Windstream’s Kinetic Business unit rolled out a new Cloud Connect product offering enterprises dedicated connections to third-party and private clouds, aiming to streamline network architecture and improve the security of data transmissions to and from these environments.
A Windstream representative told Fierce it partnered with Equinix to offer private virtual wide-area network (WAN) connections enabling businesses to directly access “critical data housed in data centers all over the globe.” The representative added Windstream has “agreements and procedures” in place to link customers to Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and Google cloud environments.
Jeff Lowney, president of strategic accounts for Kinetic Business, said in a statement the cloud services businesses rely on today “are only as strong as the networks that connect them. That’s why we offer this cost-effective, secure, dedicated connectivity that supports business apps and scales as customers add new ones.”
The company said it can supply bandwidth ranging from 50 Mbps to 10 Gbps for Cloud Connect customers and pitched the service as a way to enhance existing SD-WAN and MPLS networks.
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Detailing how Cloud Connect hooks into these, the Windstream representative explained Kinetic can plug a customer’s Layer 3 IP traffic into that customer’s existing virtual routing and forwarding tables to create another “remote” location for their communication needs. When SD-WAN is used as an overlay network, it can install virtual customer edge devices at the data center to optimize performance of mission critical traffic.
Cloud Connect can also accommodate Layer 2 needs, the representative added.
Windstream is now a private company, following its emergence from bankruptcy proceedings in September 2020. During its Q2 2020 earnings report, the last before it went private, company executives said it had 3,200 SD-WAN customers under contract representing over 29,000 endpoint locations.