cloud deployments such as AWS- not supported by the IT department .

"A year ago it was not unusual for our cloud consumption analysis services to find five to seven times more cloud sites than the CIOs of our clients had authorized (or were aware of) that contained critical company data," wrote Earle in the blog. "Today, just 12 months later, that number is often 15 to 22 times more and growing. On average, our clients are unknowingly using almost 1,000 external cloud services, all of which are storing data and enabling core business processes, especially customer facing ones."

That public cloud proliferation, said Cisco's Earle, is "creating huge, but often invisible, risks for companies. The primary threat is security -- only a small percentage of sites are encrypting data or require stringent access authentication."

To that end, Cisco said it has extended its zone-based firewall services to support Microsoft Azure.

"This is very big as it shows interoperability with non-Cisco networks," said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research. "There's been criticism that Cisco is trying to build a proprietary cloud network, but that's not the case at all. … The Azure news is a good example of this."

In addition, Intercloud Fabric will now support OpenStack KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V. The fabric previously only supported VMware vSphere, according to Earle.

"We are really trying to push any cloud, any [virtual machine], any security control policy -- not just connectivity," said Earle.

Kerravala said Cisco wants Intercloud to include as many cloud partners as possible. He also pointed to Cisco's recent acquisition of OpenStack specialist Piston Cloud Computing as "opening the door to any OpenStack cloud."

"Cisco is trying to deliver a world where cloud services are connected and workloads and data can migrate easily between private and public clouds or between public clouds," said Kerravala. "I'm starting to see a fair amount of interest from customers. … I believe Cisco's [Intercloud] strategy is working."

Earle said there are 120 customers using Intercloud Fabric with around 35 partners providing services available in the market based on the fabric.

PUBLISHED JUNE 10, 2015