Topic: Interconnection

Whilst natural disasters cannot be avoided, many anticipate that interconnected smart cities will enable citizens to better protect themselves and empower governments to better safeguard private and public assets.  Everyone desires a quick recovery.

To be competitive, healthcare firms will need to combine their vast amounts of data with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) — be it Google-developed AI/ML algorithms to identify cancerous tumors on mammograms or cloud-assisted medical collaboration leading to new drugs or treatments.

And as business and technology leaders move closer to another year of high stakes digital transformations and the big IT decisions that power them, we’re taking a closer look at the technologies that will make the biggest digital business impact in 2019.

Networking has played a critical role in digital transformation, evolving from now-primitive centralized connections to today’s distributed software-defined networks (SDN). Software-defined networking, an approach to cloud computing, simplifies network management and configuration through programming to improve network performance and monitoring.

We at Equinix — the world’s largest interconnection platform provider — have made some key observations over the past several years, particularly relating to the evolving strategy of deploying wide area network infrastructures. The following provides a narrative for the illustration below, with emphasis on two sharply different methodologies in play from both the past and present.

The oil rigs, power plants and service stations of the energy and utility sector conjure up the heavy metal industry of the 20th century more than the digital future of the 21st. But, in fact, this sector is ripe for digital transformation and the power of Interconnection, according to the second annual Global Interconnection Index (the GXI).

In the Motiv SOC, all activities on the application and associated data are collected, analyzed and correlated in a centralized manner for its customers, so deviations can be recognized quickly and reported. Initially, the SOC service was mainly reactive, but Motiv is now focusing on real-time alerting to provide faster insights for customers to immediately analyze and solve potential security breaches.

Digital business will include enterprise-owned assets, whether enterprise-premises-based, colocated or in the cloud. These assets will utilize cloud technology for integration and deployment, and will be optimized in designs where dynamic, high-speed, secure communications will reduce the friction between multiple sources and sinks of information.

Walking the OpenWorld floor, it was clear that the enterprises and partner organizations gathered there were eager to realize Ellison’s vision. They are working to make digital transformations that will increase their operational efficiency, improve their customer experiences, grow their revenues and strengthen their competitive positions. But

Cloud computing involves virtualization, dynamically moving workloads between on-premises and cloud platforms, and an increased reliance on third parties for many types of IT functions. This makes well-thought-out and documented processes, policies and procedures even more important than in a more static and manual environment.