Leaping Ahead with Interconnection

2020 being a leap year is pretty significant in my household since my wife was a “leap year baby”  ̶   my vows of marriage keep me from saying the actual date. But I’d like to think that celebrating her birthday every four years sort of makes her ageless!

I also find it pretty significant how leap years keep our Gregorian calendar aligned with the seasons of the year. Afterall, without leap days every four years, the calendar would be off by 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds more each year. After 100 years, the seasons would be off by 25 days, and February and March would feel like June and July in the Northern Hemisphere, which would completely throw off the growth cycles of most animals and plants.

This makes me reflect on how keeping in alignment with the flow of nature is similar to keeping in alignment with the flow of your business. Falling behind on your business’s digital transformation can lead to not knowing how to take that leap toward creating a new offering or opening a new market to grow your business.

One way to stay in “digital alignment” is through a blend of physical and software-defined interconnection. Direct and secure, low-latency virtual connections accelerate seamless access to locations, people, clouds, data, apps and digital services. For example, by extending your physical network with more scalable and cost-effective virtual networks, you can more easily and quickly build hybrid multicloud infrastructures closer to users and customers, interconnect geographically distributed IT infrastructures and access critical virtual network services.

Here are just a few examples of how our customers have accelerated their transformation leveraging software-defined interconnection:

Creating a cloud-like network consumption model

Provisioning physical network connections can take weeks and in some cases months. By integrating physical and virtual connectivity on a single, vendor-neutral interconnection fabric, such as Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric™ (ECX Fabric™), you can select the most efficient and cost-effective way to interconnect with network service provides (NSPs) to purchase network services and access virtual networks and cloud service providers (CSPs).

For example, Verizon has developed Software-Defined Interconnect (SDI), a solution that works with ECX Fabric, to make available a wide range of software-defined network resources. Verizon SDI eliminates the need for dedicated access circuits and enables enterprises to establish a private, direct IP network connection to global Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers, on-demand, in minutes.

By eliminating delays associated with dedicated physical connections, enterprises take advantage of software-defined network capabilities to:

• Reduce network and connectivity costs via fast, reliable connections between the enterprise and Equinix IBX data centers for greater access to cloud, SaaS and industry-specific ecosystems.
• Speed time to revenue for new services and applications while ensuring an optimal user experience at global scale.
• Leverage software-defined networks and virtual network functions to tailor network performance to meet changing data and workload processing demands.
• Deploy high-performance, low-latency connections across geographically distributed IBX data center locations for reliable business continuity and disaster recovery.

Optimizing and extending network access to cloud services

The following customer use cases illustrate how interconnection drives dynamic hybrid multicloud infrastructures:

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is an executive agency of the UK government that employs 4,600 people in more than 500 locations to help people stay safe on Britain’s roads. To meet its need for more agile, software-defined connectivity, DVSA selected ECX Fabric on Platform Equinix®. Because most major cloud and IT service providers have a presence in Equinix’s IBX data centers, DVSA can now easily connect its employees to AWS, Microsoft Azure and other CSPs. Switching via virtual connections from one CSP to another helps DVSA save on networking costs and enables access to additional services in only minutes. DVSA also cut its latency to cloud services by two-thirds, giving it fast, responsive access to cloud-based platforms. In addition, DVSA’s cloud connections run via its own MPLS network, without crossing the public internet, bringing its services and controls closer to citizens, employees and partners at the digital edge.

Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company, wanted to provide its enterprise customers flexible, secure, on-demand multicloud network connectivity to more than 170 service providers in 38 markets globally. To meet these needs Telstra’s Programmable Network (TPN) is leveraging ECX Fabric to allow its customers to create private multicloud network connections to CSPs in just minutes, instead of weeks or months. By building deeper integration with ECX Fabric, Telstra is enabling its customers to privately access the full range of cloud service providers and expand TPN cloud connectivity at a rapid pace into new countries and metros around the world.

Accessing virtual network services

ECX Fabric Customer Portal and APIs allow our customers to connect between different edge virtual networking devices by being the underlying interconnection that ties all of those devices together. For example, you can leverage ECX Fabric’s Customer Portal to access Network Edge services, which enable you to instantly deploy virtual network devices from vendors like Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, CloudGenix, Juniper Networks, and Versa Networks. This allows businesses to scale or augment existing physical IT infrastructures via virtual services, and replace a CAPEX model with OPEX. Companies can also gain access to additional Equinix direct connections between partners and customers and NSP peering partners via Equinix Internet Exchange™.

Building an “ageless” interconnected network backbone that aligns with your digital strategy

Integrating legacy physical networks with software-defined networks on an interconnected global platform, such as Platform Equinix with ECX Fabric, extends your backbone network infrastructure’s life expectancy and optimizes its reach, performance and scalability  ̶  making it seem ageless because it can more easily adapt to a changing business environment.

And just as Leap Year days keep the yearly calendar in alignment with the movement of the sun, Equinix provides a wide choice of physical or virtual interconnection offerings to a host of cloud and digital services that will keep your IT infrastructure in alignment with your digital transformation strategy.

Read more about Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric.