The Enterprise Journey

The October 22nd Telarus Tuesday call welcomed Spectrum’s senior manager national partner development, JC Boley, to discuss their ancillary managed products. The entire recording is available here.

What Value Does Spectrum Bring?

Spectrum provides network, cloud, IT infrastructure solutions, and managed services to clients nationwide, leveraging their wholly-owned fiber network. They continue to invest $1B annually in capital to accelerate their commitment to driving fiber deeper into their markets.

• 3^rd largest U.S. provider of fiber-lit buildings
• 4^th largest Ethernet provider in U.S.
• Ranked 31 for “Ease of Doing Business” in the ATLANTIC-ACM survey of business telecom buyers.

Managed Network Services (MNS) is a collection of managed services that are used to protect and manage customer WAN. From essential routing to advanced network defense systems, Spectrum can maximize customer networks for performance and efficiency while reducing overall costs. Managed Network service is compromised of two product offers:

• Managed Router Service (MRS)
  • Includes Cisco CPE at customer locations with Fiber Internet Access (FIA) or Ethernet (EPL, EVPL, and EPLAN) services.
  • Ensure network continuity, provides reliable connections, minimizes network disruptions.
• Managed Security Service (MSS)
  • Includes Fortinet CPE at customer locations with Fiber Internet Access (FIA).
  • Eliminate network threats, protects data, provides remote security – VPN/mobile.
  • Fully managed and maintained firewall

When you hear the following words, it’s a good time to talk MNS:

• “We’re about to do a Network Refresh”
• “My end equipment is End of Life/End of Sale”
• “Our CPE won’t work for this product, e.g., TDM to Ethernet”
• “We have limited IT resources”
• “We don’t have the budget to set up our own management platform”
• We’re having some issues with our vendor management”

What is Cloud Connect?

Cloud Connect is a secure private Ethernet connection across the Spectrum Enterprise nationwide network to major Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). Businesses are realizing the advantages of using cloud services instead of maintaining their own private server infrastructure, Spectrum’s Cloud Connect gives them a simple and painless way to establish a private connection to either of these two CSPs.  Spectrum provides the service through a partnership with Equinix, and their network engineering team has established several NNI (Network-to-Network Interface) meet points across the country. An NNI can be thought of as nothing more than a router that makes the Equinix Cloud Exchange appear as an extension of Spectrum’s own Ethernet Services network so that they can easily add either AWS or Azure as endpoints to a client location. The diagram below shows an example of an Ethernet Private Line (EPL) circuit connecting one client location to the Cloud Connect, but EVPL is also supported as an E-LINE option.

Similarly, they can add the Cloud Connect service as just another endpoint to an ELAN solution, which is an any-to-any service, meaning any customer site and their cloud service can equally send data among each other.

Eighty-three percent of all data will pass through the cloud and be managed by Cloud Services Providers by 2020.  With the Cloud Connect product, Spectrum has established themselves as a simple solution to ease their client’s migration to cloud services.

To learn more about Spectrum Enterprise visit, https://enterprise.spectrum.com/.