Cisco Capital Asia Pacific

Cisco Capital adds even more flexibility to Cisco’s cloud solutions

Cloud builders and service providers are facing new challenges as customer demand and expectations continue to rise - but providers who get it right will benefit from huge opportunities in this booming market.

Businesses are looking for greater agility, scalability, and performance from the cloud, while keeping costs manageable. But meeting these increasing expectations isn't always easy. So, whether you're a cloud provider or an enterprise building your own cloud infrastructure, you may need to re examine your IT operations and architecture, and even how you purchase technology.

Recognizing the increased demands on cloud builders, Cisco announced a new cloud strategy in 2014. This strategy is centered around two key technologies: Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Intercloud Fabric.

These two solutions work together to deliver unprecedented performance and scalability, and the agility businesses need to innovate. Cisco’s financing arm, Cisco Capital, can add further flexibility by enabling you to upgrade infrastructure when you need to - not just when your budget allows.

 

The shifting nature of cloud

As well as seeing an overall increase in demand, the market is fundamentally changing. Organizations now need to deploy new applications in hours instead of months. Resources need to scale up or down in minutes, not hours, and the Internet of Everything is taking this need to a new level. With billions of connected devices coming online – from washing machines to driverless vehicles – businesses will have an entirely new set of requirements for globally distributed and highly secure clouds.

At the same time, enterprises are moving away from the traditional box-centric approach to an application-centric model for managing IT. They’re shifting their focus from maintaining Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to delivering new cloud-based applications that better engage customers, improve internal processes, and make a real difference to the business.

The traditional IT operation - where the application, network, security, and cloud teams work independently from each other - cannot deliver the agility that enterprises now require. As a result, many businesses are adopting the DevOps model, where development and operations teams work more closely together.

 

ACI: Putting the application first

Recognizing the shift to application-centric IT management, Cisco developed its ACI technology for data centers. ACI is an innovative, highly secure architecture built from the ground up to deliver centralized, application-driven policy automation and management. It enables IT teams to manage even the most complex private, public, or hybrid environments more easily and transparently.

ACI is delivered via Cisco Nexus 9000 series switches, Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and Cisco Application Virtual Switch (AVS). (See www.cisco.com/web/ANZ/netsol/datacenter/aci.html for more information).

 

Intercloud: Moving workloads where you need them

Cisco Intercloud Fabric builds on ACI to give you complete freedom to place your workloads on any private, public, or hybrid cloud - and quickly scale or shift them as your business needs change. The two technologies work together, with ACI allowing applications to run on any cloud in your Intercloud Fabric.

This type of flexibility is becoming essential for retailers that require more capacity during peak shopping seasons, for an enterprise to quickly recover from a disaster, or for an organisation that needs to shift its data to a cloud hosted in a particular country for regulatory reasons.

Intercloud Fabric applies the same network security, quality of service (QoS), and access control policies in public clouds that you enforce in the data center. As capacity is added, there’s no demarcation between clouds.

The enterprise solution, Intercloud Fabric for Business, includes the core product for securely connecting multiple clouds, and an admin portal for managing your clouds.

However, Intercloud is more than a new technology. It’s a framework of partners that has created a global network of interconnected clouds. The network already includes more than 45 partners, with 250 data centers in 59 countries, and the likes of Amazon and Microsoft support Intercloud workloads.

Cisco Cloud Managed Services Partners (CMSPs) can deploy the new technology to become an Intercloud node now, or in readiness to tap into the global network in the future.

Service providers that want to deploy hybrid clouds and become part of the Intercloud ecosystem will need the Intercloud Fabric for Provider solution.

 

Deploying and paying for your solution

Traditionally, most cloud builders and service providers have purchased their equipment outright, but what if you don’t have the CapEx budget available? And, more fundamentally, do you really need to own your infrastructure?

Providers are increasingly attracted to the option of financing their equipment, replacing large up-front CapEx payments with more manageable periodic payments. This can simplify their finances and reduce risk, while ensuring that users benefit from cutting-edge Cisco technology.

Cisco Capital offers financing solutions to suit every business, with its Financing the Cloud Suite including:

• Flexible payment structures that include total solution financing for hardware, software, and services from both Cisco and complementary third parties
• Accelerate Loans for cloud providers and managed services partners that require no payments during the time required to build the data center
• A more advanced solution called Monetization of Managed Services for CMSPs - where the partner assigns a portion of the receivables due from its customers to Cisco Capital and retains the direct relationship with its users.

In short, Cisco Capital offers the financial flexibility to match the technology scalability of Cisco’s advanced cloud solutions. Service Providers and Enterprises looking to deploy Cisco Cloud solutions should reach out to Cisco Capital to discuss their financing options. Visit the Cisco Capital at www.ciscocapital.com/apjc website for more information.