Windstream 'Diverse Connect' Delivers Business Cloud Continuity

As more and more businesses move to the cloud, service providers are challenged with ensuring high availability, reliability and security for cloud services across a diverse access network. To meet this challenge, Windstream has launched a new Diverse Connect service that aims to keep a customer's network endpoints connected and ensures the performance of mission-critical business functions.

The Diverse Connect service utilizes a combination of Windstream's fiber footprint and fixed wireless assets, which the company acquired through the 2014 acquisition of Business Only Broadband. Diverse Connect also utilities backup power, and diversity in routers, points of presence and transport networks to reduce the threat of single points of failure. (See Windstream Introduces Diverse Connect.)

"Single points of failure are prevalent -- our customers need solutions that can drive effective continuity into their business," Mike Kozlowski, vice president of product management at Windstream Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: WIN), told Light Reading's Editor-at-Large, Carol Wilson this week. "This is a simplified diversity solution," he says. "And we are delivering it with an end-to-end five-nines SLA [99.999% service level agreement]. So we are creating the diversity, showing it to them and packaging it so it can be easily consumed and then providing that end-to-end SLA to back it up." (See Windstream Redefines Continuity for the Cloud.)

Windstream is already seeing intense interest from financial services and healthcare businesses and Kozlowski says retail and professional services will soon follow.

Diverse Connect is part of Windstream's solution set that includes voice, data, Unified Communications and security offerings. It provides customers choices to build out and customize their services based on individual needs and allows them to maintain network redundancy.

"We have been doing business continuity solutions for a long time now, but we made an effort to leverage assets and be much more deliberate in how we package it for customers so they don't have to deal with the friction of à la carte approach," Kozlowski told Wilson. "This is largely about how we package and present this to our customers in a way that is more effective for them to consume."

Other operators are offering wireless access backups so what distinguishes Windstream's offer is the packaging and ease of use, according to Kozlowski.

— Elizabeth Miller Coyne, Managing Editor, Light Reading

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