Lumen - March2021 by Business Chief USA

LUMEN

The Platform for Amazing Things

IN ASSOCIATION WITH:

DIGITAL REPORT 2021

THE LEADING LIGHT

IN SECURE CONNECTIVITY How the Lumen platform is driving the 4th Industrial Revolution with services supporting network infrastructure, cloud edge and collaboration.

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umen delivers the fastest, most secure platform for next-gen business applications and data. Its platform integrates extensive network infrastructure, cloud connectivity, edge computing, connected security, voice, collaboration and enterprise-class services into an advanced application architecture. The 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) is here, and it’s changing the way companies use technology. Lumen is one of the leading lights driving that change. With a move away from private data centres and the push towards the cloud, Lumen is supporting its customers with their latency-sensitive day-to-day applications for everything from automation and robotics, to AI and self-driving cars. “Our customers told us they needed connectivity closer to where their applications are consumed,” explains Lumen’s Vice President for Global Security Services, Christopher Smith. “To do this, we repurposed many of the central offices we previously established for legacy voice

COMPANY NAME

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Lumen Technologies: Andrew Dugan, CTO

systems (made largely redundant by the rise of smartphones) and turned them into mini cloud data centres. The industry is calling that the cloud edge, and it’s the next natural trend for the application experience.” Network Integrated Security “Security plays a huge part in the move from private, on-premises to public cloud,” explains Smith. “Security is a crowded

space,” he says. “Everyone’s got their unique approach on how to make things more secure; and, in some cases, how to scare people into feeling insecure. Lumen’s goal is simply to create threatfree traffic for its customers. “The way most security works, you either put a perimeter at the edge of your data centre or cloud, or you're doing something on the server to watch for bad behaviour,” says Smith. “With

“ My mantra is that security is not something separate from the things we sell, but we build it into the things that customers are buying from us.” CHRISTOPHER SMITH,

VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL SECURITY SERVICES, LUMEN

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CHRISTOPHER SMITH TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL SECURITY SERVICES COMPANY: LUMEN INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: LOUISIANA, USA

Black Lotus Labs Lumen also has an in-house threat intelligence team branded Black Lotus Labs®. Tasked with watching the network for anomalies, they’re on the lookout for malware, C2s and anything that leaves a footprint on the network. “I think of our team as weather forecasters,” explains Smith. “If you were living in Florida and were worried about a hurricane, you could turn on the news and get updates days before it hit. That’s what our threat intel team does. They see those threats before they impact our customers, and we can act on that. The most egregious threats we can take right off the network; we are able to blackhole them so they can never touch our customers. We also work with law enforcement to help them prosecute the worst offenders of malware and C2s. Allied to this, we build capabilities into our

EXECUTIVE BIO

Lumen being the largest public peered IP network on the planet, we have visibility to threats on the network before they even breach a customer's infrastructure.”

Christopher Smith consistently creates world-class product experiences through solid product management practices. His ability to identify and solve his customers’ business problems stems from more than 20 years of experience developing and managing technology products and applications for the Enterprise market. Chris currently serves as Lumen’s Vice President of Global Security Services. In this capacity, he oversees the Connected Security pillar of the Lumen platform. This includes investment oversight, and product and revenue management for the global security-product portfolio. Prior to joining Lumen through the Level 3 acquisition of CenturyLink, Chris was Vice President of Product Management, responsible for enterprise voice solutions and the global data center portfolio. He also served as a director in the CTO office at Global Crossing, where he was responsible for setting and incubating technology direction, and developing and managing the suite of SIP Trunking services.Chris’s work for Lumen is just a side gig, however. For his real job, Chris plays guitar in a band, and he intends to resume playing live shows post-Covid.

