Why Interconnection Makes Your Business Thrive

Spending time with family, friends and colleagues is paramount to happiness and well-being. We all know the global pandemic has challenged us to get creative and find new ways to connect with each other. As our personal and work lives are integrated more than ever, and this shift has introduced major hurdles, it also has brought us closer in new and unexpected ways.

Despite these unique times, the Global Sales team delivered one of the bright spots of the past year. We decided to celebrate our resilience, show how much we value our families and find meaningful ways to engage our kids. The team created a series of meetings called “Family First” that invited Equinix Sales colleagues and their families to virtually come together and share a bit of themselves, including their talents, pets, favorite toys and more. Our President and CEO Charles Meyers even taught a virtual family yoga class that was met with great enthusiasm… and very flexible children.

These special moments of connection created many positive memories, even as we continue to march ahead during this difficult time.

Charles Meyers and his daughter, Madison, lead a Family First yoga session.

The “Family First” series is just one example of how we have been finding new ways to deepen our connections with each other and our families. On a personal level, these kinds of initiatives have given our team the energy and inspiration to succeed through the toughest of times.

Professionally, it has been incredibly satisfying to realize that we are creating this same kind of interconnection-driven impact every day for our customers on Platform Equinix® as we help them connect to the employees, partners and customers their businesses need to thrive. As the upcoming fifth annual edition of the Global Interconnection Index (GXI) reports, “The pandemic forced the economy into digital overdrive. As traditional business gets its bearings, digital leaders are moving 4.5x farther ahead.”[i] It has been a privilege to be trusted to help our customers accelerate their digital strategies to meet the pandemic’s unique challenges while creating new sources of competitive advantage that will fuel their leadership for years to come.

How interconnection powers digital transformation

Before the pandemic, very few of the businesses we talked to were actively pursuing digital transformation strategies. But during COVID, digital transformation took on a whole new meaning. According to the Equinix 2020-21 Global Tech Trends Survey, 47% of global IT decision-makers accelerated their digital transformation plans because of the pandemic, with 31% reporting that interconnection facilitates digital transformation.

For our customers, the path to digital transformation typically starts with companies thinking about where their business-critical data lives and how to best connect to it. This brings interconnection front and center as a top priority. From there, businesses need to determine how to best connect their distributed clouds, data, applications and devices and drive the best performance possible across these hybrid digital infrastructures, with more reliable security than the public internet.

They also required proximate connectivity to employees and partner and customer ecosystems — virtually rather than physically — to dramatically improve both their business performance and user experience. This is why our customers turn to our private, low-latency interconnection solutions, such as Equinix Fabric™ to power their digital infrastructure to transform and thrive in the global digital economy.

Digital leaders in action

Two Equinix customers stand out as great examples of this interconnection-fueled digital transformation journey: Zoom and Sentara Healthcare and Optima Health. Both organizations recognized early that they would need to transform their legacy on-premises IT infrastructures into more flexible and scalable digital infrastructures to achieve future growth. While they had already started down that road, there is no way they could have anticipated the massive pandemic-driven demand they would experience.

Leveraging Platform Equinix® and our interconnection services in multiple regions around the world, Zoom was able to expedite the delivery of its unified communications platform to global customers and partners. Today, Zoom is in Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers in nine markets worldwide and has at least two data centers in each of the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions to create sites for reliable disaster-recovery backup.

Sentara Healthcare and Optima Health launched a digital transformation strategy to connect patients to healthcare providers more effectively and seamlessly, whether the patient was in a hospital bed or at home. Sentara’s investment in a modern digital infrastructure prepared the company for the high volumes of patient connections to its online Sentara and Optima Patient Portal and telemedicine platforms during the pandemic.

Connecting to success

In the same way interconnection helped our Sales Team’s families stay connected through our Family First activities during the pandemic, we’ll continue to pursue new innovative interconnection solutions for our customers on Platform Equinix. We’ll help them advance their competitive advantage through forward-looking data center, interconnection and edge services that enable them to build and interconnect the foundational digital infrastructure that powers their success. These solutions on Platform Equinix will help digital businesses protect their current investments while investing in new possibilities.

Learn more about how far you can take your digital transformation with interconnection by reading the Platform Equinix Vision Paper.

[i] Equinix market analytics.