Chris Morley, President & COO Strategic Business Segments As the “consumerization of IT” continues to evolve, IT environment is getting relatively complex. There is not a single cloud platform that can successfully, efficiently, and safely solve all the IT workload demands. “Today, IT workloads require different performance, security, and various other features and that is why so many pursue a hybrid cloud strategy,” says Chris Morley, President and COO, Cloud and Connectivity at Zayo Group (NYSE: ZAYO). The company offers their own hybrid cloud environment with different hypervisor options as well as private and public-based cloud. In addition, through their vast network and connect to cloud options, Zayo makes it easier to federate with other cloud providers. They provide communications infrastructure services, including fiber and bandwidth connectivity, colocation and cloud services.
Zayo provides data center colocation in the North America and Europe through over 50 data centers and a wide array of connectivity options from dark fiber to lit services options including wavelengths, Ethernet, and IP services. “Our comprehensive and integrated service suite enables customers to reduce the number of vendors they have to manage and offers them portability as their needs evolve,” explains Morley. “We also offer different security audits and risk assessments, including SSAE16 SOC2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GLBA.”
Zayo offers hybrid Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), combining private and public cloud as well as dedicated hosting, that supports organizations with the perfect approach needed to obtain the performance and capacity they desire. “In addition to IaaS, businesses can utilize connectivity to an on-premises data center that they can operate themselves,” adds Morley. With IaaS, all the workloads and data, the mix of production, test/development, and disaster recovery services, as well as storage, IT security, and performance requirements can be optimized for maximum efficiency, economy, and control.
Through IaaS, businesses can encompass connectivity to an on-premises data center that they can operate themselves
In addition to providing everything from bare metal servers to private cloud and all the way up to usage-based, multitenant public cloud, the Zayo platform also compiles a set of managed services like security and performance monitoring. “We take a tailored approach to customers’ requirements,” asserts Morley. “Zayo’s solutions are purpose built based on the needs of each customer.” Zayo collaborates with big players like HP, F5, Cisco, and Juniper to provide better performance and greater agility and offers a true Enterprise Grade Infrastructure. Since they use the enterprise grade components, they can offer industry leading service level agreements (SLAs).
Zayo’s customer base covers a wide arena of industries comprising wireless and wireline carriers, media and content organizations, finance, and healthcare. An example illustrating the company’s expertise include an on-demand video aggregator that makes numerous decisions on commercials to play during on demand television programs. As the client found their business scaling rapidly, they knew that managing their own infrastructure to keep up with the growth would be challenging. Their decision to host on Zayo’s platform gave them a hybrid mix of everything they needed with dedicated hosts for their databases and big data platform. The company also assisted the client with a private cloud to host the client’s production systems and public cloud to enable them to support testing and development with their end users.The company remains focused on how they can further integrate their infrastructure products to create complete solutions. Zayo continues to concentrate on their strategy to strengthen their value proposition by expanding their product offerings to support their brand. “Our inquisitive nature and experience in mergers and acquisitions give us the opportunity to grow and expand our platform at a rapid rate,” concludes Morley.
