Equinix Services Drive Digital Transformation Across Canada

Canadian businesses have faced significant disruption over the last several years, leading to changing IT requirements and new investment priorities. These changes show up clearly in the results of the 2022 Equinix Global Tech Trends Survey (GTTS). Equinix talked to IT decision-makers from around the world—including 100 from Canada—to determine the trends, challenges and opportunities shaping IT today.

The results paint a clear picture of how businesses have adapted to change in recent years, and how they’re strategizing to get ahead of what’s next. For instance, 62% of Canadian IT decision-makers said the technology changes they made during the COVID-19 pandemic are here to stay, while 52% said their IT strategy became more ambitious and aggressive because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Throughout our history in Canada, Equinix has been dedicated to understanding the IT priorities of Canadian companies and adapting our services accordingly. It was this dedication that led us to expand our colocation footprint by acquiring 13 data centres from Bell Canada in 2020. Today, we operate 15 Equinix IBX® colocation data centres in eight metros across six provinces. We are proud to help businesses from the Maritimes to British Columbia access the agile, distributed infrastructure they need to thrive in the modern digital economy, all while tapping into partner ecosystems of leading cloud, network and IT service providers.

As important as it is for our customers, our commitment to Canada extends far beyond just our colocation footprint. We’ve also made it a priority to expand our portfolio of digital services to more places across the country. Some of the digital services that make up Platform Equinix® include:

• Network Edge, which provides virtual network functions (VNFs) on a modular infrastructure platform, allowing instant deployment and interconnection of network services.
• Equinix Fabric™, our software-defined interconnection service, which helps customers connect digital infrastructure and services on demand at software speed.
• Equinix Metal™, our automated, interconnected Bare Metal as a Service offering, which gives customers access to scalable physical infrastructure on demand.
• Equinix Internet Access, which offers access to multiple ISPs in each metro via a single contract.
• Equinix Internet Exchange®, which helps customers exchange internet data with optimal flexibility, performance and control.
• Equinix Precision Time™, which offers precise and secure Time as a Service for distributed enterprise systems worldwide.
• Equinix Managed Services, which help customers consume market-leading technology and accelerate time-to-market via scalable, pre-provisioned infrastructure.

Today, we’re proud to announce that the services named above are available in new metros throughout Canada, helping more Canadian businesses optimize their digital infrastructure and future-proof their operations. The new service availability includes:

• Network Edge in Vancouver
• Equinix Fabric, Equinix Precision Time and Equinix Internet Access in Vancouver and Kamloops
• Equinix Internet Exchange and Equinix Metal in Montreal
• Equinix Managed Services across our entire Canadian footprint

Infrastructure agility helps unlock geographic expansion

The GTTS data shows that many Canadian businesses are forging ahead with geographic expansion in the next 12 months, despite the economic uncertainty on the horizon. This includes 20% that are planning to expand into a new country, and 33% that are planning to expand to a new region within Canada. To help with their expansion goals, most of these businesses are turning to virtual infrastructure: 47% said they plan to use virtual infrastructure in the short term before building permanent physical infrastructure, while 23% said they’ll continue to rely on their virtual infrastructure for the foreseeable future.

The expansion of Network Edge into Vancouver creates instant opportunities for businesses looking to expand from Western Canada to the Asia-Pacific region. Network Edge is also available in key APAC metros like Tokyo, Sydney, Hong Kong and Singapore. This means that Canadian businesses can quickly deploy the network services they need from the vendors of their choice, getting closer to end users at the edge on either side of the Pacific. In addition, customers can use Equinix Fabric to connect all the different components of their distributed digital infrastructure to each other and to the partners in their digital supply chain, even in the aftermath of aggressive global expansion.

Interconnection and virtual network functions empower hybrid multicloud

The GTTS results also show the important role that hybrid multicloud architectures will play for Canadian businesses going forward. When asked to share their cloud strategies for the next 12 months, 76% of Canadian IT leaders said their organizations would be moving more functions to the cloud. Specifically, 49% said they’re using hybrid cloud, making it the most common cloud deployment approach among Canadian businesses. Furthermore, 75% said they currently work with two or more cloud providers.

The expansion of Equinix digital services in Canada can help organizations meet their hybrid multicloud goals. Businesses in Western Canada will now be able to use Network Edge devices to privately route their traffic to and from the cloud, and among their different cloud providers. Most importantly, they’ll be able to reach their chosen cloud providers remotely, instead of having to be physically colocated with a cloud on-ramp. With Equinix Fabric, they’ll also be able to simplify hybrid multicloud networking. With our interoperable self-service web portal, they can set or adjust virtual connections to all their different clouds in the same place, rather than having to use multiple proprietary tools from the cloud providers themselves.

Maximize flexibility and overcome supply chain challenges with XaaS

Another key takeaway from the GTTS is that Canadian businesses seem particularly attuned to the idea of using Everything as a Service (XaaS) to help overcome disruption. More than two-thirds of Canadian IT leaders (64%) said their organizations were moving toward an XaaS operating model. Those who are moving toward XaaS gave a variety of reasons for doing so, including greater simplicity in their IT infrastructure (58%) and the flexibility to add or remove components as needed (55%).

Add in the global chip shortage—with many businesses waiting up to 12 months to source physical hardware—and it’s easy to see why virtual infrastructure solutions like Network Edge and Equinix Metal are so important for Canadian businesses. Network Edge offers VNFs such as load balancers, SD-WAN edge gateways, multicloud edge routers or distributed edge firewalls from top technology providers around the world, while Equinix Metal provides dedicated compute and storage capacity on bare metal when and where customers need it.

One example of a Canadian customer that’s maximizing agility using Equinix services is Celero, a leading provider of financial technology solutions for Canada’s credit union sector. The company utilizes Equinix Fabric software-defined interconnection for low-latency access to cloud services on demand and Network Edge VNFs for situations when physical deployments would be too costly or time consuming.

Both Network Edge and Equinix Metal offer the benefits businesses look for in an XaaS operating model, including faster deployment (even in the face of supply chain challenges), greater cost-efficiency by shifting to OPEX spend, and more time to focus on core business processes instead of manually managing IT infrastructure.

Equinix is driving digital transformation across Canada—today and tomorrow

The coast-to-coast expansion of Equinix digital services complements our existing colocation footprint to help Canadian businesses overcome their challenges and capitalize on the opportunities facing them, now and into the future. We see Canada as a thriving digital economy, driven forward by sustainable innovation and a collaborative spirit, and we’re proud to do our part to help Canadian businesses go even further.

To learn more about how Equinix can support your digital transformation goals, within Canada or across the world, connect with an Equinix Canada sales specialist today.

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For more insights like the ones presented in this blog, read the Equinix 2022 GTTS results ebook.