Delivering on the Rising Need for Remote Working

In these times of increased uncertainty, it’s important for businesses to remain agile and, where possible, ensure their teams have the ability to adopt flexible practices at the drop of a hat. Online office models have been able to cushion the effect of the current epidemic on business operations and have highlighted a rising need for remote working solutions.

Recently, Forbes Insights revealed that 62% of enterprises use three or more video conferencing solutions[1], often working with a range of tools for different lines of business. Meanwhile, 100% of CEOs and presidents believe their businesses could achieve greater cost savings, effectiveness, governance, and control, if they adopted UCC platforms.

Surging demand for video conferencing 

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, enterprises have increasingly encouraged employees to work from home. According to Blis, a global mobile data intelligence agency, there has been a 314% increase in mobile and online traffic across the 12 districts of Hong Kong since the government announced its work-from-home policy, clearly indicating a soaring increase in remote working as workers shift from offices to homes.

Integral to this remote style of working is the ability to easily and seamlessly interact with colleagues, clients, partners and prospects over video. This shortens the perceived distance between people and encourages collaboration and engagement. With an increase in digitally savvy employees, combined with the impact of changing work patterns, we have seen a spike in demand for video conferencing – something clearly demonstrated by leading provider of video-first unified communications, Zoom Video Communications, Inc. This growing need for video conference will lead to the explosion of internet traffic, unified communication vendors like WebEx, Zoom and Cisco are reporting more than 100% increases and we support a lot of those applications.

At times like this, it’s critical for businesses like Zoom to be able to scale up bandwidth in various places on its network, with a particular focus on doing more peering closer to end users. Alex Guerrero, Senior manager of SaaS operations at Zoom, commented in a webinar organized by Kentik, “Being an Equinix customer has helped Zoom increase its network’s bandwidth. The company has been using Equinix’s Cloud Exchange Fabric, its software-defined network interconnection platform, to a great extent to boost capacity.”

Riding on the unexpected to accelerate digital transformation

The popularity of the Zoom platform is also attributable to the rise of cloud-based remote work solutions and the digital edge. We can see this in the very history of the company itself. Founded in 2011, Zoom’s unified communications and collaboration (UCC) platform was engineered from the ground up to be cloud-native and optimized for video, promising simplicity, versatility, and value. Since then, Zoom has revolutionized the way people interact and collaborate across geographies, transforming the global collaborative experience.

According to the Global Interconnection Index (GXI) Volume 3, a market study published by Equinix, interconnecting between multiple network providers across numerous edge locations is the most prominent use case for interconnection bandwidth. Currently, it makes up 68% of all interconnection bandwidth in Asia-Pacific and is expected to grow fourfold by 2022. The GXI forecast and supporting deployment data reveal that workloads are moving to the digital edge, allowing business data to be exchanged depending where customers, employees, and partners are located.

This present period of uncertainty should compel enterprises to embrace digital transformation. By doing so, they can ensure they have the resources and tools in place to facilitate remote working and maintain staff productivity regardless of external circumstances.

Powering video conferencing with interconnection

As strategic partners since 2015, Zoom has leveraged the extensive Equinix colocation footprint and interconnection portfolio available through Platform Equinix® to expand its worldwide presence. Today, Zoom is in Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers in nine markets worldwide: Silicon Valley, New York, Toronto, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Melbourne, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

The company has also capitalized on its reach by placing at least two data centers in each of the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions to create sites for reliable disaster-recovery backup. Zoom also leveraged Equinix Internet Exchange™, the world’s largest internet exchange footprint, to achieve more scalable network-peering aggregation across its global carriers. In addition, the company harnessed Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric™ (ECX Fabric™) software-defined interconnection to quickly set up and scale its access to networks, clouds, partners and customers in just days.

The partnership with Equinix has enabled Zoom to grow and scale its UC platform globally, providing its growing enterprise customer base with direct, secure and high-performance interconnection to its video, voice, webinar and chat services.

“The global Equinix team was a critical part of our solution in helping enterprises quickly connect to us worldwide,” says Alex Guerrero, Senior Manager of SaaS Operations, Zoom. “Our customers decide how they want to access our services, and more and more it is with Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric.”

There is no doubt that Internet-based UCC are the future. In order to help businesses benefit from this collaboration technology, Zoom, Orange Business Services (OBS) and Equinix have collaborated to develop a joint video conferencing solution to help enterprises address the challenges posed to UCC platforms, including scalability, compliance, security, and above all, user experience. Download the joint solution brief or contact us to learn more.

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/insights-zoom/2018/12/13/seeing-eye-to-eye-but-at-a-distance-the-case-for-the-videoconference/#748c171d6be2