Google’s Partner Interconnect connects SMBs to its data centers

If you are a large-scale enterprise, Google has a service called Dedicated Interconnect that offers 10Gbps connections between your data center and one of theirs. But what if you are a smaller firm and don’t need that kind of bandwidth and the expense that goes with it?

Google now has you covered. The cloud giant recently announced Google Cloud Partner Interconnect, a means of establishing a direct connection between a SMB data center, with emphasis on the medium-sized business, and Google’s hybrid cloud platform. The company did this in concert with 23 ISP partners around the globe.

Instead of the 10Gbps full circuits, Partner Interconnect allows users to select partial circuits from 50Mbps to 10Gbps.

Participating partners include, but are not limited to, AT&T and Verizon in North America, NTT and Softbank in Japan, BT and Orange in EMEA, Macquarie and Megaport in Australia, plus global providers such as Digital Realty and Equinix.

“Getting up and running with Partner Interconnect is easy, as our partners have already set up and certified the infrastructure with Google Cloud. This provides a turnkey solution that minimizes the effort needed to bring up network connectivity from your data center to GCP,” said John Veizades, Google Cloud product manager, in the blog post announcing the service.

Dedicated and Partner Interconnect mean businesses can connect their data center directly to Google Cloud services without having to use the public internet, reducing latency and securing data transfers at the same time. Google also offers Cloud VPN for customers using the public internet for whatever reason.

Google’s growing interest in hybrid cloud

Google started out as a pure cloud player, but this is the second major effort, following Dedicated Interconnect, that shows Google’s growing interest in hybrid cloud installations. Google has finally acknowledged that the hybrid cloud is the dominant style and most enterprises are going with a mix and has adjusted accordingly.

The company has made other hybrid deals recently, most notably a deal with Cisco last October to help connect on-premises services to Google Cloud, plus similar a partnership with Nutanix announced last June to allow on-premises and cloud deployments to be managed as a unified service.

Google says general availability for Partner Interconnect will come in the next few weeks.