Security Without Compromise Fortinet Security Fabric

Security-Driven Networking

Empowering the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world with intelligent, seamless protection The Fortinet Security Fabric architecture can deliver security without compromise to address the most critical challenges, whether in network, application, cloud, or mobile environments. “We’ve driven the evolution from point defence products via integration to what are now unified platforms across the prevention technology stack, the detection stack and the response stack,” explains Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Vice President of Fortinet’s Global Field CISO Team. “These three pillars are the foundation of our cybersecurity offering.” Fortinet can meet the demands of an ever-expanding attack surface, giving enterprises the power to take on the ever-increasing performance requirements of the borderless network - today and into the future.

Convergence

The latest research shows 80% of all attacks that lead to breaches and major disruptions, could have been mitigated through simple digital media controls. “Wherever we have large enterprise environments, we see gaps of visibility and control and those gaps are due to the complexity of the environment,” explains Nguyen-Duy. “Fortinet’s broad integrated and automated approach helps manage the complexity IT teams see each day enabling them to improve cybersecurity.” Nguyen-Duy believes networking, security and application performance need to be working in

a tight holistic fashion to deliver the business outcomes and end user experience service providers like Lumen are focused on for their customers. Fortinet offers support to provide that foundation with out of the box solutions for the convergence of security and networking irrespective of where an enterprise or small to medium business is on its journey.

Automation

Today’s operating environment sees teams almost overwhelmed by too many alerts on too many devices, on too many management consoles… “As prevention, detection and response technologies mature, leveraging artificial intelligence will allow us to automate workflows so we’re better able to identify and mitigate threats with greater accuracy and speed,” says Nguyen-Duy. “Security needs to be wherever the computer is, meaning wherever the data’s being processed and wherever it’s being stored. For Fortinet, that means end-to-end solutions on the LAN edge, the WAN edge and the Cloud edge, in whichever form factor makes sense for that business, whether it’s a virtual machine, a cloud delivered service or consumption and licensing models. We provide this integrated fabric of technologies with over 400 other vendors spanning 3,200 products. Out of the box, enterprises can access an ecosystem of technologies all designed to work together so that the operator can focus on operating the technology rather than integrating it. It’s the key to moving the industry forward...” fortinet.com

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“Everyone’s got their unique approach on how to make things more secure; and, in some cases, how to scare people into feeling insecure. Our goal is simply to create threat-free traffic for our customers.” CHRISTOPHER SMITH, VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL SECURITY SERVICES, LUMEN

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portfolios that leverage this intel to help protect our customers proactively.” Rapid Threat Defense To offer proactive protection, Lumen has developed a capability called Rapid Threat Defense. “It’s a capability not a product,” states Smith. “My mantra for the security practice is that it’s not something separate from the things we sell, but built in. So, if you're buying network connectivity, SD-WAN or UC, security is built in. Smith explains Rapid Threat Defense is one of those built-in ingredients. “Security engineers take the threat intel they see on the network and build it into the data lake

supplemented by third party intelligence we either pay or partner for,” Smith adds. “When threats become active, we've got a softwarebased policy engine that can push blocks to any of the devices we manage – such as Fortinet and Palo Alto firewalls – to prevent you from ever talking to that threat.” Rapid Threat Defense is also built into Lumen’s DDoS practice. “If we see a DDoS attack forming out of the network, we will put a policy block into all of our global scrubbers, so the attack can never hit a scrubber and never hit a customer. It gets black-holed off the network.” Smith sees this approach as a policy remediation engine that means customers don’t have to take action themselves. “If you're a CISO and you're managing the edge of your network, you've got SD-WAN devices and firewalls, and you have to pay a bunch of expensive, hard-to-hire people to manage the policies on all those devices. It's not hard, but it's complex, tedious work that

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Accelerate Digital Transformation with Intelligent Network Automation In the cloudy, software-defined era of digital transformation, the network has never been more critical. Empower network operations to deliver digital experiences at the speed of business with intelligent network automation.

