Liquid C2 Managed 365Direct - A managed service for Azure users

Liquid Intelligent Technologies (LIT) is the leading communication and digital services solution provider across the African continent. We have built Africa’s largest independent fibre network, spanning more than 100,000km, enabling customers to seamlessly connect to Microsoft cloud services. LIT has established over 1000 Points of Presence across Africa with Microsoft peering locations in Gauteng, Cape Town, Kenya, and Nigeria.

Plan Description:

LIT offers managed 365Direct with MAPS tagging at the peering locations advertised by LIT. The managed service will benefit customers who want to connect to the Microsoft Cloud using the internet as transport. 365Direct provides dedicated bandwidth and optimised routes to the Microsoft Cloud.

Why 365 Direct with Azure Peering Service?

• Prevent congestion from slowing down your business applications.
• Stop connectivity hogs from driving up your internet usage.
• The best public routing over the internet to Microsoft Software as a Service for optimal performance and reliability.
• Traffic insights such as latency reporting and prefix monitoring.
• Route analytics and statistics: Events for BGP route anomalies (leak or hijack detection) and suboptimal routing.

Process followed to plan, deliver and manage the solution:

• A needs analysis to capture requirements.
• A feasibility study conducted, and a commercial proposal published to the customer on Azure.
• Install feasible last mile at the customer premise.
• Configure WAN, VNets, and Peering Services if applicable.
• Test connectivity from the customer site to VNet and PaaS/SaaS Services if applicable.

Azure tools used:

• Azure Lighthouse.