CenturyLink grows on-demand network connectivity to Google Cloud Platform

In May, CenturyLink announced it was connecting its IT consulting services across GCP's public cloud. CenturyLink also inked an agreement with GCP last year to connect its customers to Google Cloud globally through Google Cloud Partner Interconnect.

With Tuesday's announcement, CenturyLink is able to offer self-serve, real-time dedicated network connectivity across thousands of endpoints in North America, Asia Pacific and Europe via its fiber network.

CenturyLink added 5,000 new fiber-fed buildings in the second quarter of this year, compared to 4,500 in the first quarter. In July, CenturyLink announced its plan to deploy 4.7 million miles of fiber across the company's intercity networks in the U.S. and Europe. 

"CenturyLink is supporting the digital business with direct, on-demand and scalable cloud networking solutions that customers can easily control," said Paul Savill, CenturyLink senior vice president, core network and technology solutions, in a statement. "With this expansion, Google Cloud customers now have a new, easy way to connect and control their cloud networking environments and adjust bandwidth in response to their evolving business needs."

CenturyLink's Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections enables real-time creation and deletion of private Ethernet connections to GCP via a portal or an API. Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections, which is part of the CenturyLink Cloud Connect portfolio, is available across North America, Asia Pacific and Europe. CenturyLink first announced Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections in October of last year.

In addition to GCP, CenturyLink also has partnerships in place with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections.

CenturyLink Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections plays a leading role in the company's edge compute strategy. In August, CenturyLink outlined its edge compute strategy, which will serve enterprise customers, cloud providers, system integrators, and wireless carriers. At that time, CenturyLink said it had booted up more than 100 initial edge compute locations across the U.S. to provide a range of managed services and hybrid cloud solutions to its customers.

CenturyLink Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections provide real-time network provisioning from the customer premise to CenturyLink's edge locations, which allows businesses to deploy and manage their workloads in an agile development model.

In turn, the edge services can connect to thousands of data centers and office buildings by using CenturyLink Cloud Connect to run distributed IT workloads closer to the edge of the network and closer to the end customers.

"With CenturyLink Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections, enterprises will be able to connect their locations and scale their network up and down as quickly and easily as they do with their Google Cloud workloads," said Kerry Takenaka, product manager, Google Cloud, in a statement. "Having your network behave in a cloud-like elastic way will be a key enabler to enterprises' hybrid cloud strategies and digital transformation."

In addition to the cloud-based services, CenturyLink's global broadcast fiber network, Vyvx Cloud Connect, provides an on-ramp to GCP by offering multi-site, connectivity paths into GCP for high-bandwidth and high-quality video services.

In order to deepen its relationship with GCP, CenturyLink opened the doors on a Google Cloud center of excellence earlier this year that's staffed by certified Google Cloud Architects and engineers who are well-versed in cloud infrastructure, networking, migration and managed services.

source fiercetelecom

Industry: Data Centre / Data Center / Cloud Computing