Contoso Ltd. has two ExpressRoute circuits: one provisioned at the New York Equinix NY7 location and another at the London Equinix LD8 location. Their networking team wants on-premises branches connected to the New York circuit to talk directly to branches connected to the London circuit over Microsoft’s backbone (no public Internet, no site-to-site VPN). What action must Contoso take to enable branch‑to‑branch connectivity across the Microsoft global network?

ExpressRoute Global Reach allows you to link two ExpressRoute circuits together, enabling direct connectivity between your on-premises networks across the Microsoft global network. This eliminates the need for traffic to traverse your corporate WAN or the public internet. You must enable Global Reach on both circuits and then link them in the Azure portal. Creating VNet Peering between VNets attached to each circuit would only allow connectivity between the VNets themselves, not directly between the on-premises branches. Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN) is a valid solution for global connectivity but requires migrating existing ExpressRoute circuits into vWAN hubs, which is a more extensive configuration than simply linking existing circuits with Global Reach. Deploying a site-to-site VPN between on-prem routers would use the public internet, which the requirement explicitly excludes.