Accelerate Your AI Success With a Simplified Multi-Cloud Strategy

According to Gartner, nearly 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach—including multi-cloud environments—by 2027.¹ But are they truly prepared for the complexity that comes with it?

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies to optimize performance, reduce costs and enhance resilience. Yet managing multiple cloud platforms brings its own set of challenges—from integration and visibility to security and scalability.

To thrive in an AI-first world, you’ll need more than just access to the cloud—you’ll also require intelligent, adaptive networks that evolve alongside your business. As you embrace multi-cloud to fuel innovation, you’re likely to encounter operational and strategic challenges that demand a new approach to networking. Overcoming these issues requires robust solutions designed for the multi-cloud era with speed, security and agility at their core.

Challenges of Navigating the Complexities of a Multi-Cloud Environment

As multi-cloud adoption accelerates to support AI workloads and broader digital transformation initiatives, traditional networks struggle to keep up. Without modern infrastructure and adaptive connectivity, you could risk stalled innovation, performance breakdowns and heightened security exposure.

These obstacles could be standing in the way of your AI success:

• Unpredictable traffic demands: The explosive growth of AI and generative AI workloads is straining data center capacity, creating volatile and unpredictable traffic patterns. Real-time scalability and flexibility will help your business stay ahead.
• Latency and flexibility Issues: Transitioning between clouds should be seamless, but high latency and limited interoperability often cause disruptions that compromise operations and user experience.
• Security and data sovereignty risks: Multi-cloud environments widen the attack surface and raise jurisdictional concerns. Ethernet-based architectures with secure connectivity are key to ensuring data privacy, integrity and sovereignty, especially in regulated industries.
• Complex network management: Managing a patchwork of cloud services often means grappling with inconsistent technologies, siloed systems and fragmented visibility. Simplified and unified management tools provide end-to-end transparency, automation and control across every layer of the network.

Lumen offers a range of solutions to help you address these challenges quickly, easily and cost-effectively.

7 Ways Lumen Helps Businesses Thrive in a Multi-Cloud World

Lumen offers a powerful suite of solutions designed to simplify operations, enhance performance and provide the agility required to compete in today’s AI-first, multi-cloud world. At the heart of this approach is Lumen® Network as a Service (NaaS)—a flexible, on-demand model that enable your business to dynamically provision, manage and scale high-performance connectivity as easily as cloud services.

Here’s how your business can benefit from this approach:

1. Stay ahead of AI demands: AI workloads are dynamic and often unpredictable. Lumen provides high-capacity networks built to keep pace with these demands. With high-capacity bandwidth available from more than 70 colocation data centers, Lumen enables your network to handle the most demanding AI workloads. Additionally, dynamic bandwidth allocation powered by adaptive networking supports optimal performance and cost savings.
2. Adapt in real time: Business needs evolve fast—your network should too. Lumen enables on-demand, scalable connectivity to match your momentum. This means you have an immediate pathway for secure, rapid connectivity that evolves with your needs. The scalability allows you to expand bandwidth and add connections as needed, ensuring your network grows with your business.
3. Optimize costs without sacrificing performance: Get more out of your budget with flexible pricing and minimal upfront investment. Lumen offers usage-based pricing with pay-as-you-go flexibility, allowing you to optimize costs. And reduced capital expenditure through infrastructure divestment and a streamlined investment strategy helps you get the most out of your budget without compromising on performance.
4. Maximize application performance: From AI to analytics, your critical workloads need consistent speed and reliability. Lumen provides high-bandwidth, low-latency networks built for performance-critical applications. Reliable connectivity ensures consistent and dependable network performance, which is crucial for maintaining business continuity.
5. Streamline network management: Managing your network shouldn’t feel like  navigating a maze. Lumen simplifies provisioning and control with the Lumen control center manager, which offers centralized provisioning, monitoring and service configuration. Streamlined provisioning with intuitive tools and automation reduces operational overhead, making network management more efficient.
6. Protect what matters: Security and compliance aren’t optional—they’re foundational. Lumen provides real-time DDoS protection and 24/7 monitoring backed by Black Lotus Labs® threat intelligence, maintaining data integrity and compliance with industry standards. Secure, private connections across offices, data centers and cloud environments further enhance security.
7. Build infrastructure flexibility: Choose infrastructure that matches your mix of workloads and locations. Lumen offers dynamic connectivity services that can be deployed, scaled and managed in minutes via a self-service portal or APIs. Both fiber and copper connections are available, though fiber is recommended for its superior bandwidth and range.

This flexible, AI-ready network foundation sets the stage for meaningful transformation that’s helping businesses achieve impressive results.

Real-World Examples of Multi-Cloud Success

Lumen multi-cloud solutions aren’t just theoretical. They’re already driving measurable results for our customers. Here are two examples that show how our capabilities translate into real-world success.

Seamless cloud migration

Certegy Payment Solutions needed a seamless, secure transition to a multi-cloud environment to support real-time payment processing and enhance customer experience. With unpredictable traffic patterns and strict security requirements, traditional infrastructure couldn’t keep pace.

By deploying Lumen® Cloud Connect for uninterrupted migration, Lumen® IP VPN for secure, high-performance connectivity and Lumen® Adaptive Network Security for low-latency protection, Certegy successfully reduced transaction processing times and migrated without service disruptions, delivering consistent availability and improved client satisfaction.

Scalable AI at the edge

Lumen and IBM collaborated to develop enterprise-grade AI solutions at the edge, integrating IBM’s watsonx AI products with Lumen Edge Cloud infrastructure and network, which offers sub-5 millisecond latency and direct connectivity to major cloud providers and enterprise locations. This collaboration aims to bring powerful, real-time AI inference closer to where data is generated, helping companies overcome cost, latency, and security barriers as they scale AI adoption and enhance customer experiences.

Deploying IBM watsonx technology in Lumen edge data centers and leveraging Lumen multi-cloud architecture can help clients across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and retail analyze massive volumes of data in near real-time, minimizing latency while boosting responsiveness and operational insight.

Lumen multi-cloud solutions enable you to achieve similar results and position your business to lead in the digital economy.

Building the Backbone for AI-Driven Innovation

The digital race doesn’t wait and neither should your infrastructure. Businesses that harness the full potential of multi-cloud environments with intelligent, adaptive networks position themselves not just to compete, but to lead.

Through our Network-as-a-Service offerings, Lumen empowers enterprises to meet the demands of multi-cloud complexity with secure sub-5 millisecond latency, dynamic scalability and seamless cloud integration. With over 1,500 connected data centers and a proven track record across industries, Lumen is helping businesses turn network strategy into competitive advantage.

As AI reshapes the digital landscape, the right network strategy will define tomorrow’s leaders. Is your business ready?

Ready to simplify your multi-cloud complexity? Unlock seamless, high-performance connectivity with Lumen NaaS—designed to meet the demands of AI-first innovation across 1,500+ data centers.

¹Gartner, Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Total $723 Billion in 2025, November 19, 2024.

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