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Cisco and Google Partner on New Hybrid Cloud Solution

Cisco and Google Cloud announced a partnership to deliver a hybrid cloud solution that helps customers maximize their investments across cloud and on-premises environments.

The companies will provide a unique and open hybrid cloud offering that enables applications and services to be deployed, managed and secured across on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform. The solution delivers cloud speed and scale, with enterprise-class security.

The offering provides enterprises with a way to run, secure and monitor workloads, thus enabling them to optimize their existing investments, plan their cloud migration at their own pace and avoid vendor lock in. Companies can now develop new applications in the cloud or on premises, consistently using the same developer tools, run time, and production environment.

The joint Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution helps developers leverage managed Kubernetes, GCP Service Catalog, Cisco networking and security, and Istio authentication and service mesh monitoring. Enterprise app developers can securely access cloud APIs, and cloud developers can securely access enterprise APIs and on-premises resources

Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution highlights:

- Orchestration and Management – Policy-based Kubernetes orchestration and lifecycle management of resources, applications and services across hybrid environments

- Networking – Extend network policy and configurations to multiple on-premises and cloud environments

- Security – Extend Security policy and monitor applications behavior

- Visibility and Control – Real-time network and application performance monitoring and automation

- Cloud-ready Infrastructure – Hyperconverged platform supporting existing application and cloud-native Kubernetes environments

- Service Management with Istio – Open-source solution provides a uniform way to connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices

- API Management – Google's Apigee enterprise-class API management enables legacy workloads running on premises to connect to the cloud through APIs

- Developer Ready – Cisco's DevNet Developer Center provides tools and resources for cloud and enterprise developers to code in hybrid environments

- Support – Joint coordinated technical support for the solution

The solution will be available to a limited number of customers during the first part of 2018, with planned general availability later in the year.

In support of this partnership, DevNet – Cisco's Developer Network – offers a set of tools for enterprise and IoT developers to explore open source technologies, build hybrid cloud solutions, and further develop IoT opportunities. The Cisco DevNet Sandbox provides instant access to hardware and software developer environments at no cost to help developers quickly explore and create solutions. Developers can get started with Kubernetes and container networking using Contiv in the Sandbox, or take a DevNet learning track on cloud-native development or edge computing to get started today. In addition, developers using Google Cloud have access to a wealth of information, tools, and documentation from the innovator in container management and Kubernetes.

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Cisco and Google Partner on New Hybrid Cloud Solution

Cisco and Google Cloud announced a partnership to deliver a hybrid cloud solution that helps customers maximize their investments across cloud and on-premises environments.

The companies will provide a unique and open hybrid cloud offering that enables applications and services to be deployed, managed and secured across on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform. The solution delivers cloud speed and scale, with enterprise-class security.

The offering provides enterprises with a way to run, secure and monitor workloads, thus enabling them to optimize their existing investments, plan their cloud migration at their own pace and avoid vendor lock in. Companies can now develop new applications in the cloud or on premises, consistently using the same developer tools, run time, and production environment.

The joint Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution helps developers leverage managed Kubernetes, GCP Service Catalog, Cisco networking and security, and Istio authentication and service mesh monitoring. Enterprise app developers can securely access cloud APIs, and cloud developers can securely access enterprise APIs and on-premises resources

Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution highlights:

- Orchestration and Management – Policy-based Kubernetes orchestration and lifecycle management of resources, applications and services across hybrid environments

- Networking – Extend network policy and configurations to multiple on-premises and cloud environments

- Security – Extend Security policy and monitor applications behavior

- Visibility and Control – Real-time network and application performance monitoring and automation

- Cloud-ready Infrastructure – Hyperconverged platform supporting existing application and cloud-native Kubernetes environments

- Service Management with Istio – Open-source solution provides a uniform way to connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices

- API Management – Google's Apigee enterprise-class API management enables legacy workloads running on premises to connect to the cloud through APIs

- Developer Ready – Cisco's DevNet Developer Center provides tools and resources for cloud and enterprise developers to code in hybrid environments

- Support – Joint coordinated technical support for the solution

The solution will be available to a limited number of customers during the first part of 2018, with planned general availability later in the year.

In support of this partnership, DevNet – Cisco's Developer Network – offers a set of tools for enterprise and IoT developers to explore open source technologies, build hybrid cloud solutions, and further develop IoT opportunities. The Cisco DevNet Sandbox provides instant access to hardware and software developer environments at no cost to help developers quickly explore and create solutions. Developers can get started with Kubernetes and container networking using Contiv in the Sandbox, or take a DevNet learning track on cloud-native development or edge computing to get started today. In addition, developers using Google Cloud have access to a wealth of information, tools, and documentation from the innovator in container management and Kubernetes.

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In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...