Lumen Technologies is partnering with Amazon Web Services to drastically simplify how businesses connect to the cloud, reducing a process that often takes weeks down to a matter of hours. The collaboration, announced Wednesday, makes Lumen the first network provider for a new service, AWS Interconnect – last mile, which leverages Lumen's extensive network to create a faster, software-driven on-ramp to the AWS cloud.
This move directly addresses a long-standing bottleneck in enterprise cloud adoption. While cloud services themselves are agile, establishing the secure, high-performance private network connections to them has remained a complex, multi-vendor process involving lengthy manual configuration. "What once took multiple providers and weeks to set up is becoming a simple, software-driven experience," Lumen said in its announcement.
The partnership integrates Lumen's last-mile and metro network infrastructure directly with AWS. This allows businesses to connect their enterprise locations to the cloud using a single, pre-integrated solution. The new offering aims to reduce the time to establish private connectivity from an industry average of several weeks to potentially under an hour, representing a more than 90% improvement in deployment speed for some customers.
For Lumen, this collaboration opens up a significant revenue stream by positioning its vast fiber network as the default, easy-to-use bridge for enterprises moving to hybrid cloud architectures. For AWS, it strengthens its ecosystem by removing a major point of friction for customers, making its platform more attractive to large enterprises compared to competitors like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud who face similar last-mile challenges. The move reflects a broader industry trend of bringing network and cloud stacks closer together, treating connectivity not as an afterthought, but as a core, integrated component of the cloud experience.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
