- A Lumen executive says this is the natural next chapter for its multi-cloud gateway
- Lumen works with third-party service providers to extend the reach
- The expansion is desirable for enterprises that have locations outside of Lumen’s footprint
Lumen Technologies has expanded its multi-cloud gateway service beyond its own fiber footprint. This means that enterprises can now use the service to reach wherever their business operates.
Lumen first launched its multi-cloud gateway service in February to about 150,000 of its own on-net locations. “With today's expansion, this extends our reach to around 10 million U.S. business locations,” said Marc Oriani, VP of Enterprise Solutions at Lumen.
“From our perspective, this is a natural next chapter of the February launch,” said Oriani.
Lumen is able to extend multi-cloud gateway by working with qualified third-party service providers. And it's already established most of these third-party relationships for other Lumen products such as its Ethernet Fabric Connection.
From the customer’s perspective, a qualified off-net site can be brought into the multi-cloud gateway using the same ordering experience, the same routing policies and the same segmentation as an on-net location.
By expanding Multi-Cloud Gateway beyond its fiber footprint, Lumen is enabling distributed enterprises to connect more locations to cloud and AI environments through a consistent, software-defined networking model,” said Peter Chahal, IDC research director for Worldwide Telecommunications.
Why do enterprises need this?
“What we're seeing through various insights from our customers is that in managing their workloads across their facilities, they're just running into this huge problem, which is essentially complexity,” said Oriani.
Businesses have had to acquire the right connectivity and right-size it according to their growth patterns. They’ve had to ensure they identify the right endpoints, both internally and externally to the cloud providers.
In addition, organizations such as healthcare providers, financial institutions and manufacturers have a need to move sensitive data between their multiple locations.
“This demand pattern is very clear in the industry,” said Oriani. “Businesses are inherently distributed, and the data is sensitive. So, a company had to design its cloud architecture around where connectivity existed, rather than where the business operates. That's the constraint that this is removing.”
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