Cisco enables ‘highly secure’ Cloud experiences

The new products and services in Cisco's extended cloud portfolio will include:
· Cisco InterCloud
· Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Cisco/Red Hat integrated Cloud Management and Provisioning
· Cisco Services for Cloud Strategy, Management, and Operations
· Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) 4.0

“Cisco introduced the concept of the ‘World of Many Clouds’ two years ago, and since then, we and our partners have been enabling an ever-expanding world of highly secure clouds, helping organizations shape their own unique cloud journeys,” said Robert Lloyd, Cisco president of development and sales. “Now, as brokers of IT services, organizations can add value by dynamically combining, integrating, and tailoring the delivery of cloud services – whether public, private, or hybrid – to best meet their business needs. Today marks a key step in the evolution of cloud computing – cloud workload portability will deliver immense benefits to cloud providers and cloud customers, paving the way toward an open and highly secure cloud ecosystem that delivers greater levels of agility, transparency, and speed of deployment.”

Cisco InterCloud
Cisco InterCloud, part of the Cisco One platform, is infrastructure software that will support hybrid clouds by allowing organizations to combine and move workloads – including data and applications – across different public or private clouds as needed, easily and very securely, while maintaining associated network and security policies.

By deploying Cisco InterCloud, enterprises and cloud providers will be able to create an interoperable and highly secure hybrid cloud environment across multiple public and private clouds and between premises-based applications and public clouds while maintaining associated network and security policies. On-demand flexibility and workload portability will allow organizations to cost-effectively select their optimal cloud strategy.
Cisco continues to embrace an open, standards-based approach that offers cloud users and providers the opportunity to utilize a robust ecosystem of industry-leading technologies and avoid being locked into a single vendor or platform. An extension of Cisco’s commitment to openness, Cisco InterCloud is expected to be able to move workloads to and from participating cloud providers with Cisco Powered services, such as BT, CSC/ServiceMesh, CenturyLink Technology Solutions, and Virtustream. The adoption of Cisco InterCloud by other cloud providers through the InterCloud Provider Enablement Platform will give users even more choice and flexibility. In addition, Cisco InterCloud has been designed to move workloads to and from multiple public clouds, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Azure.

Cisco InterCloud will provide workload mobility and is intended to integrate with cloud management solutions such as Cisco IAC, as well as CSC/ServiceMesh's Agility Platform, Red Hat CloudForms, and other products from Cisco's ecosystem partners.

Other leading technology partners supporting Cisco InterCloud include EMC, Citrix, Denali Advanced Integration, Microsoft, NetApp, Rackspace, VCE and Zerto.

“Our customers rely on the BT Cloud Compute portfolio of services to design and operate cloud solutions that are tailored to meet their needs,” said Neil Sutton, vice president, Portfolio at BT Global Services. “BT welcomes Cisco's InterCloud announcement as it aligns to our vision. The open standards approach of this new solution makes it even easier for our customers to reap the benefits of hybrid cloud solutions and migrate traditional IT workloads to the cloud. Cisco’s support for the Citrix Cloud platform builds on our long-standing partnership with Cisco, Citrix and NetApp. This collaboration continues to open new opportunities to bring innovative cloud services to meet the business needs of our customers.”

"Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision encompasses on-premises data centers, Windows Azure, hosted services, and hybrid implementations, and we recognize that heterogeneous environments are a reality in today’s IT,” said Brad Anderson, corporate vice president, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft. “Our close work with Cisco on InterCloud exemplifies how our two companies can deliver interoperable public, private and hybrid clouds based on leading platforms and management portfolios, including Windows Server, System Center, and Windows Azure. InterCloud will help customers quickly and easily move applications and services to Windows Azure.”

Part of the Cisco ONE technology solution, Cisco InterCloud will be integrated into higher-level management frameworks, such as Cisco IAC or other leading cloud management solutions provided by Cisco's partner ecosystem.

Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for Cisco/Red Hat integrated Cloud Management and Provisioning
Cisco and Red Hat are working together on several key initiatives to extend OpenStack and enable open, interoperable cloud environments. These include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings designed to allow customers to manage both legacy and web-scale cloud environments. For example, the companies are integrating Cisco Prime™ network management and the Cisco IAC Service Catalog with the Red Hat OpenShift platform to provide dynamic scaling, tenant-level security, and integrated management and provisioning.

