Microsoft Adds BT And Verizon To Its Azure ExpressRoute Ecosystem

3 min. read

Published on April 9, 2014

published on April 9, 2014

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Microsoft today announced the expansion of Azure ExpressRoute ecosystem with new alliances with BT and Verizon. Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute ecosystem already includes AT&T, Equinix and Level 3 in the US. With these new partnerships, Microsoft is reducing barriers for adoption of cloud computing and accelerating the growth of Microsoft Azure by providing a more secure and reliable connectivity option for enterprise customers.

BT announcement:

BT and Microsoft announced today a global agreement to provide customers with high performance and more secure connectivity to Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud platform, with Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute.

Customers will be able to take advantage of the flexibility and agility offered by cloud resources, with the assurance of a dedicated, more secure connection to their data and applications.

Azure ExpressRoute allows customers to bypass the public Internet when connecting to Azure through a private connection based on BT’s IP Connect VPN service. As a result, enterprise customers have a seamless, hybrid IT environment encompassing their corporate networks, data centres and the Azure cloud platform. BT’s IP Connect VPN service, which is available in 198 countries and territories, integrates the Azure infrastructure directly with the wide area networks of customers. Customers will benefit from lower latency, more predictable performance and enhanced security for Azure workloads.

The service is due to go live in summer 2014 in Europe through direct network connectivity to Microsoft Azure data centres in Dublin and Amsterdam. This will be followed by connections in Asia, then by additional locations around the world.

Read more about it here.

Verizon’s announcement:

Verizon is addressing the growing need for organizations to connect more than one cloud seamlessly and securely, with the launch of its Secure Cloud Interconnect service. Enterprise organizations will be able to use Verizon’s Private IP service to connect to multiple cloud services including the Verizon cloud and Microsoft Azure, with an additional half-dozen other major cloud services expected to come online later this year.

In addition, enterprises that have located their private cloud infrastructure in Equinix data centers can directly access Verizon’s Private IP service in 15 Equinix data centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific; (Northern Virginia., Newark, N.J., Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Silicon Valley; London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris; Sydney, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore).

“With Secure Cloud Interconnect, Verizon is removing the barriers for enterprise cloud adoption,” said Michael Palmer, vice president of product development for Verizon. “The reality is that many organizations today use multiple clouds to meet their business and technical objectives, but there was no easy way to manage this environment until now.

“Our new offering uniquely gives enterprises everything they require in a multi-cloud environment– security, private connectivity, performance, simplicity and efficiency. SCI will enable a wide range of applications and use cases for organizations,” stated Palmer.

Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect service will offer a combination of features to enterprises, including dynamic bandwidth allocation with fully redundant connections, application performance throughput and quality of service, usage-based billing, and simple provisioning and management via a centralized portal.