While there are many forms of connectivity available to consumers and businesses, the internet has become ubiquitous—essentially a utility that’s vital for daily life. For enterprises, the public internet can become the predominant corporate WAN backbone, gradually replacing and augmenting private MPLS networks. The growth of cloud and SaaS applications over the past decade accelerated this shift to internet-based networks as many enterprise software systems migrated to as-a-service offerings.
Because of how available and cost-effective the internet is for enterprise connectivity, organizations make a lot of assumptions about its reliability and performance. Often, they assume it’s reliable and performant enough for their requirements. And for many workloads, it is. However, the internet isn’t magic; there’s a lot of infrastructure that runs behind it.
Because the internet is inherently a public, shared global network, it’s not a great fit for every workload. In instances where predictable user experience is key, the inherent variability of the internet can become problematic. Ensuring user-bound traffic is on a reliable path can mean the difference between keeping users or losing them to frustration. Many companies are also concerned about deterministic routing and observability into the full path of user traffic so that they can, for example, make sure traffic stays in country for regulatory purposes.
Enterprises sometimes learn the hard way that the internet is no longer good enough for a given workload or goal when they experience outages, reduced productivity, revenue loss, customer or user complaints, and other business impacts. Once they reach this point, they usually begin to explore private connectivity solutions that deliver better performance, security and reliability.
The balancing act of network performance, cost and control
Organizations have a lot of connectivity choices. Everyone’s working to find the right mix of public and private connectivity to address their requirements. When evaluating the best connectivity option for a given workload, companies typically try to balance performance, cost, observability and other network metrics to deliver the best the user experience.
In fact, there’s a common saying in business: “Good, fast, and cheap: Pick two.” Companies can’t optimize everything, so they must balance their priorities. The most reliable, low-latency, high-speed networking solutions aren’t the cheapest; and if you want lower costs, you might need to sacrifice latency, speed or reliability.
When is the internet no longer good enough?
Let’s explore five key areas where the internet can fall short:
1. When you have strict data privacy and security standards
As a public connectivity solution, the internet can expose data in transit to risks, such as data breaches and data leaks. Encryption and other security tooling can help prevent access to data, but once the traffic is on the internet, it’s subject to interception. Tampering with traffic flows in the public internet is a significant security problem and can increase your attack surface for risks like phishing, ransomware, DDoS attacks and malware that can compromise company data.
2. When you’re in a highly regulated industry or region
Industries like healthcare and finance are subject to a higher number of data regulations since they have very sensitive data and are prime targets for cybercriminals. The internet can’t guarantee the traffic isolation and control that private connectivity options offer. It also can’t guarantee data will stay within national borders, which some regulatory frameworks require. All around, the internet can’t support the auditability and compliance some organizations need.
3. When you need traceability for data access
Some companies with sensitive data need very fine-grained policies for identity and access management (IAM) that allow them to control which users or roles can access or interact with certain data. The public internet lacks this kind of granular visibility of where traffic moves, which degrades observability for access management, isolation and oversight. Granular access allows for robust tracking and monitoring of where traffic moved, which can support audit and compliance needs.
4. When you need to optimize network performance
Some companies require ultra-fast, reliable network performance. For instance, you may need:
- Quality of Service to prioritize mission-critical applications
- Dynamic resource allocation because of fluctuating load on your network
- Network segmentation to isolate particular data or departments
- Continuous monitoring to detect and mitigate network issues faster
- Minimum committed transmission speeds
With the public internet, you don’t get this level of control over your network.
5. When you need customizable traffic policies
For a host of reasons, some organizations want highly customizable traffic policies for deterministic routing and pathing. This is impossible to do once your traffic leaves your network.
In scenarios like these, the internet is probably no longer meeting your needs. And that means it’s time to start looking at private interconnection.
The importance of alternatives to the internet
Of course, companies have plenty of connectivity options beyond the internet, including public and private peering solutions and private interconnection.
Public and private peering solutions are a middle ground, offering some advantages over the internet: determinate paths, lower latency and at least some network observability. Private peering, specifically, offers dedicated bandwidth and enhanced security.
But private interconnection is the best option for those that want very low latency with higher security and observability. Direct, private connections address all the major limitations of the public internet. With private interconnection, you get enhanced security, predictable performance, more control, more customization options and reliable performance that supports optimal user experiences.
Case study
A company in the agriculture industry was running a multicloud environment that consisted of a production environment in Cloud A and a development environment in Cloud B. They were using the internet to refresh data from the production environment into the development environment. They were getting very different speeds on different days, which hindered productivity and led to a poor user experience for the developers. When these problems happened, they had no control over the resolution and started to realize the internet was no longer adequate for their use case.
To address these issues, the company sought help from Equinix to create a private connection between the two clouds. The private interconnection solution delivers guaranteed bandwidth, performance and observability. Developers can count on a consistent experience since their network now provides the same quality every day. And if network issues arise, they can quickly identify and fix the problem, whereas before, they were in the dark.
More and more companies are realizing that the internet isn’t always the best connectivity option for their needs. The volume of data that’s exchanged directly between companies, bypassing the public internet, is on the rise. With the growth of AI, high-speed connectivity is becoming even more important. It’s likely that we’ll see more organizations using private interconnection instead of the internet, at least when they start to realize the internet is no longer good enough for their workloads.
Equinix offers private software-defined interconnection that enables businesses to connect distributed infrastructure and seamlessly interconnect with thousands of customers partners, clouds and service providers worldwide. With Equinix Fabric®, organizations bypass the public internet, reducing security threats and shrinking the attack surface, all while getting lower latency and improved application performance.
Learn more about the value of private interconnection by downloading our white paper The Future of Interconnection – Driving innovation, efficiency and growth.
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