In recent years, the IT infrastructure needs of large global companies have changed drastically. Thanks to an increasingly borderless economy, the growth of latency-sensitive digital applications, and a complex patchwork of data privacy and sovereignty regulations, the old way of doing things is now untenable.
Rather than continuing to rely on siloed, centralized IT infrastructure, where all traffic passes through a core data center location, digital leaders are increasingly turning to distributed, interconnected digital infrastructure. This allows them to get closer to end users by deploying at the digital edge, and interconnecting those edge locations across the globe. In addition, it allows them to connect with an ecosystem of key vendors and service providers at the edge, unlocking a much wider range of services than they could ever dream of supporting alone. These services could include flexible, high-performance cloud compute and SaaS offerings that optimize collaboration and productivity.
With this in mind, it’s no wonder so many global enterprises are turning to Equinix Fabric™ to help interconnect their digital infrastructure. Equinix Fabric provides virtual interconnection capabilities in locations around the world. This makes it easy for enterprises to set up new connections or adjust existing ones—when and where the need arises. By utilizing virtual connections instead of relying exclusively on physical cross connects, enterprises can deploy digital infrastructure with greater flexibility and agility, network and application performance, and cost-efficiency. They can achieve all this while also complying with increasingly complex data privacy and sovereignty laws.
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Thousands of enterprises from around the world are taking advantage of Equinix Fabric to drive digital acceleration. Equinix Fabric is also highly adaptable to the specific technical needs of companies in different industry verticals. Adoption is particularly high in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and retail; 7 of the 10 largest companies in both those industries use Equinix Fabric.
Equinix Fabric enables greater agility and scalability for enterprises across use cases
The key reason so many enterprises are choosing Equinix Fabric is that it supports better results across many different digital infrastructure use cases. These use cases include hybrid multicloud connectivity, data center interconnection and SD-WAN adoption.
Hybrid multicloud connectivity
As enterprises look to adopt hybrid multicloud architectures to drive the best possible balance of performance, scalability, cost efficiency and security, they need reliable, flexible connections with top cloud service providers to keep everything functioning properly. Equinix Fabric for hybrid multicloud networking allows enterprises to access on-ramps to cloud providers across our global footprint; in fact, Equinix ranks #1 worldwide for the highest share of hosted on-ramps. In addition, our intuitive self-service customer portal supports network agility, allowing enterprises to set new virtual connections or modify existing ones with a few simple clicks, on demand.
Equinix Fabric also allows enterprises to deploy redundant connections with ease, making it easier to ensure high availability and business continuity in an uncertain world. Pairing Equinix Fabric private interconnection capabilities with colocation services in one of our global Equinix IBX® data centers can help limit the hidden costs of cloud, including data egress fees.
FIEGE Logistics, a global full-service logistics provider based in Germany, uses Equinix Fabric virtual interconnection services to enable quick and secure access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, as well as Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. This connectivity helps the company automate its digital supply chain, reinforce resiliency, and better manage large volumes of data across disparate locations.
PCL Construction, a global construction contracting company based in Canada, also uses Equinix Fabric to connect directly to Microsoft Azure. “Equinix was invaluable in helping us retrofit our global network with the lowest latency and fastest connectivity to Microsoft Azure for our global users, while enabling greater cloud security and reliability”, said Chris Palmer, Manager of Advanced Technology Services for PCL Construction.
Data center interconnection
In addition to helping enterprises connect with cloud providers, Equinix Fabric also helps them interconnect their own data centers across different metro areas. This enables them to deploy distributed digital infrastructure quickly and easily in locations across the world. Data center interconnection via Equinix Fabric is fast to set up and highly flexible; it’s simple to scale bandwidth up or down as your business needs change.
Mercury Engineering, an Ireland-based engineering and construction company, used Equinix Fabric to create a secure, resilient, high-performance infrastructure that gives workers reliable access to Microsoft Azure services and other SaaS applications at construction sites worldwide. This connectivity allows the company to back up and share construction data in less time, ensuring the data is safe and available when and where it’s needed.
Setting up the high-speed interconnection between our Dublin facilities with Equinix Fabric, then adding the secure, dedicated Microsoft Azure access via ExpressRoute gave us the scalability and resiliency we required to perform our backups more frequently, without impacting any other applications we were running.”- Adam Hoffmann, IT Infrastructure Manager, Mercury
SD-WAN
One of the reasons Equinix Fabric is so valuable for enterprises is that it does more than just help connect them with service providers; it also integrates with other key Equinix offerings, including Network Edge virtual network functions (VNFs). Enterprises can use Equinix Fabric integrated with Network Edge to deploy SD-WAN solutions and other VNFs without the complexity and wait time required for physical networking hardware.
CELSA Group, a leading European manufacturer of long steel products, used Equinix offerings including Equinix Fabric and Network Edge to enable its shift away from MPLS, toward SD-WAN and SDN. This move helped the company reduce network infrastructure costs by up to 40%, and lower latency by up to 10x.
Start interconnecting your digital infrastructure today
As enterprises face a complex and always-changing world, distributed digital infrastructure can help them overcome challenges and unlock a key source of competitive advantage. Equinix Fabric is the ideal platform to interconnect that digital infrastructure, with more locations in more places throughout the world, a larger ecosystem of partners and customers, and greater experience and expertise than any competitor.
To learn more about how Equinix Fabric can help enterprises take advantage of these and other use cases, read the data sheet today.
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