BT today announced it is rolling out its transformational Global Fabric network-as-a-service (NaaS) in strategic Digital Realty carrier neutral facilities (CNFs) around the world. This will enable customers to unlock the full value of their data by making it easier for employees to access it securely and compliantly across the business. It will provide IT leaders with instant, centralised control of connectivity for the best performance and user experience, reduce total costs and help ensure compliance.

Global Fabric is BT’s brand-new NaaS with a footprint spanning the world’s top cloud locations. It is designed to be flexible, scalable and resilient, and offer near-instant control with a choice of connectivity on a pay-as-you-use basis.

Digital Realty operates over 300 CNFs across six continents, in more than 25 countries and over 50 metros. These bring together the world’s leading cloud and software-as-a-service providers in a single location to offer customers a data-centre platform that can act as a digital hub for their business, bringing together technology and data to create the intelligence that drives their digital transformation.

By offering Global Fabric connectivity within and between CNFs, the partners will enable customers to choose and instantly create the right type of connections for their applications and data and layer on security services to make it easier to share across the business. This includes choosing the routes workloads take as they cross the network to give the best user experience to employees wherever they are.

With this control, customers can achieve the best applications performance and costs while addressing growing cyber security threats and future regulations on data in transit. It builds on BT’s existing ability to offer customers Digital Realty hosting and co-location services, which will be available through the Global Fabric marketplace.

Harm Joosse, Global Head of Strategy & Business Development, Service Providers, Digital Realty, said: “By integrating into Digital Realty’s global data centre platform, PlatformDIGITAL®, customers address data gravity challenges by bringing users and clouds to the data with BT’s Global Fabric connectivity, controls, and policy management.”

Joosse continued: “BT’s innovative network-as-a-service solution, combined with Digital Realty’s orchestration platform, ServiceFabric, empowers enterprises with on-demand, personalised experiences, ultimately revolutionising the way networks are used and managed.”

“Businesses deploying cloud services locally benefit from proximity to customers and suppliers. For large organisations, more value can be unlocked if local data can be brought together centrally in a secure and compliant way to create new insights. With data volumes surging, CIOs need greater control of data flows. The combination of Global Fabric and Digital Realty can help customers unlock value from data by stopping local data hubs becoming digital black holes,” concluded Colin Bannon, CTO, Business, BT.