Powering the agile, AI-ready enterprise with Lumen® Multi-Cloud Gateway

In today’s digital-first AI economy, enterprises are rapidly adopting multicloud strategies to drive innovation, agility and resilience. According to IDC, over 90% of enterprises now deploy hybrid or multicloud environments, with 84% using more than one cloud provider.¹

The benefits are clear: avoid vendor lock-in, optimize costs, meet compliance requirements, and leverage best-of-breed services for AI and digital transformation. However, traditional approaches that rely on complex routing and costly infrastructure lead to high latency, operational headaches and spiraling expenses.

As organizations scale AI workloads and distributed applications across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and more, the costs and complexity of connecting these environments can become a major barrier to growth.

Lumen is breaking down this barrier with Lumen^® Multi-Cloud Gateway, a solution designed to deliver fast, secure connectivity with control across clouds, data centers and enterprise sites—all on a unified, high-performance digital platform.

Challenges in multicloud networking

Businesses face several hurdles as they modernize their cloud and network infrastructure.

The first is complexity and cost. Managing separate circuits for each cloud provider is inefficient and slows down innovation. Traditional approaches lead to high latency, operational headaches and spiraling expenses.

The second is scalability. As enterprises grow, scaling connections to new clouds or sites can be slow and expensive.

The third is security and compliance. Public internet connections expose sensitive data to risk. Ensuring compliance and robust security across multiple clouds is challenging without a unified approach.

The Lumen advantage: simplicity, speed and security

Lumen® Multi-Cloud Gateway transforms cloud connectivity and helps solve these challenges by providing:

• Unified access: One secure port connects your business to all major cloud providers, eliminating the need for separate circuits and reducing provisioning from weeks to minutes.
• Direct, low-latency routing: Traffic moves seamlessly between clouds and enterprise locations over our private IP network, bypassing the public internet and minimizing latency.
• Centralized management: A single platform for policy enforcement, monitoring and troubleshooting reduces operational overhead and points of failure.
• API-first automation: Provision connections in near real-time through Lumen Connect℠ and APIs, enabling rapid deployment and integration into your workflows.

Business outcomes at a glance

The benefits of this type of connectivity are numerous.

One benefit is cost savings. Our solution is designed to consolidate connectivity, reduce the number of required ports and take advantage of high-bandwidth shared links to enable predictable pricing and lower total cost of ownership.

Another is boosted operational efficiency. Centralized routing and management simplify network operations, reduce troubleshooting time and free up resources for innovation.

The next is enhanced security. Private, compliant data paths and integrated routing features protect your data and help meet industry and government regulations.

A final benefit is agility and innovation. Quickly add new clouds, sites or services without redesigning your network, therefore supporting business growth and AI initiatives.

Industry solutions

Lumen Multi-Cloud Gateway helps solve some of the most challenging problems across industries, including:

• Empowering financial services with secure real-time transactions and compliance.
• Enabling retailers to unify channels, optimize inventory and deliver personalized customer experiences.
• Supporting healthcare organizations with seamless EHR sharing, telehealth services and secure data exchange.
• Connecting manufacturers for real-time production data, predictive maintenance and global visibility.
• Accelerating technology services with agile, scalable multicloud access and secure collaboration for digital and AI-driven solutions.

Key use cases 

One key use case is cloud interconnection. Direct, private links between major cloud providers reduce latency and improve security. This enables seamless workload migration, faster application performance and simplified management across multicloud environments, which supports agile business operations and reliable disaster recovery.

Another is premises-to-cloud interconnection. Connect on-premises sites, branch offices and corporate campuses directly to multiple cloud environments through a single, secure gateway. This approach helps ensure consistent performance, robust security and simplified management for hybrid workloads, enabling organizations to extend their private networks to the cloud and support seamless integration of legacy systems with modern cloud applications.

The last is data center interconnection. Securely link multiple data centers and colocation facilities, creating a unified, high-performance network fabric. This streamlines large data transfers, supports business continuity and allows for efficient scaling of resources across locations—all while maintaining consistent security and compliance standards.

Lumen Multi-Cloud Gateway is a feature-rich, cloud-based solution that addresses the complexity, cost and security challenges of multicloud networking. By leveraging the Lumen Trusted Network for AI, businesses can accelerate innovation, improve operational efficiency, and support the growth of AI and digital transformation initiatives.

See how a cloud-based solution from Lumen can help your business boost efficiency and minimize costs.

Learn more 

¹IDC, Multicloud gateway: a new paradigm for agile enterprise cloud networking (Sponsored by: Lumen Technologies), December 2025.

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