Lumen Technologies expanded the reach of its Multi-Cloud Gateway service to more than 10 million U.S. business locations, a reach that pushes service availability beyond the network provider’s managed physical footprint.

The extension allows locations that are currently outside of Lumen’s owned fiber reach to link into Lumen’s gateway platform via “qualified third-party connected locations” and receive the same features. This linking is through Lumen’s Ethernet Fabric Connect that sits within the Lumen connect portal and through APIs, with the gateway portal supporting management of routing policies, segmentation controls, and digital service control.

Lumen launched the Multi-Cloud Gateway platform earlier this year, targeting the platform at growing demand for multicloud connectivity and tapping into Lumen’s push into the network-as-a-service (NaaS) business.

Dave Shacochis, VP of product management at Lumen, explained to SDxCentral at that time that the offering is “a more pure, multicloud routing service that we can configure and allow customers to link up any one of their fabrics [on-premises] as well as any of the hyperscale platforms that we have gateways and on ramps to be able to privately link them all together.”

“Really geared for customers that want to create private layer-three connectivity between cloud, [on-premises], and data center sources, but do so completely privately that we just set up and allow them to configure and manage within the Lumen Connect portal,” Shacochis added.

The service was termed a “kind of reimagining” of some already launched capabilities that were targeted at multiprotocol label switching (MPLS)-VPNs.

“We've always been able to connect those environments into public clouds and route there through any one of our on ramps,” Shacochis noted. “Multi-Cloud Gateway really improves the user experience and accelerates the time to value by making all of that just more automated and configurable, as opposed to something we sell as an add-on to a traditional telecom service.”

The updated service is being targeted at customers running applications that span multiple data sources, runtimes, and hosted environments.

“They're probably running more than one data center in a metro area, so linking all that together, certainly at the application layer, with more private IP is something that's becoming increasingly relevant for those types of applications,” Shacochis added.

NaaS weather update

Lumen’s extended service reach comes under increasing cloud cover for the broader NaaS market.

Lumen’s most recent earnings showed continued buoyancy driven by NaaS, with CEO Kate Johnson noting the vendor’s NaaS customer base grew to more than 3,000 customers in the quarter and more than 20% of these were brand new customers.

“Somewhere around 60% … of the customers that were already Lumen customers were adding NaaS circuits. They weren’t migrating,” Johnson added. “This is clearly a share take; it’s not a one-for-one translation of the legacy business into strategic.”

However, a recent Futurum Group report described NaaS as “a small wallet with an outsized pipeline,” with low market adoption (13%) despite 62% of enterprises actively evaluating potential production rollouts.

But just a few weeks prior, a Gartner report went the other way around, labelling it as “overhyped” and placing it firmly in its “trough of disillusionment.” NaaS found itself in the waning portion of the analyst firm’s hype cycle alongside more mature technologies like 5G, and function accelerator cards like data processing units (DPUs) or smart network interface cards (NICs).

Gartner claimed vendors were positioning array services as NaaS but were “rarely” meeting formal definitions and described the offering as “adolescent.”