Topic: Interconnection

A global, real-world proving ground can offer companies a huge advantage, especially when it’s based on a vendor-neutral interconnection platform, along with the right level of expertise for proactively testing new digital solutions. Equinix can offer that kind of environment and support to help accelerate digital transformation and innovation with a greater level of success.

High-profile security breaches that exploited Internet of Things (IoT) vulnerabilities have created major business concerns, and people really aren’t sure how safe IoT is. These breaches have redoubled industry efforts to make the IoT as secure as possible, and the joke implies that these efforts are succeeding. But that’s debatable.

Between 2017-2021, the GXI projects a 48% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in Interconnection Bandwidth, the total capacity provisioned to privately and directly exchange traffic with a diverse set of participants at distributed IT exchange points. Europe is expected to contribute 23% of installed Interconnection Bandwidth capacity globally by 2021, an estimated 1,921 Terabits per second (Tbps).

PT conducted three different Amazon Web Services™ (AWS EC2) interconnection scenarios at the Principled Technologies data center and an Equinix Solution Validation Center™ (SVC) to see if there was a significant difference in data transfer performance when using the public internet versus private interconnection between businesses and cloud partners. The results were pretty amazing.

Advances in the use of digital technology have improved customer experiences in most industries. Look around—there isn’t a day that we’re not benefitting, as individuals and as a society, from recent advances in digital technology, whether by using an innovative application or by discovering a disruptive digital service capable of transforming some aspect of our daily routine.

The U.S. was an early adopter of digital business, which is a big reason it’s led the way in expanding access to the Interconnection that powers it. The U.S. is also the home base for the largest number of multi-national enterprises.

For distributed application architectures, especially those leveraging the cloud, performance issues can be hard to track down because it’s not easy to observe all the components in the system simultaneously. Performance issues are typically diagnosed from the application perspective and fall into two big buckets: storage and network.

Individually connecting multiple clouds over traditional wide area networking (WAN) infrastructures is operationally complex and costly, resulting in unreliable cross-cloud application interaction and performance, as well as poor scalability, visibility and control. Also, managing increasing data volumes from the cloud can’t be solved by public internet offloading, since doing so increases latency and risk.

Digital technologies will form the cornerstone of answering this question, but in order to succeed they will need to address issues such as updating legacy infrastructure, guaranteeing data security and improving the ROI on healthcare technology investments. As a result, the digital healthcare systems of the near future call for levels of decentralization, consumerization and personalization that can only be delivered by technology and interconnection. 

We frequently see IT teams that own the Orchestration phase are not highly engaged in the Strategy and Business Model components. Nor are they empowered to align business units to cleanly execute the IT projects that deliver transformation—applications, IT systems, operating models, people and culture. We see this is a factor in the underperformance, or even failure, of many digital transformation initiatives.