Enterprises can now use Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) private backbone network as an on-demand underlay for stitching together private data center, public cloud, and branch connectivity over virtual private network (VPN) tunnels or via Cisco SD-WAN appliances.

Google Network Connectivity Center, which is now in preview, effectively shifts the hub in a traditional hub-and-spoke network into GCP. The offering provides a single dashboard for provisioning and managing VPN tunnels and SD-WAN interconnects.

While Network Connectivity Center can be manually configured to work with a variety of hardware and software platforms, Google has expanded its relationship with Cisco to automate the provisioning of WAN links over the cloud providers' network.

“For the first time, Google is making their global network, or the backbone, available to enterprises to consume through NCC,” said Raj Gulani, senior director of product management for enterprise cloud and SD-WAN at Cisco.

Today’s announcement builds on Cisco’s existing relationship with GCP, announced back in April last year, he added.

Until now, Cisco IOS and Viptela SD-WAN users have been able to route traffic from the branch to specific workloads running in GCP, using the Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub, which mirrors existing integrations with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the launch of NCC, Cisco SD-WAN users can now take advantage of GCP’s network to not only automate the process of connecting branches to workloads but also to remote branches as well.

“This will be available with our existing enterprise DNA licenses, which means if you are a Cisco customer, you are an SD-WAN user with workloads in the cloud, [or] you are a Fortune 500 customer, these use cases are readily available for you,” Gulani said.

According to Google, the service not only simplifies WAN deployments but also provides greater security and visibility into the traffic traversing the network.

The introduction of the Network Connectivity Center has “opened up a level of visibility, observability, and analytics that would have been never possible in the past,” Gulani said.

SD-underlays gain steam

Google Network Connectivity Center launched just a day after Cloudflare announced a similar service, allowing VMware and Aruba hardware customers to route traffic over its own global backbone.

Cloudflare’s Magic WAN service functions very similarly to GCP’s platform in that it behaves as a software-defined underlay running on the company’s data centers. However, unlike GCP, which operates a total of 21 data centers globally, Cloudflare’s network extends to more than 100 countries and nearly 200 cities.

The larger trend of using cloud providers’ networks as an on-demand underlay has been gaining momentum for some time, with companies like Alkira and Aviatrix promising the simplify the process of provisioning and networking workloads and branch locations over these private backbone networks.