Google Cloud Opens Its Global Network for Enterprise Wide-Area Network Use

By Paul Gillin, SiliconANGLE
April 8, 2025

Touting its global network that spans over 2 million miles of fiber, 33 subsea cables, and 202 points of presence, Google LLC’s Cloud division today launched Cloud WAN, a fully managed enterprise backbone designed for wide area network architectures.

Backed by a 99.99% reliability service-level agreement the offering promises a unified approach to site, application, and user connectivity with optimal performance and lower total cost of ownership compared to the multiprotocol label switching services many enterprises use.

“Our customers can now tap into the same planet-scale network that powers Google’s globally available services, including Gmail, YouTube, and Search,” said Amin Vahdat, Google’s general manager of machine learning systems and Cloud AI. “No other technology company can offer this.”

Google said the offering addresses the multitude of security stacks and network configurations enterprises typically juggle to connect far-flung operations. It claims Cloud WAN provides up to 40% faster performance compared to public internet connections and up to 40% lower total cost of ownership compared to a customer-managed WAN. The service leverages Google’s Premium Tier network, which routes internet-based traffic to the geographically closest PoP, thereby reducing latency and improving consistency for applications.

Two use cases

Google highlighted two key use cases for Cloud WAN. The first is high-performance, cross-region connectivity for global organizations with geographically dispersed data centers that need to transfer significant volumes of data reliably and cost-effectively.

Cloud WAN offers several connectivity options for them, such as Cloud Interconnect for direct, low-latency links from on-premises data centers to Google Cloud, and Cross-Cloud Interconnect for multi-cloud connections with Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. Azure, and Oracle Corp.’s Cloud Infrastructure.

A new Cross-Site Interconnect feature (currently in preview) provides dedicated point-to-point layer 2 private connections at 10 Gbps or 100 Gbps speeds, a feature favored by government agencies, telecom operators and enterprises requiring transparent layer 2 access. Layer 2 networking is used for reliable node-to-node data transfers data across a physical network.

Read more…