Lumen Technologies has expanded its enterprise networking portfolio with Lumen Multi-Cloud Gateway (MCGW) and enhanced metro data center connectivity across sixteen major US markets. The company says the goal is to move data “quickly and securely across clouds, data centers, and distributed locations” as AI increases data volumes and pushes more workloads into distributed architectures.
MCGW is positioned as a centralized multi-cloud routing capability delivered as a software-defined, self-service routing layer on Lumen’s global fiber network. Lumen says MCGW provides private, high-capacity connectivity among enterprises, hyperscalers, and emerging cloud platforms, and “turns traditional telecom interconnection into a programmable cloud fabric,” enabling dynamic cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-enterprise connectivity, traffic optimization for performance and cost, and support for “AI workload distribution and real-time data exchange.” Lumen also says MCGW unifies connectivity, routing, and policy to reduce operational complexity, speed time to service, and lower total cost of ownership.
On the metro side, Lumen says it has expanded Metro Ethernet and IP Services to provide high-capacity, dedicated connectivity across sixteen US markets, with up to 100 Gbps between regional data centers, campuses, and edge locations, and up to 400 Gbps at key cloud data centers in those markets. Lumen lists AI training, analytics, replication, and disaster recovery as target use cases for moving large datasets over these links. Recently upgraded markets include Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Phoenix, Portland, San Antonio, San Jose, and Seattle.
In a quote focused on architecture impacts for distributed environments, IDC’s Courtney Munroe said, “AI is reshaping network design, pushing enterprises to move from experimentation to execution with architectures that reduce latency, cost variability, and operational complexity,” said Courtney Munroe, Vice President, Worldwide Telecommunications Research at IDC. “As workloads become more distributed and performance sensitive, organizations are rethinking how they connect edge sites, data centers, and multiple clouds, and Lumen’s network fabric shows how programmable networks can deliver more consistent data movement.”
Lumen also called out industry applications for enterprises scaling AI deployments: financial services (synchronizing risk, payments, and fraud workloads across multiple clouds with centralized policy control), retail (faster analytics by accelerating data movement across cloud and enterprise environments), healthcare (data separation, telehealth, imaging and analytics, disaster recovery, and research workloads across institutions and resource centers), and manufacturing (connecting regional facilities and cloud environments for real-time analytics and predictive maintenance).
Source: Lumen Technologies
