04 December 2020

Lumen's edge offering

"The way we work has significantly changed - in fact, in a recent Lumen trend report* 76% of UK IT decision makers surveyed say that in the wake of Covid-19, working remotely will become the 'new normal', says Claudio Scola, head of product management for EMEA, Lumen. "As a result, enterprises need to move away from managing on-premises call managers and PBXs to flexible cloud-based solutions."

Scola says the new Cisco hosted collaboration solution delivered by Lumen provides businesses with a secure, simple and effective way to engage with employees, customers and partners virtually anywhere, from any device. He adds that the cloud-based hosted unified solution allows customers dedicated use of the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (call manager) and collaboration services and includes the full Cisco user experience with several levels of redundancy.

"Since it’s a hosted solution, it frees up IT resources and enterprises benefit from consistency and flexibility with minimized upfront investments," adds Scola. "Customers can simply dial-up-or-down their requirements as needed to empower their workforce and increase business efficiencies and agility. With a comprehensive back-end solution in-place, stakeholders can focus on the tasks at-hand to move their business forward."

As enterprises embrace the 4th industrial revolution, Scola says Lumen is seeing an increasing demand for compute resources to be closer to the digital interaction that requires it. "Currently enterprises analyse and act on around only 1% of the daily data they generate. Edge Compute unlocks the potential of digital businesses by enabling a much higher proportion of data to be analysed," he says. "It does this by overcoming limitations imposed by latency, bandwidth, regulation and site availability. The Lumen platform is an enterprise technology platform that combines adaptive networking, edge cloud, connected security, and collaboration solutions, to accelerate next-generation business applications and data."

Scola says Lumen is developing edge computing services that offer multiple edge compute execution venues that will meet any latency or bandwidth requirement. "These include a customer premises device called the Lumen Edge Gateway, a universal CPE that replaces the router, switch or firewall and can host customer applications that ideally need to be on-premise; Lumen Private Cloud which can be located in any edge hosting environment; and Lumen Edge Compute Node which is pre-built capacity at the edge of Lumen’s network," he says . "All of these execution venues will support Lumen’s Network functions virtualization (NFV) marketplace and customer cloud hosting. Everything is controlled through the Lumen Orchestrator, including the WAN and Internet connections. What makes this unique is that the Lumen Orchestrator has APIs into AWS and Azure and can therefore manage the lifecycle of a multi-vendor Hybrid Cloud. The Lumen platform ties the orchestration of distributed applications, data and infrastructure all the way down through the network layers to establish connectivity with the lowest possible latency and provide the performance, security and managed services each application needs, end-to-end."

*Lumen global trend report: How the 4th Industrial Revolution is changing IT, Business and the World