Colt taps Ciena for improved European enterprise managed services

Ciena Corp. (NASDAQ: CIEN) and European service provider Colt report that Colt’s will expand the capabilities of its managed high speed services with integrated wire-speed encryption capabilities using Ciena’s 5000 Series packet-optical transport portfolio.

Colt will deploy Ciena’s 5000 Series in 14 major European markets, including Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. The platforms will offer integrated packet-optical transport and encryption. Ciena says the 5000 Series’ FIPS-certified, in-skin encryption capabilities are protocol agnostic and operate independently from applications. This allows Colt to run multiple protocols, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, and Optical Transport Network (OTN), over the same encrypted link, reducing the number of protocol-specific encryption appliances required as well as latency.

“With increasing numbers of our customers focused on regulatory compliance and mitigating security breaches, especially in sectors such as financial services or government, we’re seeing enormous growth of interest in high-speed, encrypted data connectivity services. Our new partnership with Ciena allows Colt to further extend our managed security portfolio and gives us the opportunity to exploit the advantage of a low-latency, integrated encryption solution,” said Stefano Maifreni, solutions manager, managed networking, Enterprise Services, at Colt.