Spirit Communications and Lumos Networks expand Express Cloud Access service
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Spirit Communications and Lumos Networks expand Express Cloud Access service

Spirit Communications and Lumos Networks have expanded its Express Cloud Access service to North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

The Express Cloud Access service provides customers with carrier grade, direct access to i multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). When first deployed in 2016, the service was available on Lumos’ Mid-Atlantic network and now operates across the combined company’s nine-state footprint.

“Expanding the reach of Express Cloud Access will help businesses in the Southeast protect the response time of their cloud resources from potential congestion, latency, and data exposure on the public Internet,” said Greg Guerra, chief operating officer of the combination of Lumos Networks and Spirit Communications. “Now, we can bring the Express Cloud Access service directly to the doors of these organisations via our fibre network. There are a significant number of enterprises that will benefit from the combination of carrier-class access to CSPs, delivered over a super-regional fibre network.”

By using the Express Cloud Access service customers are able to direct connect to CSPs bypassing the public internet, benefitting from increased speed, security and reliability. In addition, the service allows the CSP to become the virtual end-point on the customers WAN, meaning that users can access it with the same level of network performance and security as any other end-point on the WAN

According to a 2017 MacAfee report on the state of cloud adoption and security, 93% of businesses are using cloud services and cloud spending is expected to consume 80% of all IT budgets by the yeat 2019.

“These trends underscore the importance of carrier-class, network access to CSPs. Without it, cloud services may not have acceptable response times, which can negatively affect a business,” said Dan Watts, head of product management for the combined company. “If a company doesn’t use the public Internet for their corporate WAN, why would they rely on it for connectivity to a key CSP? Express Cloud Access helps maximise the performance of cloud resources. The bigger a company’s investment in the cloud, the more important this performance becomes.”

CSPs accessible through the service include: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Google Cloud Platform, SoftLayer, Oracle Cloud, among others.

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