According to the May/June 2011 Lightwave magazine cover story “Piecing together cloud services,” many carriers have begun to look at the optical networking requirements for support of cloud-based services. Lightwave Editorial Director and Associate Publisher Stephen Hardy reports that readying the network to support high-end cloud-based services is not trivial. The Amazon service outage underscores the difficulty of the problem – and the importance of solving that problem correctly.

However, carriers would appear to hold the high ground when it comes to meeting cloud service challenges. Lower-cost options such as Amazon’s will undoubtedly hold appeal to budget conscious businesses. But carriers have a natural competitive advantage that several have begun to exploit.

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