Google’s Dedicated Interconnect is now available and Amazon released Direct Connect Gateways Credit: Thinkstock As more organizations look to enable hybrid cloud computing, a big question remains: How do I connect my network to the cloud? This week Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services each released new products that make that process easier. Google’s Dedicated Interconnect is now generally available Dedicated Interconnect is an important way for customers to connect to the public cloud. It allows organizations to connect their on-premises resources to a colocation facility and then that co-lo facility has a direct network connection to the public cloud. Public IaaS cloud providers like Google want to give their customers access to fast connections to their cloud, but they don’t want to connect to each individual customer’s site, so they’ve created this co-lo based Interconnect. Google runs the Interconnect and offers either a 99.9 or 99.99% service level agreement. Google is working with a handful of colocation vendors as the middle-man, including Equinix, Digital Realty and Infomart. In addition to Interconnect being generally available as of last week, Google also announced new functionality for its Cloud Router product, which allows customers to manage all of their virtual subnets in the cloud from a central portal. Users can connect to any subnet they have in the cloud in any Google Cloud region through this central portal. AWS introduces Direct Connect Gateway AWS has had its own version of a connect-to-the-cloud product named Direct Connect since 2012. Last week AWS announced new functionality named Direct Connect Gateway. This new feature allows users to centrally manage connections from their on-premises environments, through a co-lo facility, to any AWS region in the world. In the past, users had to setup BGP sessions for each virtual private cloud (VPC) in AWS. Also, now each VPC can be extended across any region in Amazon’s cloud. This means a customer’s single VPC could extend across multiple AWS regions. Connections to the cloud are becoming easier These two items are significant because they show that two of the leading public IaaS cloud providers are actively making it easier for customers to connect their on premises environments to their clouds, and manage those network connections more granularly. This is a benefit for customers who are not just sending data to the cloud, but also those that need to extract data from the cloud; these network connections are a two-way street. They also emphasize the importance of colocation vendors who act as an interconnection point between cloud providers and end users. Their importance will only grow in the future as customers manage their hybrid cloud environments. Related content news Public – not hybrid – cloud dominates day 1 at Amazon re:Invent Here’s the highlights of what AWS announced so far at re:Invent By Brandon Butler Nov 30, 2017 4 mins Cloud Computing news IBM’s latest private cloud is built on Kubernetes, and is aimed at Microsoft By Brandon Butler Nov 01, 2017 4 mins Hybrid Cloud Cloud Computing news analysis What’s really behind the Cisco-Google hybrid cloud partnership For Google it's another partnership with a powerful enterprise vendor; for Cisco, it marks an evolution of the company's cloud strategy By Brandon Butler Oct 25, 2017 4 mins Hybrid Cloud Networking news At Ignite, Microsoft extends hybrid cloud beyond just infrastructure Microsoft Ignite is a coming out party for Azure Stack By Brandon Butler Sep 25, 2017 3 mins Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events NEWSLETTERS Newsletter Promo Module Test Description for newsletter promo module. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe