As a global systems integrator and managed infrastructure services provider, Atos helps some of the world's largest organizations run and modernize critical IT environments. From mainframes and private cloud platforms to highly regulated workloads, Atos delivers the reliability, performance and operational expertise customers depend on to keep their businesses running.

For Atos, keeping critical operations online is a daily, nonnegotiable test: mainframes and regulated workloads cannot pause, service-level agreements (SLAs) are measured in minutes, and there’s no room for disruption. With Lumen® NaaS (Network-as-a-Service), Atos can activate backup connectivity in minutes, scale bandwidth to match real demand, and stand up new on-demand connections in a fraction of the time it once took.

With four core data centers across North America and customer demand that can spike without warning, Atos needs a network built for resilience at scale. By partnering with Lumen, Atos has built an on-demand connectivity foundation that absorbs the worst, moves at the speed of the business, and protects the uptime, revenue and trust that thousands of organizations rely on every day.

Trust measured in uptime

Atos—with roughly 63,000 employees, close to $8 billion in annual revenue and operations across 61 countries—operates at a scale few technology partners reach, supporting organizations around the world with mission-critical infrastructure, cloud and digital services. From its North American data centers, the company delivers mainframe-as-a-service and other regulated workloads for enterprise and public sector organizations in industries where availability, security and compliance are paramount—organizations that depend on those systems running without interruption.

"The network within our data centers has to be always-on," said Head of Network & Communications and Production IT for Atos North America Charlie Bennett. “It has to be able to take a hit and recover—quickly."

Every workload in those data centers sits under an SLA with a hard window to respond and resolve, and financial and reputational stakes if either is missed. For Bennett, the risk runs deeper than the penalties themselves. "Once you lose control of your environment and you're dependent on somebody else, that leads to risk," he said. When connectivity faltered, that risk extended well beyond the contract—to the customer relationships and revenue that depend on Atos delivering without interruption.

Rethinking the path to resilience

Among the moments that shaped how Atos thinks about resilience, one stands out for Bennett. During a stretch of severe weather, two carrier facilities failed at the same time: one underwater, another nearly 200 miles away with no power. As crews rebuilt, the fiber kept getting cut. Bennett handed his engineering team a challenge: Find a way to keep delivering service no matter what, and, in his words, "make us bulletproof."

The problem was structural. Atos ran on fixed point-to-point fiber between its data centers, which always left a single point of failure somewhere in the path. With Lumen NaaS, Atos could reroute around the impacted fixed path by activating on-demand connectivity through the Lumen Network, using an existing point of presence to spin up high-capacity connectivity—40 Gbps today, scaling toward 100—on demand, in minutes. "That was huge for us," Bennett said.

Proof when it mattered most

Another clear test came in October 2025 at the Atos data center in Blythewood, South Carolina.

Hurricanes had already moved through the Carolinas. The storms were gone, but the cleanup wasn't done. For months, contractors repairing the damage kept slicing through fiber. One night, multiple cuts landed on multiple legs at once. Both neighboring data centers on the ring went down, and Blythewood was completely isolated.

In the old model, that's where the waiting would begin—hoping a carrier could dispatch a crew while the SLA clock ran, with a single fiber sometimes staying down for close to 48 hours. This time, Atos didn’t need to wait. One of its lead data center network architects had already tested Lumen NaaS and knew it would hold, so the team made the call to activate.

"In 15 minutes, that circuit was back up," Bennett said. The protected ring from Lumen stayed up, the on-demand connection carried the full load, and Blythewood reconnected to the rest of the network—all while the physical fiber was still down. No dispatch, no scramble, no waiting on a repair crew. Atos rerouted around the outage on its own terms and came in well under its SLA.

For the clients running on those systems, the disruption never even surfaced. "They were extremely pleased that we were able to bypass the outage," Bennett said. It was the kind of save customers never even see, delivered while the fiber beneath them was still being repaired. It's exactly the outcome Atos designs for: staying in control when the unexpected hits and keeping customers online no matter what.

Connectivity at the speed of the deal

The capability that saved Blythewood is quietly reshaping how Atos wins and onboards new business. Standing up a new customer used to hinge on the slowest step in the process. "Everything waited on the circuit," Bennett said.

With Lumen NaaS, that timeline can shrink dramatically. For Atos, what once took 60 to 120 days can now move in about a week. “The network used to be the bottleneck. Now it’s the first thing we deliver,” Bennett said. Instead of gating every project, his team stands up connectivity first and hands the business a network that’s ready to build on from day one.

The same flexibility shows up in everyday operations. Rather than provisioning network capacity for peak demand at all times, Atos can adjust bandwidth as business needs change using Lumen NaaS and private Ethernet capabilities. That gives the team the flexibility to scale capacity when demand rises and scale it back when it subsides, helping improve both agility and cost efficiency. “This gives us a way to be dynamic, responsive to our customers and cost-effective,” Bennett said.

Built for an AI-driven future

Resilience is only part of the story. Atos is already looking ahead to an ambitious future—and moving fast to meet it.

The company has set a mandate to move toward an agentic AI operating model, and the network beneath it is built to keep pace. Atos has built colocation facilities near major hyperscalers, using Lumen connectivity to support low-latency connections between its private cloud and public cloud environments.

That connectivity foundation includes high-capacity Lumen® Wavelength Solutions for core data center interconnection, alongside the flexibility of Lumen NaaS to dynamically adapt as business demands evolve.

Not every workload can move to the public cloud. Some must stay private for performance, cost or regulatory reasons. Now customers don’t need to choose. They can keep those workloads in Atos’s private cloud and still reach AWS, Azure and others with the speed and performance modern applications require, getting the best of both environments. “We think that’s a game changer, and we’re extremely excited about that,” Bennett said.

Atos leadership sees the same opportunity. “Lumen NaaS accelerates our hybrid cloud, AI and agentic transformation initiatives, enabling faster innovation, smarter operations and greater value for our customers," said Atos VP and Head of Cloud & Infrastructure Javier Ponce Suarez.

Atos and Lumen have partnered for more than 20 years, and Bennett's advice to other leaders considering a programmable digital platform like NaaS is simple. “Lumen NaaS has actually been a godsend for us,” he said. “It's given us the ability to be in control—and to keep our customers up and operational.” Asked to sum up Lumen in three words, he answered without hesitation: “Trust. Partnership. Technology.”

To learn more about Atos’s transformation, read the full customer success story.

Visit our customer story library to learn how organizations in virtually every industry are achieving their business objectives.

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