Auckland, 13 November 2019
CCL is pleased to announce a new enhancement to our Internet platform that ensures optimal transport for users connecting to Microsoft public services, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams and other SaaS-based services running on Microsoft Azure.
Many businesses around the world consider Microsoft’s SaaS product suite critical for productivity, collaboration, and administration. Given the importance of these tools, it is crucial to ensure that connectivity to the cloud is delivered to businesses in the most optimal way.
Using the Microsoft Azure Peering Service, CCL has set up diverse, dedicated connections to Microsoft that feed directly into our Internet platform. Azure Peering Service is a collaboration with service providers to provide highly reliable and optimised internet connectivity to Microsoft services. It also provides Internet latency telemetry and route monitoring, and alerting against hijacks, leaks and any other Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) misconfigurations.
This will benefit all clients consuming business Internet services from CCL, with customer traffic to/from SaaS services such as Office 365 connecting to Microsoft’s global network at the nearest location. Furthermore, prefixes advertised from CCL over the peering service will be assigned a higher local preference over the Microsoft network, ensuring the best possible network performance for SaaS applications.
As an optional add-on, business Internet customers can subscribe to Telemetry services via the Azure Portal. This service will provide insight into performance, route monitoring, hijacks and leaks, and other statistics around first-mile, last-mile Internet services.
Note: Peering service is not a private connectivity product to Microsoft’s cloud services, neither is it an Express Route or VPN product – it is an IP service that uses the Public Internet, and offers optimised and reliable routing to public IPs or SaaS services such as Office 365.