New Cisco Services
Cisco Services for Cloud Strategy, Management, and Operations provide organizations with business flexibility and agility designed around an open and highly secure infrastructure. This is based on three critical success factors for evolving an organization’s cloud strategy: a choice in consumption models, reduced exposure to risks, and the ability to intelligently help secure and automate a cloud environment.

New portfolio capabilities include Cisco Cloud Consumption Services, to help unlock the benefits and manage the risks of hidden cloud usage; Cisco Domain Ten 2.0 framework for IT transformation, which helps companies to strategically evaluate their business priorities and readiness to develop their cloud strategy/roadmap and make better IT sourcing decisions; and Cisco Services for OpenStack, for open and very secure cloud deployments tailored to unique organizational needs.

Available direct from Cisco or collaboratively with channel partners, Cloud Consumption Services help companies understand current corporate usage and spending on various cloud services (including hidden usage and “shadow IT”). This service also helps companies manage potential business risks associated with multiple cloud providers. Customers gain greater visibility and control of cloud usage across their enterprise, allowing them to better manage cloud costs and security while providing IT a way to open discussions and show increased value to their business stakeholders.

“Cisco Cloud Consumption Services harness network intelligence to analyze cloud usage, risk profile, and cloud spend, which enables us to make informed decisions to better manage our risks and costs, and offer better services to taxpayers,” said Christian Couturier, chief information officer for the Government of New Brunswick, Canada. “This robust new cloud portfolio allows us to start reaping the benefits of our cloud initiative faster. Cisco’s cloud support services are playing a key role in guiding our staff in assessing opportunities as we execute our unique cloud strategy.”
Cisco Domain Ten Framework 2.0 helps customers drive better strategic decisions related to their cloud sourcing and strategy. By adding Cisco Consulting Services for Cloud to the Framework, it provides for greater focus on business outcomes, provides deeper analysis of hybrid cloud implications; and extends the framework beyond data center and cloud to include all IT transformation initiatives.

Cisco also offers Cisco Services for OpenStack to help customers understand, strategize, pilot, design, install and/or integrate an OpenStack cloud operating system in their networks. Cisco provides unique insights into what a customer’s cloud requires from its OpenStack platform. These services include: strategy and assessment; validation; design and deployment; software and application platform integration; and optimization.

Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC)
Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 4.0 delivers a comprehensive cloud management solution for enterprises and cloud service providers to deploy private, public, or hybrid clouds. This new software release provides enhanced service catalog features for ordering, provisioning and managing the lifecycle of any type of IT service from a user-friendly, self-service portal. New integration between Cisco IAC and Cisco UCS® Director provides the ability to rapidly provision both virtual and physical infrastructure for cloud deployments on Cisco UCS and Nexus, as well as third-party hardware.
IAC 4.0 also provides new functionality for the automation of virtual network services through the integration with Cisco Prime™ Network Services Controller. And new multi-cloud management capabilities in IAC 4.0 allow customers to orchestrate multiple cloud environments, including Amazon EC2, OpenStack and VMware. Together with InterCloud, Cisco IAC will enable new hybrid cloud management use cases such as advanced application placement, policy driven workload mobility, and consistent service lifecycle governance across many clouds.

“What Cisco offers is the automation and orchestration of cloud, strongly integrated with the network, which is quite complex,” said Mirko Santocono, enterprise VAS product manager, FASTWEB S.p.A., a leading Italian telecommunications operator and cloud provider owned by Swisscom. “Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud offers ready-to-use IaaS services, such as ‘provision a new virtual data center’ that can be customized to fit different business requirements, “It’s also easy to create brand new services when you need them, unlike some other cloud orchestration platforms that are pretty rigid. With the Cisco portal, catalog, and automation tools customers can set up their own virtual data centers in just a few clicks. Delivering cloud over our Cisco platform helps us to stand out, and Cisco's new innovations in cloud management will help accelerate that competitive advantage."