Google unveils Cloud WAN for global network solutions

Google has announced the introduction of Cloud WAN, a new solution designed to offer businesses and governments the ability to utilise Google's global network for their wide area network (WAN) needs.

Cloud WAN is envisaged as a fully managed enterprise backbone, aiming to transform traditional WAN architectures by providing a reliable and secure solution optimised for application performance. It purports to deliver up to 40% faster performance than the public internet and offers a potential 40% savings in total cost of ownership compared to customer-managed WAN solutions.

Traditionally, enterprises have relied on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks, which often come with high costs. However, the advent of cloud and SaaS applications prompted a shift towards alternatives such as SD-WAN with direct internet access (DIA), despite their complexities. Cloud WAN seeks to address these challenges by offering a unified solution for enterprises, integrating security and ensuring optimal performance while reducing costs.

One of the primary use cases for Cloud WAN is to provide high-performance connectivity between geographically dispersed data centres. Google aims to offer an alternative to traditional solutions that may have limited capacity, higher costs, and reliability issues. This use case is supported by Cloud Interconnect and Cross-Cloud Interconnect, and now, the newly introduced Cross-Site Interconnect. This latter service, currently in preview in select countries, enables dedicated point-to-point layer 2 connectivity to connect applications between data centres.

Chris Dee, Head of Cloud Platform Engineering at Citadel Securities, commented, "Having a scalable and reliable global network is critical as we continue to expand our research efforts and host performance sensitive workloads on Google Cloud. We look forward to leveraging the stability and reliability we have seen with Google's Cloud WAN to meet the growing needs in our hybrid networks."

The second use case detailed by Google focuses on enhancing connectivity for branch and campus networks. By utilising Google's Premium Tier network, Cloud WAN aims to securely connect these locations to public cloud resources and the internet, with promises of a 40% improvement in performance. The extensive peering connections further facilitate efficient traffic exchange to enhance application performance.

Ralf Huebenthal, Global Head of IT Platforms at Nestle, stated, "By bridging the edge-cloud gap, Cloud WAN is enhancing our application performance by up to 40%, reducing costs, and providing resilient, scalable support and foundation for our end-to-end digitalization."

Cloud WAN presents an open and integrated ecosystem allowing enterprises to tailor their network and security services. This flexibility extends to partnerships with SD-WAN vendors and security service edge providers, such as Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, and Palo Alto Networks. Enterprises are afforded the flexibility to self-manage or adopt managed connectivity solutions.

Cloud WAN enables organisations to potentially consolidate their network deployments and leverage a fixed-price model for high-bandwidth data transfers through Cloud Interconnect, which is expected to be generally available this quarter. This aims to further reduce costs and complexity for enterprises.

For enterprises preferring managed services, Google's partner ecosystem includes companies such as Accenture, HCLTech, and Wipro, who offer architecture, migration, and management services for Cloud WAN deployment.