Zayo announced a broad portfolio of edge services today aimed at capitalizing on what the company sees as a major shift on the part of business customers toward a multi-cloud environment. The term “multi-cloud” refers to a strategy that relies on multiple cloud providers.
“We fundamentally believe multi-cloud is driving network demand,” said Frank Cittadino, senior vice president of Edge Solutions for Zayo, in a pre-briefing with Telecompetitor.
At the same time, Cittadino said, cloud providers are moving to a more distributed approach, with cloud resources pushed closer to the network edge.
Zayo Edge Network Solutions
Zayo uses the name Edge Network Solutions for the new portfolio, which includes:
- Software-Defined Wide-Area Network (SD-WAN) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
- Unified Communications as a Service (UCaas)
- Managed Circuit Aggregation
- Security Options, including zero trust, cloud access security broker (CASB), network firewall and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection
- Remote-Access-as-a-Service
The offerings are supported by a combination of partnerships with technology providers, including VMware, Palo Alto, Fortinet and Versa – as well as technology that Zayo developed in house.
A key technology developed in house is what the company calls zInsights Portal, which according to a press release, provides network intelligence, visibility and control of network health and performance based on artificial intelligence and a comprehensive view across multiple platforms, domains and silos – from edge to core to cloud.
The goal is faster mean-time-to-repair, Cittadino told us. The artificial intelligence uses predictive analytics to identify issues that could be a problem based on past experiences. He noted, for example, that if the shopping cart function on a customer’s website isn’t functioning, the portal could look at the network path and if no problem was detected there, the issue could be sent to the internal team focused on applications.
A new partner for Zayo is Cloudbrink, which offers technology that enables employees of Zayo’s business customers to obtain a low-latency network connection on demand. As Cittadino explained, the offering uses a remote user agent on the employee’s laptop which “spins up and down a network connection” based on where the employee is located at that time.
According to the Zayo press release, “users are never more than 5 to 20 milliseconds away from enterprise access points and applications.”
Today’s Zayo news builds on a strategy that another Zayo exec outlined in an interview with Telecompetitor earlier this year when the company acquired QoS Networks, a company that specialized in edge technologies.