In partnership with Itential, Lumen has enabled customers to rapidly respond to “changing market demands by providing agile, on-demand and responsive network and cloud services. Itential’s automation and integration capabilities provide Lumen with comprehensive orchestration of activities across all network types and IT systems while ensuring streamlined customer experience.

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Shawn Draper, Vice President of Network Service Fulfillment, Engineering & Field Services, Lumen

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developer.itential.io

info@itential.com

LUMEN – A SECURE ‘DIGITAL EXPERIENCE’

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“Our team is available in the chat should customers need any help or advice” CHRISTOPHER SMITH,

VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL SECURITY SERVICES, LUMEN

There has been a significant rise in DDoS attacks during the global pandemic. Lumen has created a simplified way for businesses to quickly deploy the security solutions they need to protect themselves from DDoS attacks. “Late last year we saw a 1200% increase in emergency DDoS orders from customers who have business critical applications and do business over the internet,” reveals Lumen’s Vice President for Global Security Services, Christopher Smith.

you're paying really expensive people to do. We have automated that, and we don't charge separately for it. It's built into our products.” Partnering to Protect Smith believes it’s impossible to have a relevant security practice without partnerships. With so many threats and options to counter them, collaboration is key to deliver protection with equipment, software and services. “We leverage

To meet the needs of those suffering from DDoS attacks, Lumen launched a self-service portal on Lumen.com. Customers can educate themselves on the offer, get a quote online, agree to some simple commercial terms, and log in to mitigate the attack by themselves. “Our team is available in the chat should customers need any help or advice,” says Smith. “It’s all completely automated and takes less than 15 minutes to get businesses protected.”

partners such as Fortinet and Palo Alto for the firewalls, WEF equipment and DDoS scrubbers that you can put in a data centre to protect your edge or SD-WAN devices,” he says. Lumen is a platform services company, so it procures, stages and sets up equipment like firewalls for its customers. “We manage them on their behalf, along with any endpoint software or SIEMs they already have,” says Smith. “Firewalls are turning into lumen.com

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software – they’re virtual and not physical – but the premise is still the same. And then we leverage software companies like RiskSense and CyberSaint to supplement our professional security services practice. We package up the right partners as ingredients that we use to provide a tailored security service to our customers.” Professional Security Services Support Part of Smith’s job is to run Lumen’s Professional Security Services team, which helps customers anywhere on their security journey. “We can help customers no matter where they are technically, from ‘Hey, I really don't know what I'm doing and I need to build a security practice from scratch,’ to ‘I've spent $500,000 standing up a noisy SIEM, the board

Nova Context’s path computation Leading the way to fully orchestrated hybrid networks with automated network design, optimized resources, decreased costs and reduced provisioning fallout.

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Lumen: Imagine Possibilities

is expecting me to share results, and I can't find the talent to manage it.’” Smith says his team can go deep or wide – whether consulting to help create a practice, or coming in to operate any part of a customer’s infrastructure on their behalf. “We can be on-premise or remote – wherever our customers are located, we can help them protect themselves,” Smith says. The Lumen Security team has also built a Digital Experience portal that customers can access 24/7, and choose the security services they need (with help to achieve the right configuration) to take the best advantage of Lumen’s scrubbing technology. Lighting the Pathway to Success Smith’s goal for the Lumen security portfolio is to achieve profitable growth while further establishing Lumen as the platform for amazing things. “If you consider all the legacy

companies that have come together to form Lumen, there was a time where some of the additions to our current portfolio weren't making any money. I came from some of those companies. But we're never going to go back to a place that looks like that,” he pledges. Lumen is also putting tremendous efforts into an edge compute strategy. “We believe it's about application performance and building the platform that helps these applications of the future perform the way that they need to, by being closer to where they're consumed,” says Smith. “That involves the network, the facilities and the platform orchestration we're going to deliver. Delivering security for our customers will be a big part of that.”

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Lumen

Corporate Headquarters 100 CenturyLink Drive Monroe Louisiana LA 71203 T +1 318 388 9000 | lumen.com