Announcing Cross-Cloud Interconnect: seamless connectivity to all your clouds

Enterprises continue to adopt hybrid and multicloud as they migrate and leverage the cloud to build and run their applications. According to IDC studies conducted in 2022, 64% of customers were using multiple cloud providers for public cloud IaaS services¹ and 79% indicated a need to simplify and unify how they manage and secure dedicated cloud infrastructure to improve business resiliency². Enterprises need simple connectivity at the physical and service layers, and the ability to stand up distributed cloud applications and SaaS workloads within minutes. 

Networking is often the first step, but connecting and securing distributed environments can be complex. Today, we are announcing a significant expansion to our Cloud Interconnect portfolio with Cross-Cloud Interconnect, which lets you connect any public cloud with Google Cloud through a secure, high performance network, allowing organizations to run applications on multiple clouds, simplify SaaS networking in a multicloud environment, and migrate workloads from one cloud to another. Cross-Cloud Interconnect is now generally available in many global locations for customers connected to the following cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Alibaba Cloud — with support planned for additional cloud providers based on customer demand. 

We also made significant enhancements for Private Service Connect to support Cross-Cloud Interconnect, and automated service connection policies. In addition, we added new Cloud Interconnect capabilities, and released a new total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis showing lower costs of Google Cloud Networking. 

Seamless multicloud connectivity with Cross-Cloud Interconnect

The rise of distributed applications has been challenging for cloud infrastructure teams trying to ensure connectivity, performance, security, and reliability. Connecting clouds together often requires complex configurations, dedicated hardware, and lengthy operational processes. Cross-Cloud Interconnect simplifies the configuration, minimizes hardware, and reduces overhead.  

Available in 10 Gbps or 100 Gbps options, Cross-Cloud Interconnect does not require new hardware, has the same features as Cloud Interconnect, and is backed with a SLA. Customers with multicloud environments can leverage Cross-Cloud Interconnect to enable the following: 

• Private and secure connectivity across clouds 

• Line-rate performance and high reliability with 99.99% SLA

• Lower TCO without the complexity and cost of managing infrastructure 

Cross-Cloud Interconnect is available in major cities around the world with many of our partners, and because Cross-Cloud Interconnect is a fully managed service, setting it up is simple, as you can see in this demo. 

“As enterprises, globally, look to adopt hybrid and multicloud network services – as part of their digital transformation journeys, they increasingly recognize the strategic value of cross-cloud interconnection capabilities as integral to their business success. Google Cloud’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect offerings address a broad range of hybrid and multicloud network connectivity use cases that span the datacenter, cloud core, and edge, while offering multi-gigabit speeds, disruptive pricing, high-availability, and ease of use.” – Vijay Bhagavath, Research VP for Cloud and Datacenter Networking, IDC 

Early access customers like Walmart and Pexip are leveraging Cross-Cloud Interconnect to enable faster business outcomes. 

“Walmart runs a seamless platform across multiple cloud providers to accelerate innovations. We partner with Google Cloud to leverage their global network for hybrid and multicloud networking. With Cross-Cloud Interconnect, we were able to simplify connectivity between cloud providers, shorten time to production, and reduce overall costs.” - Gerald Bothello, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Walmart 

"Pexip provides a secure, multi-technology video conferencing experience that helps our customers protect and personalize their meetings. With Cross-Cloud Interconnect and our partnership with Google, we can seamlessly connect platforms from multiple clouds to expand our reach and bring our solution to a broader audience at scale." - Thomas Guggenbuhl, Principal Engineer Infrastructure Operations, Pexip

We continue to work with our partner ecosystem to extend co-location facilities worldwide and jointly drive the simplification of multicloud connectivity for our customers. 

