Level 3 Communications has established a new partnership with Digital Realty Trust where it will provide the data center provider's customers in 14 U.S. and European markets access to its growing base of cloud service partners including Amazon Web Services (AWS Direct Connect) (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT) (ExpressRoute).
Through this relationship, the Digital Realty customers will have a new route to migrate and operate their applications to a hybrid cloud environment with the backing of Level 3's deep network presence.
While Level 3 is hardly alone in providing a direct access route to AWS and Microsoft Azure, Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer for Level 3, told FierceTelecom what sets it apart is the global nature of the offering.
"One of the things that you'll see from us that is different than what you'll see from some of the other network service providers is we continue to leverage the global nature of our network," he said. "With Amazon, Level 3 will be listed as the most connected player to Amazon's hosting and data centers around the world."
Another potential benefit of this pact for enterprise customers is they can adjust network bandwidth and storage levels as needed. During a holiday shopping season, a retailer could dynamically scale their bandwidth and only pay for what they consume as demand for computing capacity ramps.
In addition to scaling bandwidth, Digital Realty customers will gain the flexibility to choose the cloud model and cloud provider that best meet their needs, access bandwidth dynamically and pay only for what they use.
Level 3 is also providing connectivity under its Cloud Connect Solutions program, including Layer 1, Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity.
"On a global scale, we can guarantee latency for connectivity for public and hybrid cloud environments at Layer 1," Christie said. "We're working on Layer 2 and Layer 3, but because of the switched nature of those products, it's a bit tricky."
Christie added that "with our Layer 3 MPLS offer, what we're enabling is instantaneous consumption by pre-provisioning ports into Amazon and into Azure so they can burst through and consume Amazon Web Services in the future."
For more:
- see the release
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