As with so many partnership announcements, especially in the enterprise space, the companies remained pretty vague as to what exactly their combined solution will look like, but both Cisco and Google told us that the general idea here is to help bring the power of the cloud to their customers’ on-premise environments.

Cisco further went to add that the platform will enable businesses to optimise application stacks by distributing their components to their best locations. For example, an application suite could support a front end running on one public cloud to optimise for cost, an analytics library on another cloud to leverage its AI/ML capabilities, and a financial component running on-prem for optimal security and compliance

Both teams stressed that a multi-cloud solution for enterprises must include support for the security, configuration and policy requirements of enterprises, as well as the ability to get real-time networking and performance data.

What’s maybe more important than this partnership itself, though, is that we’ll clearly see that Cisco and Google Cloud will build a close integration between Cisco SD-WAN solutions and the Google Cloud. Network policies, such as segmentation, will follow network traffic across the boundary between the enterprise network and the Google Cloud.