Lumen Technologies and IBM have integrated IMB’s Cloud Satellite with Lumen’s edge platform across 180,000 global Lumen enterprise locations, in an effort to address a growing need for deployment flexibility, low-latency and data sovereignty within enterprises.
With this integration, IBM says its hybrid cloud services are now available in any environment — on any cloud, on premises or at the edge — and Lumen’s enterprise customers now have access to cloud services such as artificial intelligence (AI), security and automation, all via IBM Cloud Satellite.
According to IBM, there are five defined cloud deployment models, from a private cloud on-premises to a public cloud service with a cloud service provider. The hybrid cloud offers added flexibility by preventing companies from having to choose just one of these five models.
The IBM Cloud Satellite, specifically, is built on Red Hat’s OpenShift, allowing customers to access the benefits of the cloud can be done from “anywhere, from the core of the data center to the farthest reaches of the network,” according to Howard Boville, head of IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform.
“With the Lumen platform’s broad reach, we are giving our enterprise customers access to IBM Cloud Satellite to help them drive innovation more rapidly at the edge,” said Paul Savill, SVP of enterprise product management andsServices at Lumen in a statement. “Our enterprise customers can now extend IBM Cloud services across Lumen’s robust global network, enabling them to deploy data-heavy edge applications that demand high security and ultra-low latency. By bringing secure and open hybrid cloud capabilities to the edge, our customers can propel their businesses forward and take advantage of the emerging applications of the 4th Industrial Revolution.”
Gartner has predicted that by 2025, 75% of enterprise grade data will be created and processed at the edge, taking place on billions of connected devices, hinting at how critical solutions like this one that offer a secured, unifying layer of cloud services across environments might prove to be in the near future.
