The new year often brings about a time of reflection, coupled with an anticipation of what’s to come. Along those lines, we wanted to share with you some key highlights of 2015 and things to look forward to in 2016. 2015 was a busy year at CenturyLink Cloud, as we expanded our global presence, completed hundreds of product and feature launches on a 15-day cadence, and were recognized by industry experts as a leading cloud service provider.
Leading Industry Analyst Firms Recognize CenturyLink's 2015 Cloud Achievements
- Frost & Sullivan honors CenturyLink Cloud with Company of the Year Award for the North American Cloud Industry and also published a report on how CenturyLink is Setting the Standard for the Next Generation of Cloud Services.
Gartner granted us “Visionary” status in their annual Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service. (1)
Gartner also named us a “Leader” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, Asia Pacific, 2015. (2)
Platform Highlights of 2015
One of the top concerns of our customers when it comes to cloud is security. In an effort to outline key security strategies we compiled the CenturyLink Cloud Security Overview Guide (and an eBook, if you’d like the 5 Best Practices cliff notes version). Take our “Weakest Link Assessment” to find the Weakest Link in your IT Security Strategy.
Compliance is also a hot topic with consumers of the cloud, and rightfully so. Ensuring that your infrastructure meets the regulations of different compliance bodies can be cumbersome. We understand that; so we created our Compliance Center along with additional Knowledge Base resources that provide a deeper dive into compliance.
High Availability (HA) is also top of mind with our customers; so we wrote the Seven Secrets to High Availability in the Cloud solution brief.
We expanded our platform by launching Bare Metal and AppFog, providing physical infrastructure on-demand and a Pivotal-based Platform-as-a-Service offering respectively.
We added cloud capabilities for our customers in the Asia Pacific region by offering our public cloud in our Singapore data center, a hub for our managed hosting and network offerings.
We updated our API and created SDKs for .NET, Python, NodeJS, Go, and Java, and launched a Developer Center targeted to those with a technical interest in our platform.
To give our customers functionality beyond that provided by the Platform, we've partnered with more than 200 partners through our Marketplace Provider Program.
We acquired Orchestrate to provide a lightning fast NoSQL database option.
Update and patch your servers using automation with our Patching-as-a- Service offering.
Check real-time data center and service status via our new status portal.
We enhanced our Knowledge Base with an easily searchable, cataloged interface and wrote hundreds of how-to and best practice articles. Here are a few of the most popular from 2015:
Configuring High Availability (AlwaysOn) on Microsoft SQL Server Databases
What to Look Forward to in 2016:
Infrastructure Innovation: advanced storage, network, and compute options for your complex, growing needs.
Anywhere Services: Offering managed services wherever your workloads are running.
Platform Integration: Supporting real hybrid scenarios by connecting network services via self-service, and receiving more integrated support from our teams.
Want to Learn More?
Check out our YouTube channel, where you can watch videos from our senior leadership and experts on the latest tech topics and learn more about CenturyLink's story and vision.
Ready to Test Drive the Cloud? Start with a Free Trial of our Platform.
(1) Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide; Gartner; May 18, 2015; Lydia Leong, Doug Toombs, Bob Gill (2) Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, Asia Pacific; Gartner; November 11, 2015, To Chee Eng, Kenshi Tazaki, Vincent Fu, Arup Roy Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from CenturyLink.
