As enterprises accelerate their AI initiatives and embrace increasingly distributed architectures, the network is shifting from background utility to strategic enabler. theCUBE Research data shows that 93% of organizations now view the network as more important to achieving business goals than it was just two years ago. Against this backdrop, Zayo is aiming to make connectivity as easy to consume as cloud with its new Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offering, DynamicLink.
In a recent conversation with Bill Long, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Zayo, several themes emerged: the need to rethink legacy network products, the importance of simplifying operations, and the role of AI in abstracting complexity while preserving operator control. See full video below.
From Physical Fiber to AI Factories
Zayo is best known as a communications infrastructure provider with a substantial fiber footprint across North America, roughly 20 million fiber miles and more than 147,000 route miles connecting data centers, enterprises, towers, and residential locations. That long-haul backbone now underpins a new wave of AI-driven use cases, including large GPU clusters being built wherever power is available.
Historically, Zayo has connected cloud and wholesale environments; now it is pushing deeper into the enterprise, targeting the connectivity challenges of hybrid, multi-cloud, and AI-enabled operations. The focus is on helping enterprises overhaul their WAN and data center connectivity so they can participate fully in an AI-driven digital economy, linking buildings, branches, data centers, cloud regions, and edge locations with greater agility and control.
Rethinking Legacy Connectivity for AI and Multi-Cloud
Long argues that while the network’s importance has increased, the products most enterprises use were designed roughly 25 years ago for a very different world, primarily connecting people to applications or each other. Today’s reality is about connecting “data pools to intelligence”: data in one location, compute and AI services in another, and users potentially somewhere else entirely.
DynamicLink is positioned as a fundamental re-imagining of those legacy products. Rather than forcing customers to choose and provision separate services for dedicated internet access (DIA), point-to-point Ethernet, or cloud connectivity, Zayo abstracts these into a single port-based construct. Enterprises order ports at locations, cloud on-ramps, multi-tenant data centers, headquarters, via a portal or APIs. The same underlying infrastructure can be configured as multi-point VLANs, DIA with DDoS protection and route filtering, or cloud interconnects, all through software.
This approach changes both the architectural and commercial model. Customers no longer need to think in rigid product silos; they consume bandwidth and services from a common fabric and can repurpose or reconfigure them as use cases evolve, without re-provisioning physical circuits.
Value in Three Waves: Cost, Operations, and Agility
Enterprises typically adopt DynamicLink by first “lifting and shifting” existing services, such as DIA or basic cloud connectivity, to the new platform. The first wave of value comes from immediate telecom savings when multiple services are consolidated on a single commercial model.
The second wave is operational. Because DynamicLink centralizes service creation and policy control, it reduces the need for highly specialized teams managing fragmented, site-by-site architectures. Network teams can scale services and locations without proportional headcount growth, improving productivity and helping retain scarce talent by simplifying workflows and eliminating tedious, error-prone processes.
The third wave is strategic agility. By collapsing order cycles from weeks or months into minutes or seconds, DynamicLink allows network teams to say “yes” more often when the business needs to spin up new AI workloads, connect new partners, or support new applications. A scenario that might have taken months in a traditional telco model, such as connecting data in Google Cloud to an AI service in AWS and delivering the result to a branch office, can be executed in minutes via the portal or APIs.
AI-Assisted Operations with Human in the Loop
A particularly notable aspect of DynamicLink is its AI agent user interface. Instead of operators having to know the intricacies of router configurations, ACLs, route filters, and firewall policies across multiple domains, they can express intent in natural language, such as “Create a DIA connection with route filtering in Chicago” or “Connect my GCP dataset to an AI instance in AWS and deliver it to this branch.”
The AI agent then translates that intent into concrete configuration steps, presents a clear summary of the changes, and asks for explicit approval before committing any modifications. This “CCIE in front of the network” approach preserves human oversight while dramatically reducing time-to-configure and troubleshooting complexity.
In the NOC, the same AI assistant can accelerate diagnosis and remediation. For example, when a user reports slow internet performance in a given city, the agent can correlate traffic patterns, identify anomalies (such as an unusual burst from a specific IP), and propose mitigations, such as applying a route filter, again with operator approval. Tasks that might previously have required hours of manual investigation can now be completed in seconds.
Ecosystem, Security, and Observability
DynamicLink is also tightly coupled with Zayo’s broader ecosystem and long-haul build-out. The company is one of the few providers still constructing new long-haul routes in the U.S., particularly to emerging AI data center regions. Reference architectures developed with partners such as Equinix are designed to guide customers on how to architect AI-ready connectivity.
From a design perspective, DynamicLink can support flat, private Layer-2 domains that span clouds, colos, headquarters, and even remote locations via partnerships such as Starlink. This private fabric approach allows partners to interconnect without exposing services to the public internet, reducing attack surface and improving control.
Deep observability is built into the platform as well. Because Zayo carries the packets, it can measure end-to-end latency and performance between endpoints, set thresholds, and alert when conditions deviate from expected baselines, which is critical for latency-sensitive AI and real-time applications.
Early Experiences and Getting Started
During private preview, Zayo onboarded a couple of dozen customers to validate DynamicLink. The most common driver was overwhelming architectural complexity: too many point-to-point connections, fragmented security policies, and limited visibility into the core network.
Early use cases include a large media company needing DIA across 20 locations, as well as cloud connectivity where a previous product required hours of form-filling for a single connection. With DynamicLink, that same cloud on-ramp can be configured in roughly 30 seconds through the portal, dramatically improving both speed and operator satisfaction.
For organizations interested in piloting DynamicLink, Zayo has pre-provisioned capacity in 150 data centers and typically delivers the initial port in fewer than 10 days. Once connected, customers can experiment with services in real time, turning the network from a slow-moving constraint into a programmable resource.
Our ANGLE
DynamicLink reflects a broader shift in networking: AI architectures will resemble hybrid multi-cloud patterns, but “on steroids” in terms of bandwidth, security, and performance requirements. Legacy connectivity models optimized for simpler user-to-app traffic are increasingly ill-suited to AI data pipelines and distributed inference.
By combining a modern NaaS fabric, AI-assisted operations, deep observability, and a growing ecosystem of partners and reference architectures, Zayo is positioning DynamicLink as a foundational platform for AI-era networking. The ultimate test will be how broadly enterprises adopt it and how creatively they exploit its flexibility, but the direction is clear: connectivity is becoming more cloud-like, more intelligent, and far more central to digital and AI strategy.
For more information on Zayo and Dynamic Link, please visit their website.
