CenturyLink may be an advocate of cloud-based solutions for its business customers, but the service provider realizes that accommodating hybrid IT environments will continue to be the norm for years to come.
According to CenturyLink’s estimates, only 15 percent of the total enterprise servers are outsourced, meaning they will continue to migrate over time.
David Meredith, SVP of global data centers for CenturyLink, told FierceTelecom that while they are in the process of making this hybrid migration, business customers will consider a host of options.
“You can’t put everything on the cloud and what our customers are finding is that they need a mix of solutions,” Meredith said. “Then there are different issues, meaning that some can be public cloud, some that can be private cloud, some are a managed service and they need different connectivity solutions to tie that all together.”
CenturyLink will then couple the solutions with stringent SLAs that promise always-on connectivity and access.
“Our customers need it to be up 100 percent of the time,” Meredith said. “One of the things we have been doing is these solution SLAs where we say ‘we’re going to give you 100 percent uptime on this solution whereas a lot of our competitors will give an SLA on only one component.’”
One of the key targets for CenturyLink’s Hybrid IT solutions is its large business customers that have multiple domestic and international locations.
The large business segment can migrate to a colocation solution from CenturyLink to get access to their hardware and link their workloads as they see fit.
“I think you’ll find that hybrid IT is being adopted across the spectrum of segments,” said Chip Freund, director of colocation and data center product marketing at CenturyLink. “The larger enterprises were the first in that space because they have a broad and varied array of workloads, including some that they carry on in-house hardware, some on private clouds, and they’re trying to find the ideal platform for that.”
Freund said that the telco is starting to see similar trends take place in the medium-sized business market.
“Even in the mid-market space, there’s a need to stack up a cabinet of equipment supporting workloads that aren’t cloud ready today and be able to cross connect those over to public and private clouds as well as software as a service providers they may be working with,” Freund said. “
To support the growth of the hybrid IT environment, CenturyLink recently expanded the number of network interconnection partners across 58 of its data centers throughout North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, giving customers access to 99 additional carrier and network provider sources.
As part of that expansion, CenturyLink can also provide low latency connectivity from any of its data center over 260 neutral data center facilities, giving customers the ability to connect such as geographic redundancy solutions, ecosystem partners, and cloud nodes such as CLC, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google.
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