Colt Technology Services

Main service(s)

Colt Technology Services is a multinational telecommunications company. Colt operates a substantial network that connects data centres and business hubs across Europe, Asia, and North America. Additionally, Colt delivers security services where they complement their connectivity offering.

Thanks to a recent completed acquisition of Lumen EMEA, Colt is now one of the biggest B2B providers for connectivity in the world and the largest fibre infrastructure provider in Europe.

Business context

Every business needs connectivity. For most companies, the connectivity provided by their local internet providers is sufficient. But some companies have additional requirements which make things much more complex. For example:

• Needing a performant network connecting different company sites in different countries (or continents).
• Very strict latency requirements, with a business grade SLA or dedicated lines (for example, for financial players)
• Connectivity into data centres or cloud providers.

With its specialised network, Colt caters to these companies.

Colt Security

In the security space, Colt delivers services which either augment or profit from its network business. The main products are: encryption, DDoS mitigation, managed firewalls and secure network gateways.

Encryption

Because Colt owns the network, it can encrypt at layer 1 of the OSI stack (the physical layer). This means the encryption can be “always on” (embedded in the hardware), extremely efficient and cost effective, without any performance degradation.

Colt also allows customers to handle their own encryption keys and configuration. Encryption hardware can be located in the customer’s secured environment.

DDoS mitigation

Because Colt owns the network, it can block DDoS traffic where it enters the network instead of at the customer site. This ensures the connection to the company network is not saturated, a major advantage compared to blocking at the company network edge.

Colt DDoS is implemented in their network: there is no need for tunnelling, rerouting or specific IP requirements.

Managed firewalls

Colt uses its security and network knowledge and scale to provide a cost effective firewall solution for customers.

Secure Access Service Edge

By integrating the above network and security services and combining them with SSE players like Zscaler (which provides cloud-based security services), Colt can provide a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution. This results in improved security (using zero trust principles), better performance (through better routing) and lower overhead (due to centrally managed security policies).

Differentiators

For Colt, everything starts with the physical network and the connections with different important sites (data centres, business hubs,...).

Colt caters to companies with complex connectivity requirements and it is important they can deliver all the services needed to satisfy these requirements (as opposed to customers having to piece together a solution with multiple providers).

Colt has connectivity in Europe, the US, Asia, Africa and the middle east. Particularly in Europe, their network connectivity is hard to beat.

The Colt security offering builds on its network connectivity. Because of this, they can realise some results that are very hard to achieve for competitors without this network capability.

Certain industry verticals have been more impacted than others by privacy considerations. Take the medical industry, which handles highly sensitive personal data.

Future plans

In November 2023, Colt bought the EMEA part of Lumen, another provider of network connectivity. 2024 will certainly be a year of integration, as well as further building out new (security) services and adding additional customers.

Company history

Colt publishes its company history on the website: https://www.colt.net/about/our-story/.