Cisco Secure Networking Simplifying Multicloud Networking

Mirko Grabel and Jubil Mathew of Cisco introduced Cisco Multi-Cloud Fabric, a network-as-a-service offering in Cisco Cloud Control that connects sites, regions, and AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud directly. They covered its Cisco-operated virtual points of presence, zero trust routing, ThousandEyes integration, and consumption pricing, and they demonstrated onboarding cloud networks and a Meraki site live. Grabel, the lead product manager, and Mathew, a technical marketing engineer, presented at Networking Field Day 41, and Kiran Ghodgaonkar closed Cisco’s appearance.

Grabel said that backhauling cloud traffic through data centers adds latency and fragments operations, and the problem compounds for AI workloads that repeatedly call data sources. In one example, a Los Angeles branch reaching cloud apps through a Dallas data center crossed eight hops, and connecting directly cut latency by about 75%. Multi-Cloud Fabric places VPoPs in each cloud. They run Cisco’s elastic routing stack in Cisco’s own account, where SRE teams handle sizing and scaling. Zero trust routing prunes routes and denies everything by default until users define who can talk to whom. Stateful firewalls are available through service chaining, and ThousandEyes agents are hosted inside the VPoPs. Customer VPCs connect over IPsec from a VPN gateway, limited at first to 1.25 Gbps per VPC, while the backbone offers hundreds of gigabits. Pricing combines per-attachment fees, data transfer charges, and premium services.

In the live demo, Mathew supplied cloud credentials and discovered VPCs across all three clouds. He onboarded them to the nearest VPoP, connected a new San Francisco Meraki site to three cloud applications, and showed health views for IPsec tunnels and BGP. Grabel contrasted the service with Cisco Cloud OnRamp, which suits customers who want to run their own routers. He said brownfield customers can migrate CIDR by CIDR alongside their existing networking. Delegates pressed on the per-VPC throughput limit and on security that stops at Layer 4 ACLs in the MVP, and Grabel said both will expand. The service runs in North America and Europe today, with Oracle Cloud as the next cloud, and it remains in public beta ahead of general availability.