Zayo Group operates 141,000 miles of owned and operated fiber-optic network infrastructure across North America and Europe, serving carriers, enterprises, and government agencies. The company designs, builds, and maintains this infrastructure while offering a stack of connectivity products: dark fiber leasing, private networks, wavelength services, Ethernet connectivity, and dedicated internet access (DIA). The network connects thousands of buildings and data centers, making it a backbone player in critical infrastructure rather than a consumer-facing service.
The threat model here is operational continuity and data integrity at scale. Zayo's customers depend on the network for mission-critical traffic - financial transactions, healthcare systems, government communications, media delivery. Security work spans the usual suspects: protecting fiber routes and data center interconnects from physical and logical compromise, securing the wavelength and Ethernet control planes, managing access to dark fiber provisioning systems, and monitoring for unauthorized network taps or routing anomalies. With 3,700+ employees and infrastructure spanning multiple geographies, the attack surface includes both traditional network security (DDoS mitigation, BGP/OSPF integrity) and physical security (facility access, fiber cut detection and response).
Zayo has operated as a private company since 2020, which the company positions as enabling longer-term infrastructure investment rather than quarterly optimization. The business model is recurring revenue from service-level agreements with known customers in regulated and semi-regulated sectors. This shapes the security posture: SLAs demand uptime commitments, compliance requirements (government contracts, financial services) are non-negotiable, and customer trust is a competitive differentiator in a market where switching costs are high.
