Intercloud Fabric: Simplifying the Hybrid Cloud

So. Much. Data.

Every hour 300,000 new things connect to the Internet. That’s more than 50 million things a week. And by 2020, we estimate that 50 billion things and five billion people will be connected.  These are staggering numbers. And they speak to the rate of change that’s happening in IT and business. Now companies are trying to figure out how to use cloud to navigate the massive amount of data that comes from all these connections.

From private to hybrid

We’ve designed Cisco Intercloud Fabric as a native cloud application that enables businesses to securely extend their private cloud and all its process and policies into the public cloud.  With Intercloud Fabric, our customers have the ability to control this cloud environment through a single pane of glass, moving workloads across and between clouds, all with consistent networking and security policies. We’ve totally simplified the environment between private and public cloud, which allows customers to choose the right cloud for their business requirements, regardless of underlying technologies like hypervisors.

More secure.  More control.  More flexibility. 

Today at Cisco Live, we announced the latest release of Cisco Intercloud Fabric , which has new features to make the hybrid cloud more secure, more controlled, and more flexible. These range from new security features to enable customers to extend enterprise-class security to all their public cloud resources, to support for extending on-premise management tools across the hybrid cloud, to an expanded list of supported hypervisors (adding OpenStack KVM and Microsoft Hyper-V to existing support for VMware vSphere)—all designed to deliver our promise of connecting heterogeneous environments regardless of hypervisor.

Market Momentum

We’re also seeing a lot of exciting traction for Intercloud Fabric with our customers and partners.  Today, 30 Intercloud providers and 100 customers worldwide are using Intercloud Fabric to deliver hybrid cloud capabilities.

• Salvation Army: Take the Salvation Army for example.  We know it as the organization highly successful and adept at helping those in need in over 120 countries. But underlying the assistance they provide, same as any other business, is the need to continually deliver necessary technology to its employees and customers in a rapid and cost-effective manner.  Cisco Intercloud Fabric gives Salvation Army the ability to connect to multiple public clouds, manage those resources easily, and cost-effectively build public cloud environments to develop and test their new technology to help those in need.  But let’s hear the Salvation Army tell its own story.

• Presidio: What’s also great about Cisco Intercloud Fabric is that our partners can add their own unique value-add innovations to improve their customers’ experience.  Our Cloud Builder partner, Presidio, has introduced Presidio Managed Cloud (PMC) – a service with Cisco Intercloud Fabric integrated plus a service catalog and central management with a simple, intuitive, self-service portal.  As a result, Presidio is providing its customers the centrally coordinated orchestration required to manage complex cloud environments and the flexibility to allow their customers to consume cloud in the manner they want.   You can read more of Presidio’s innovation in managed services here.

• iland: And finally, we have our Cloud Provider partners integrating Cisco Intercloud Fabric into their hybrid cloud services to make innovation easier for their customers.  iland, for instance, is a global cloud provider with data centers located throughout the United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore. iland recognizes that a particular challenge for their customers, when connecting to a public cloud, is the inconsistency introduced by multiple environments, processes, and policies.  With Cisco Intercloud Fabric integrated into their Enterprise Cloud Services, iland is able to extend their customers’ IT infrastructures into iland’s global cloud with the same level of control as their on-premise resources.In fact, The Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, creators of the innovative E-learning platform, LaunchPad, is actively taking advantage of iland’s service. Holtzbrinck uses iland’s Enterprise Cloud Services (integrated with Cisco Intercloud Fabric) to extend their QA environment into iland’s global cloud, leveraging templates stored on-premise to streamline provisioning while maintaining consistent security and control across the cloud environment.  Future plans include using iland to enable Holtzbrinck to burst production capacity into the cloud based upon utilization.  iland talks more about their service here.

Cisco Intercloud Fabric is a game-changer because it provides customers simple, seamless workload portability across hypervisors for private and public clouds. And only Cisco offers this software technology.  As the world of connections grows, this functionality becomes more critical than ever.  Learn more at www.cisco.com/go/cloud.