"Equinix provides the world’s digital infrastructure enabling enterprises to connect anywhere. We are excited to collaborate with Google Cloud to expand on its multicloud networking strategy to deliver scalable, seamless, high bandwidth connectivity for enterprises." - Bill Bushman, Business Development Director, Platform Alliances, Equinix

Hybrid connectivity to SaaS with Private Service Connect

Configuring the network to run producer services can be time-consuming, slowing down services rollouts and delaying cloud integrations. Private Service Connect makes it easier to create private and secure connections from your VPCs to Google, partner, or your own service, simplifying network configuration for published services and SaaS applications. In addition to Google services such as Apigee, BeyondCorp Enterprise, Cloud Composer, and Google Kubernetes Engine, Private Service Connect supports many partner services such as Datastax, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, etc. 

Recently, we announced hybrid and global access for Private Service Connect, allowing on-premises and multicloud clients to access producer services in Google Cloud privately, from anywhere. Private Service Connect global access, now generally available, allows customers to access Google and partner published services from their on-prem locations and between regions. 

Today, we announced the following new enhancements to Private Service Connect: 

• Private Service Connect over Cross-Cloud Interconnect is now generally available. Customers can access producer services in Google Cloud from Cross-Cloud Interconnect.  

• Service Connection Policies, in preview, lets network admins create policies that automate the connectivity of Private Service Connect for managed services. This makes it easy for service admins to deploy, update, and delete published services connected by Private Service Connect without opening networking tickets. 

A secure and highly resilient foundation 

Our Dedicated and Partner Interconnect offerings provide secure, highly resilient connectivity for hybrid cloud networking. Dedicated Interconnect is now available globally with 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps options in 144 locations, 14 of which we added recently. 

We also added new enhancements to Cloud and Cross-Cloud Interconnect with new encryption options, higher performance, and greater network resiliency with faster link detection to ensure your mission-critical applications are available and performing well. The enhancements include the following: 

Secure hybrid connectivity

• MACsec for Cloud Interconnect, in preview in early 3Q23, provides point-to-point line-rate L2 encryption to protect “first mile/last mile” communications between the customer and Google Cloud. 

• HA VPN over Interconnect is generally available, and provides IPSec encryption to protect communications between a customer’s on-prem VPN gateway and the HA VPN gateway in Google Cloud.

Higher performance 

• 9K MTU support, currently in preview, enables large packet sizes to deliver higher throughput over Interconnect offerings.

• Bidirectional forwarding detection, now generally available, is a path-outage detection protocol that expedites detection of link failure to initiate traffic rerouting. 

• BGP enhancements including support for custom learned routes, increased prefix scale, and non-link local addressing are currently in preview. 

Reduce TCO 

Google Cloud Networking provides planet-scale, enterprise-ready networking that provides seamless access to partner and third-party services with consistent management policy extending from on-prem to cloud — and it does so at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to other cloud service providers. 

According to a recent paper from Enterprise Strategy Group, customers running on Google Cloud can achieve a TCO reduction of up to 28%. In The Economic Advantage of Google Cloud's Advanced Networking Services, ESG considered both the direct costs for networking services, as well as network administration and on-going management costs. ESG predicted that customers can see up to 22% lower connectivity and egress costs, and up to 28% lower cloud network administration costs when using Google Cloud compared to other major public cloud vendors. A blog with more details can be found here. 

These savings are a direct result of both the global scale and scope of Google Cloud’s networking services, and a rich set of native capabilities allowing customers to deploy, manage, scale, optimize, and secure hybrid or multi-cloud workloads easily. The new products and features discussed earlier in this article extend these capabilities even further. 

Learn more about Google Cloud Networking 

At Google Cloud Next ‘23, we’ll be offering several sessions to provide deep dives into the network innovations to help you build hybrid and multicloud networking transformation initiatives. Register today!

^{1. What Are Enterprise Multicloud Adoption Trends, IDC, Andrew Smith, IDC #US48902122, March 2022   
2. Multicloud Networking - An Essential Component of Digital Infrastructure, IDC, Brad Casemore, IDC #US48965022, March 2022}