Cisco is not among the top cloud computing providers, though that could be changing following recent announcements from the company pointing towards a strong play in the field.
During its Cisco Live event, held this week in San Diego, Calif., the firm announced its Cisco Cloud Connected Solution, a product solution designed to “help organizations to take advantage of cloud computing and to accelerate the deployment of cloud services while delivering an optimal user experience at the lowest cost.”
Cisco said the solution delivers cloud-enabled routing and wide area network optimization platforms, along with cloud connector software and services, enabling users to securely connect to cloud services. The Cloud Connected Solution is a package that includes connectors, enabled platforms and services (check all of them here).
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During the event, Cisco also introduced its open network environment – dubbed Cisco ONE – designed to help customers drive business innovation through trends such as cloud, mobility, social networking and video (read further details).
Both announcements follow Cisco’s CloudVerse launch from late last year. The CloudVerse systems is a framework that combines the elements needed to enable organizations to build, manage and connect public, private and hybrid clouds, by combining key cloud elements – unified data center, cloud intelligent network and cloud applications and services.
Cisco’s journey into the cloud could be explained by analyzing the results of the 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey, which points the majority of IT decision makers cite a cloud-ready network as the biggest requirement to enable the migration of business applications to the cloud. It is clear Cisco aims to fulfill this requirement.
Cisco surveyed more than 1,300 IT professionals to find out the top priorities and challenges they face when moving applications and services to the cloud. More than one-in-three respondents said that a cloud-ready WAN is a critical infrastructure element necessary to move applications to the cloud. The survey also found that 72% said data protection security is a top obstacle to a successful implementation of cloud services during the cloud migration process, followed by availability and reliability of cloud applications (67%), device-based security (66%), visibility and control of applications across the WAN (60%) and overall application performance (60%).
