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As businesses continue to move operations to the cloud as part of their digital transformation strategies, having reliable tools to make this transition smooth is becoming even more critical. A recent report highlights just how much, showing that $18 billion was spent on cloud services by organizations in the U.S. in Q1 of 2021. On Wednesday, at Cisco’s virtual Future Cloud event, the networking giant unveiled a series of new solutions to help ease the process.

Cisco, which has invested multibillions into hybrid cloud, boasts a range of new products and services that can improve the hybrid cloud, through full-stack observability and cloud-neutral automation, which are aimed at delivering faster speed, transparency and control to customers. The five key areas of focus for these products and services are: continuity, insights, security, connectivity and operations.

SEE: Cheat sheet: The most important cloud advances of the decade (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Here are a few of the big offerings for businesses, according to the news release:

Operations:

  • Cisco UCS X-Series: As part of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), the X-Series is implemented in data centers at over 50,000 locations. “Fully integrated with Cisco Intersight, UCS X-Series is a first-of-its kind system designed for hybrid operations from the cloud and across the clouds. Blending the best of rack and blade systems and featuring revolutionary UCS X-Fabric technology, it’s built for workload versatility today and comes future-ready for the next decade of industry innovation in processors, accelerators and computing interconnects,” the release stated.

  • Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: This aims to make it easier for customers by offering a “low-code, automation framework that simplifies complex workflows.”

  • Integration of ThousandEyes internet and cloud intelligence with the Cisco Catalyst 8000 Edge Series for SD-WAN and Cisco Nexus 9000: This tool helps customers gain intelligence about performance and network health.

  • Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator: Cisco says this can “act as a single pane of glass for configuring and managing common policies across multiple [platforms].”

  • Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: “Provides a low-code, easy-to-use framework to create and automate complex workflows so IT Ops can easily orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and accelerate delivery of services.”

Additionally, Cisco is offering tools to improve customer experience, such as:

  • CX Business Critical Services for Cloud: This gives business users expert guidance on how to “architect, deploy, secure and optimize digital transformations.”

  • CX Intersight Workload Optimizer Services: This is a tool to “enhance the resource consumption of applications in the cloud.”

  • CX Advanced Services for ThousandEyes and SD-WAN: These services aim to improve the experience through design and integration guidance.

  • Custom Quick Start Solutions: Offers “services for end-to-end automation and infrastructure-as-code (IaC).”

SEE: The new SMB stack (ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature) | Download the free PDF version (TechRepublic)

“Today, a simple, intuitive user experience is how to achieve success in a digital world,” said Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM, Cisco Enterprise Networking and Cloud, in the press release.

“We are focused on helping our customers be cloud smart to advance their digital operating models to securely deliver new types of apps that live across on-prem, multiple clouds and the edge,” Nightingale continued. “From infrastructure teams to the app developers, only Cisco can provide the level of observability and insight they need to orchestrate and manage applications and workloads no matter where they reside.”