Lumen Secures Microsoft Partnership Despite Being Affected by Two Security Incidents

• Lumen has won multiple contracts with several U.S. government departments, including defense.
• Lumen suffered two cybersecurity attacks in 2023 which saw networks compromised and data stolen.
• Microsoft’s AI expansion requires greater cybersecurity oversight.

Microsoft is partnering with telecoms and cybersecurity firm, Lumen Technologies, to expand its network capacity and data center demand amid an artificial intelligence (AI) boom.

The problem is, as shown with the CrowdStrike disaster that Microsoft’s reliance on third parties for vital infrastructure can place millions of devices at risk.

Microsoft’s Datacenters

As per the official announcement , Microsoft has partnered with Lumen to scale up its datacenter infrastructure to continue powering its resource-intensive tools such as Azure, OpenAI Service, and Microsoft Copilot.

Datacenters are under strain to meet the increasing resource demands required to operate AI services. As such, Microsoft has highlighted the need for a “strategic supplier for its network infrastructure” in order to maintain and scale its ecosystem. As noted by Kate Johnson, president and CEO of Lumen:

“We are preparing for a future where AI is the driving force of innovation and growth, and where a powerful network infrastructure is essential for companies to thrive,”

Specifically, Microsoft will leverage Lumen’s Private Connectivity Fabric to improve its overall capacity and bandwidth between AI data centers. Now that Microsoft is integrating OpenAI into everything from Office 365 to GitHub.

However, in the wake of the CrowdStrike outage, which affected 8.5 million devices globally and brought critical infrastructure to its knees, cybersecurity should be at the forefront of every infrastructure expansion that Microsoft makes.

Lumen Cybersecurity

In the release, Lumen’s CEO also highlighted that meeting Microsoft’s “vision for AI” requires a “network that can make it a reality.” Therefore, providing the best in cybersecurity would be of the utmost concern.

But it seems that the Lumen partnership will indeed be a huge boost for Microsoft’s cybersecurity infrastructure. As a testament to this, Lumen has some significant credentials to back it.

In 2023, won a $233 million and a $110 million contract from the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to provide “mission-critical communications services” to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

In fact, Lumen has won several contracts, worth billions , from various U.S. government departments in recent years. Much of this work has seen the Lumen provide vital and secure comms services for ambitious public sector departments and projects.

Most recently, the firm netted a $74 million contract from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to enhance and modernize its network. Evidently, Lumen has built a reputation of reliability and stability, which could certainly help boost that of Microsoft.

That doesn’t mean Lumen is immune from attacks, as in March 2023, it suffered two separate security incidents that saw malicious malware loaded onto its servers and data stolen by bad actors.

Global Outages

With Microsoft expanding its AI capabilities, offerings, services, and infrastructure, the recent CrowdStrike debacle has given the firm a bit of an ‘image’ issue.

Whilst the outage did result from an external, third-party source, it was still the single largest IT outage in history. Although Microsoft has said that it affected 1% of all machines using the software, it still had a gigantic impact.

Now, with expanding AI services that will be embedded into any one of Microsoft’s products and subsidiaries, the consequences of a security breach, data leak, or service-wide outage could be far more disastrous.