Frontier tees up managed cloud solutions for enterprises

Frontier Communications is looking to rebound from a disappointing second quarter last month by offering a new managed cloud IT service.

Frontier's Cloud Managed Solutions was designed to enable cloud-native automation for enterprises by either a fully managed service model or through a self-service portal.

“Frontier’s Cloud Managed IT Solutions are a complete and flexible multi-cloud delivery platform that brings business customers a reliable, consistent and unified cloud IT operations experience,” said Frontier's Daniel Peiretti, SVP of products and marketing, in a prepared statement. “Our system leverages thousands of cutting-edge computing assets to provide customers with managed services and integrated commercial offerings, including disaster recovery as a service and security as a service.”

In order to better serve enterprises' multi-cloud deployments, Frontier is serving up its Cloud Managed IT Solutions services across three stages. The first stage supports customers that are migrating from a physical or virtualized traditional IT environment to a cloud IT environment. The cloud IT instance can be hosted on public cloud or private cloud by extending Frontier's multi-cloud orchestration portal onto a customer's premises or a hosting provider.

The second stage of delivery uses cloud-native tools—such as an infrastructure-as-code tool, HashiCorp's open source code tool Terraform, and containers—to manage and control applications running on any cloud. The tools are integrated within Frontier Cloud Managed Solutions, which are available for enterprises that choose self-service cloud consumption.

In the third stage, Cloud Managed Solutions leverages the integration of Frontier's orchestration portal with machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to push optimization beyond what cloud-native integration can do.

“Our fully automated and integrated tools deliver a fully functional environment that goes beyond a secondary application environment, allowing end users to maintain the same privileges and access as in the production environment," Peiretti said.

Frontier Cloud Managed Solutions includes a range of cloud and network service offerings focused on cloud infrastructure, cloud continuity (such as disaster recovery as a service), managed security, and managed networking and SD-WAN.

In order to reduce costs and provide more flexibility, the managed cloud solution is available through a pay-per-consumption model or pay-per-capacity model.

RELATED: Frontier Communications posts $5.2B loss in Q2

Frontier's fortunes could use a boost. During its second quarter earnings last month the company reported a $5.2 billion loss.

Frontier lost 71,000 broadband subscribers on a net basis in the second quarter after losing 38,000 in the first quarter. Consumer fiber broadband net losses were 10,000, and consumer copper broadband net losses were 46,000.

In an effort to shed some of its debt, Frontier sold off assets and operations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana for $1.35 billion earlier this year. WaveDivision Capital, in partnership with Searchlight Capital Partners, bought Frontier's assets in the four states.

At the start of the year, Frontier sold off nearly 100 wireless towers in Connecticut, New York and California to Pittsburgh-based Everest Infrastructure Partners for $80 million.

Four years ago, Frontier bought Verizon's wireline operations in California, Florida and Texas for $10.5 billion.

In 2010, Frontier purchased Verizon's rural wireline assets in 14 states for $6.8 billion. Later, Frontier purchased AT&T's Connecticut wireline operations for $2 billion. Frontier has struggled to integrate and service the former Verizon properties.