The Cloud is not a single thing. There are lots of Clouds, and a company might run hundreds of Clouds all on its own. Those Clouds must be managed, but every Cloud has its own needs and ways of talking to the network. A solution that brings thing under control is needed. Cisco Systems, Inc. has offered its own solution in the form of a Cloud Services Router (CSR), a virtual system to link up disparate Clouds at scale.

To learn more about this system, Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) and Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the AWS Summit – Santa Clara event in California. There, they spoke with Fan Gu, technical marketing engineer at Cisco Systems.

Great power, simple management

The discussion started with Gu describing the purpose of the CSR. She said that people are familiar with Virtual Private Cloud solutions (VPCs), but these VPCs have a hard time connecting to each other. The CSR allows VPCs to talk by routing between them. This greatly improves access to the applications and data in the Clouds. This is a big deal if the company involved has hundreds of these VPCs.

Gu explained the hard work of such a system is all done on the back end, so the customer doesn’t need to be concerned about it. The CSR is automated with a push-button interface, making it simple to manage. She pointed out that while speed and cost were major benefits, the system also included other features like firewalls and application control to monitor traffic.

Learning from customer adoption

Gu then went into what Cisco has learned from its customers. She mentioned that as the Cloud matures, companies are more willing to move their mission-critical applications there. These companies want to expand their security to cover the Cloud, using the same policies across the board.

“We have learned a lot from companies and how they manage their data,” she said.

The lessons for public Cloud adoption were easy to see. Gu pointed out the first need is to simplify Cloud management. Companies also want performance comparable to their own networks, as well.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit – Santa Clara.

Photo by SiliconANGLE