Cisco held its Future Cloud event today to launch a suite of solutions to enable hybrid cloud environments. This was an important launch for Cisco, as it marks a departure from individual product announcements and delivers a more comprehensive solution that leverages the breadth and depth of the Cisco portfolio to connect, secure, and automate cloud migrations.
The launch focused on:
- Extending observability and automation.
- Accelerating hybrid cloud operations.
This is a very timely launch for Cisco, as ESG research reveals that organizations are accelerating their digital transformation efforts, which is driving more workloads and applications to the cloud. However, it is important to note that the vast majority of organizations (78%) still have 40% of their applications and workloads in the public cloud.
What does this mean? Well, it means that hybrid cloud environments will be prevalent for a long time. Organizations need solutions that will enable them to migrate or distribute their applications and workloads across private data centers, multiple public clouds, and edge locations. Any solutions that remove the complexity inherent in these environments and deliver the appropriate levels of visibility, automation, and operational efficiency should be well received.
Cisco’s Future Cloud launch taps into a number of tightly integrated solutions across the Cisco portfolio to ensure organizations can accelerate operations in these highly distributed environments.
The launch features solutions to drive automation with Cisco Intersight, modern compute environments for hybrid cloud with the UCS-X, and observability with ThousandEyes. For this blog, I will be focused on the ThousandEyes news.
Observe More
Cisco’s acquisition of ThousandEyes provided it with key visibility into the internet, which in highly distributed environments is essentially the new corporate network. Since the acquisition, Cisco has been busy integrating ThousandEyes into its existing products to deliver full end-to-end visibility. Cisco has already announced its integration with Catalyst 9000 series switches and AppDynamics.
At Future Cloud, Cisco announced ThousandEyes would now be integrated with its SD-WAN solution on Catalyst 8200 and 8300 series edge platforms and Cisco 4000 series Integrated Service Routers. The integration will provide hop-by-hop network details required to accelerate the ability to troubleshoot and remediate the problem. Plus, AppDynamics integration provides additional application context to determine prioritization. To round things out, ThousandEyes will also integrate with the Nexus 9000 series (Nexus 9500 and 9300 series) to provide visibility into the data center as well.
These integrations now give users granular visibility into any applications traversing the data center, campus, or branch over the internet and in cloud environments. Armed with these insights, organizations will be able rapidly identify problems in their highly distributed environment and focus on ensuring optimized experiences for all applications.
If you want to learn more about the other areas of the launch, check out a related post by my colleague, Paul Nashawaty, covering Cisco UCS- X series and Intersight.
