What Is a Cloud On-Ramp?

Editor’s Note: This blog was originally published in January 2024. It was updated in August 2025 to include the latest information. 

Cloud services have helped digital businesses unlock greater flexibility, cost-efficiency and innovation.  However, savvy IT leaders recognize that how they access those services matters.

These days, anyone can access the cloud from just about anywhere. But to capitalize on the benefits of cloud, you must ensure reliable, low-latency connectivity to multiple cloud providers in strategic locations worldwide. At the same time, you need to be able to secure your cloud data, comply with data privacy and sovereignty requirements, and keep your costs predictable. You can achieve all these things using cloud on-ramps.

A cloud on-ramp is a direct, private connection offered by a cloud provider inside a vendor-neutral colocation data center, and accessible via either physical or virtual network infrastructure.

What are the benefits of using cloud on-ramps?

Cloud on-ramps can help you avoid many of the challenges that often come from using the public internet for cloud access. When you use a cloud on-ramp, by definition, you have proximity to the cloud provider of your choice. This means that low latency is a given. You also get performance benefits compared to the public internet, since your traffic takes the most direct route possible to the cloud and doesn’t have to compete with other traffic to get there.

Also, a cloud on-ramp is a private connection, so it allows your data to avoid security threats found on the public internet. And since cloud on-ramps allow you to access cloud services on demand, without having to store your data in the cloud, you can maintain the control you need to ensure you’re meeting your data sovereignty requirements.

Beyond the basic benefits of better performance and control, cloud on-ramps enable these possibilities:

• Modernizing your network infrastructure
• Unlocking the power of cloud proximity
• Enabling AI privacy and compliance

Modernizing your network infrastructure

For many enterprises, network modernization is among the first steps they take to build a foundation for more advanced digital transformation initiatives. And doing so can pay off in a big way: CDM Smith, a U.S.-based engineering construction company, achieved project modeling that is 20 times faster with 250% more operating bandwidth per employee after working with Equinix to adopt a new hybrid multicloud networking strategy.

One reason enterprises pursue network modernization is that traditional MPLS networks aren’t well suited to deliver multicloud connectivity. Many businesses still operate centralized network infrastructure, making it difficult to ensure proximity to different providers everywhere they might need cloud services. They can also experience inconsistent performance across multiple clouds, as well as unpredictable pricing.

In contrast, a modernized network infrastructure is highly flexible and distributed, thus allowing you to get the right cloud services in the right locations. In particular, a Network as a Service (NaaS) solution such as Equinix Fabric® allows you to connect into a single port and get access to cloud on-ramps to many different providers in many places throughout the world, all with built-in flexibility and low latency.

Unlocking the power of cloud proximity

The question of how best to move data into the cloud looms large for many enterprises. It’s common knowledge that a hybrid multicloud approach delivers the best results, as it allows you to pick the right environment for each workload. However, hybrid infrastructure can only perform as intended if data moves between cloud and on-premises environments quickly and cost effectively. Achieving this is often easier said than done.

To solve the hybrid multicloud data problem, you must ensure your data is close enough to move into the cloud when the need arises, while also avoiding the costs and complexity of storing data directly in the cloud. To put it simply, you need a private data environment that you control, deployed in proximity to the cloud.

By deploying data storage across multiple interconnected regions, you can access low-latency cloud on-ramps to move data into multiple clouds on demand. These cloud on-ramps can help you get the best results from hybrid multicloud without having to sacrifice control over your data. When you do decide to move data into the cloud, you can move only specific datasets that have a valid reason for moving, and maintain copies of those datasets outside the cloud. Thus, you’ll be able to avoid paying high egress fees just to get that data back out of the cloud.

Enabling AI privacy and compliance

Enterprises are rushing to capitalize on efficiencies and innovations enabled by AI, but they need a way to do that without placing their data at risk. This is especially challenging at a time when AI data sources and workloads are increasingly distributed across different public and private environments. Enterprises need reliable, flexible connectivity to bring these different environments together. Using the public internet is one way to get that connectivity, but it also places sensitive data at risk of exposure.

Using public AI services could lead to unintended data leakage, as some companies found out the hard way during the early days of ChatGPT.[1] To avoid this risk, many of these enterprises are pursuing a private approach to AI, where they train or fine-tune their own AI models, host them inside a protected environment and use only proprietary datasets for inference.

Thanks to cloud on-ramps, you can incorporate public cloud services into your AI strategy while still maintaining control over your AI datasets. This means that you can enjoy all the benefits of cloud services, including the ability to scale capacity quickly to keep up with growing AI workloads. At the same time, since you don’t have to store data directly in the cloud, you can minimize the potential drawbacks of public cloud, including:

• Performance and latency issues
• Higher-than-expected costs due to data egress fees
• Risk of failing to comply with data sovereignty and privacy requirements

There’s no better place than Equinix to find cloud on-ramps

No matter which digital use cases you’re pursuing, access to diverse cloud on-ramps will make it easier to achieve your goals. As the global market leader in native cloud on-ramps, Equinix can help you connect with your chosen cloud providers when and where you want.

Equinix colocation data centers are available in 76 markets globally. Many of these markets are home to low-latency cloud on-ramps, with all major cloud providers represented.

For example, Equinix is home to:

• Google Cloud on-ramps in 44+ global metros, including 24+ low-latency Google Cloud Interconnect locations
• Access to AWS Direct Connect in 45+ strategic markets—more than any other data center provider
• Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute availability in 36+ global locations on five continents, making us the leading provider of ExpressRoute globally

In addition, these cloud on-ramps can be accessed using Equinix Fabric virtual connections. This means that in many cases, you wouldn’t even have to be physically colocated with a particular cloud provider to access their on-ramps. Across the six largest cloud providers globally (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and IBM Cloud), there are more than 220 on-ramps directly accessible via Equinix Fabric. Also, while internet connectivity is essentially a black box, Equinix Fabric offers robust network observability features to provide insights into your cloud traffic.

Using cloud on-ramps in Equinix data centers can help customers unlock the full power of direct, private interconnection for their hybrid multicloud networking strategies. To learn more about how leading companies are optimizing costs, enhancing performance, and innovating with AI while maintaining control and scalability, read the white paper Thriving with a hybrid multicloud strategy.

[1] Emily Dreibelbis, Samsung Software Engineers Busted for Pasting Proprietary Code Into ChatGPT, PCMag, April 7, 2023.