At Google Cloud Next 2025, the cloud services provider unveiled details related to its new Cloud WAN offering and commitment to cloud security. In this piece, I will highlight the solution’s capabilities and provide insights on what I find noteworthy.
Leveraging Massive Network Investments
Google has made significant investments in network connectivity over the course of nearly three decades to support services that include its search, Gmail, cloud, and cross-cloud services. With over two hundred points of presence and two million miles of fiber, there is ample opportunity to monetize its infrastructure further. So, it was not surprising that at Google Cloud Next this year, the company launched a new Cloud WAN offering.
Google Cloud WAN is a fully managed connectivity backbone designed to supercharge wide-area network architectures. It has the potential to improve performance and mitigate operational costs for SD-WAN, SASE, and network-as-a-service deployments from the likes of Cisco, Extreme Networks, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Juniper Networks, Fortinet, and others.
Google claims that its Cloud WAN offering can dramatically simplify access across hybrid infrastructure deployments and provide up to a 40% performance boost over the public internet and a 40% savings rate over an organization’s total cost of ownership lifecycle. If those numbers are true, its new solution warrants serious consideration – especially considering emerging generative and agentic applications and modern AI workloads that will tax networking infrastructure.
Doubling Down On Cloud Security
Google is doubling down on cloud security, as evidenced by its recent acquisition of Wiz. At Google Cloud Next, the company reinforced its security focus, speaking to the merging of telemetry, intelligence, and response to weave together a cohesive AI-powered system that is designed to accelerate mean time to detection and response to threats. This effort flips the polarity from reactive to proactive cybersecurity protection, something vitally important as bad actors use modern AI applications to improve attack sophistication.
It will be interesting to see what materializes longer term with Google’s acquisition of Wiz. Still, from my perspective, it brings the depth and breadth needed to compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Partnership Highlights
Two partnership announcements from Google Cloud Next are worth highlighting. First, Google’s announced partnership with Infoblox to leverage the power of DNS to improve the deployment and management of critical network services through Google Cloud WAN and bolster security is powerful. Turning to Infoblox validates the value of DNS to serve as another layer of network resilience and security, and that Infoblox is a proven leader in DNS.
Second, I had the opportunity to spend time with Onix’s chief executive, Sanjay Singh, following the event. If you are unfamiliar with Onix, the company is a data, cloud, and AI solution provider. Onix has been a long-time Google Cloud partner for over two decades, and at Google Cloud Next this year, it was awarded a partner of the year award for its work in data and analytics.
Onix’s Wingspan solution claims to be the industry’s first agentic AI platform that enables real-time analytics to improve business outcomes. It is built to interface with diverse enterprise environments and functions, acting as a unifying AI layer that brings intelligence and automation to workflows, customer experiences, and decision-making. What makes it unique is not just the ability to integrate across ecosystems, but it also learns and adapts. From my perspective, it can potentially enhance Google’s Gemini for Business AI solutions.
Final Analyst Take
On the surface, Google’s launch of its new Cloud WAN solution is significant. It is a dynamic, policy-aware, intent-driven WAN platform that optimizes the performance of connectivity services. It also integrates security functionality into its fabric, simplifies access management, and provides significant operational cost savings.
As a former product marketer, the holy grail of tech lies in the ability to deliver products and solutions faster, better, and cheaper – or, better stated, at a higher value. If Google executes on its vision for its Cloud WAN offering, it has the potential to simplify, supercharge, and secure network services at scale.
