Aiming to help customers “hit the cloud running” with its “transformative” network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, BT has switched on its Global Fabric.
The new platform is designed to connect the multiple clouds businesses use for their applications and data with users, such as customers and employees, and will allow them to take advantage of the new wave of digital automation and artificial intelligence (AI), making it easier and quicker to securely connect employees, customers and devices to apps and digital services.
BT said Global Fabric customers will benefit from scalable, secure, high-capacity and resilient connectivity, ready to meet the growing and complex demands of networks. It added that whereas with legacy networks, setting up or making changes to connectivity services could take weeks, with Global Fabric, it happens in an “instant”, helping businesses manage unpredictable, AI-driven spikes in data traffic.
Running on the new network underlay will be an AI-powered digital orchestration layer. Global Fabric will be deterministic, with BT supplying a predictable application experience by selecting the optimal end-to-end paths for customers’ applications and workloads as they move to and between multiple clouds and users.
Options will include a BT-enhanced internet service, point-to-point Ethernet, multipoint Ethernet and MPLS, and these will be offered in bandwidth increments of 1Mbps up to 100Gbps. Connectivity will be interchangeable on the same port, offering greater flexibility than current networks.
Global Fabric’s core network hardware is installed in the world’s major carrier-neutral facilities – large datacentres where cloud providers, software-as-a-service companies and network operators provide access to their services. BT has already installed Global Fabric points of presence (PoPs) in more than 45 of the world’s major cloud datacentres and plans to increase the number to 140, giving customers a choice of locations from which to access services to suit their operational, market and regulatory needs.
The telco has been carrying out live testing of Global Fabric over the past two months and the first Global Fabric services are set for launch in early 2025. Customers that do not have network connections into the cloud datacentres hosting Global Fabric PoPs will be able to order new links from BT, ensuring they are ready for launch.
BT will roll out a demo of Global Fabric’s digital management portal in November 2024, allowing customers’ IT teams to learn how to set up and optimise their multicloud network configurations and experiment with application programming interfaces.
Commenting on the launch, Colin Bannon, chief technology officer at BT Business, said: “BT’s Global Fabric will give customers a choice of the world’s best cloud locations to interconnect with their customers, partners and suppliers, making them easier to do business with. With the achievement of our latest Global Fabric delivery milestones, we take another step closer to a new age of AI-ready, digital interconnectivity.”