Lumen Technologies is reshaping enterprise application delivery with Microsoft

Lumen has formed a strategic relationship with Microsoft that will shape the next generation of enterprise application delivery by bringing Microsoft Azure capabilities onto the Lumen platform. Mutual customers will benefit from being able to run their Microsoft-based solutions closer to where digital interactions are occurring using the global Edge Computing services of Lumen, creating one of the fastest, most secure platforms for applications and data.

"Working with Microsoft, Lumen will offer businesses and developers capabilities at the edge that are unique in the industry," said Shaun Andrews, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Lumen. "By deeply integrating more of our platform services with Microsoft Azure, we can help businesses quickly utilize their data for the insights they want and need, with the ability to support unique and customized use cases. We're excited about the innovations and amazing new digital experiences we can enable for our mutual customers by extending Azure to the edge of our global network."

Lumen will collaborate with Microsoft on several future go-to-market efforts to support mutual customers worldwide, using the resources of the Lumen Edge Experience Center, including:

• A certified Azure deployment which will be able to run in Lumen Edge Computing nodes worldwide, unlocking more low latency and high bandwidth use cases for customers of Azure service platform.

• Communication sector solutions based around Private 5G networks that would leverage the cloud-native software capabilities of Microsoft and the Lumen fiber network and Edge Computing capabilities. These solutions would allow customers to optimize their wireless networks and push workloads even closer to digital interactions.

• Enterprise sector managed solutions for a wide range of Microsoft software and cloud services to help optimize performance of business workloads and support a customer's entire workforce, wherever they may reside.

"By making Microsoft Azure technology available on the Lumen platform we are giving enterprises access to an environment where they can get the low-latency performance they need for critical applications, with the familiarity of Microsoft services and tools," said Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president, Azure for Operators at Microsoft. "With this collaboration we are expanding the ways in which businesses can connect Azure to their enterprise networks and are excited about having Lumen as a collaboration partner to expand the number of use cases we can achieve at the edge of the network."

Further solidifying their alliance, Lumen has selected Azure as the preferred public cloud venue for workloads that serve its enterprise customers, helping to improve customer experience for the Lumen platform and transforming the ways in which new service features get added to the platform. Enterprise customers will benefit from having consistent access management experiences across all Lumen digital services. Lumen will also leverage Azure, Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft 365 E5 Security & Compliance for its internal digital transformation.   

Additionally, Microsoft has named Lumen as one of its preferred partners supporting Azure globally with Lumen networking, infrastructure, and managed services. Enterprise customers will benefit from having even more high-performing network connectivity to all their Azure services from the Lumen platform. 

As businesses move enterprise workloads to the edge and increasingly use multi-cloud environments, seamless integration of networking and cloud is paramount to optimize performance.