Colt bolsters cloud connectivity with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect

Colt has deepened its relationship with Oracle by offering dedicated cloud connectivity services to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect.

With the new agreement in place, customers can now utilize Colt’s Dedicated Cloud Access to offer secure and reliable private network connectivity to Oracle Cloud. Business customers or organizations can establish public cloud connectivity from their data centers, offices or colocation environments, which in turn helps drive cost efficiencies, increase bandwidth throughput and enable low latency.

Those customers will also be able to access their cloud data and applications across the Colt IQ Network, which spans more than 850 data centers and more than 27,000 fiber connected enterprise buildings globally.

Oracle FastConnect enables private connection to Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service with better connectivity than Internet-based services.

"As more and more businesses turn to cloud service providers to power their digital transformations, security, availability and resiliency of the network are critical to today’s business operations,” said Peter Coppens, vice president product portfolio, Colt Technology Services, in a prepared statement. “It’s for this reason that we are delighted to be an Oracle FastConnect partner as part of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, to provide customers with a superior cloud networking experience that is vital for the fast-paced environment of today.”

Colt announced a similar partnership in June with IBM Cloud offering services through IBM Cloud Direct Link. A spokesman for Colt said the company didn't see any immediate impact on its cloud business from today's news that IBM was buying Red Hat primarily to increase its presence in hybrid and private cloud using Kubernetes.

RELATED: IBM makes a move in cloud space with $34B deal to buy Red Hat

In May, Colt announced support for Google Cloud Partner Interconnect, which is a service from Google Cloud that allows customers to connect to the Google Cloud Platform from anywhere in the world.

As business customers move more of their services and applications to cloud ecosystems, they need additional connectivity capabilities with the major, and regional, cloud service providers. Service providers are striking up partnerships with cloud providers in order to connect their business solutions with the more agile cloud environments.

Earlier this year, AT&T announced its partnership with Google Cloud after reaching similar arrangements with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. In May, Verizon announced that it had picked AWS as its preferred public provider.

CenturyLink has been on a similar cloud trajectory to Colt this year by making announcements with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect and support for Google Cloud Partner Interconnect, which is a service from Google Cloud that allows customers to connect to Google Cloud Platform from anywhere in the world. In August, CenturyLink was named as a Managed Service Provider for AWS.