Tag: Network Edge

In today’s digital world, legacy IT and network infrastructures can be huge inhibitors to enterprise cloud adoption. A Riverbed global survey of 1,000 business and IT decision makers in multiple industries reports that 97% of the respondents said, “Their legacy network infrastructure will have difficulty keeping pace with changing demands of cloud and hybrid networks.”

When the majority of branch office traffic was confined to an enterprise’s intranet boundary, network hardware (with extended procurement and implementation cycles) was installed in corporate data centers and branch offices to manage traffic. However, with most enterprise traffic now flowing between public clouds and the Internet, enterprises are seeking faster, more efficient means of establishing and managing secure connections between branch offices and cloud environments.

Equinix is proud to be a bronze sponsor of Cisco Live 2019, which explores the latest innovations in networking, security and the cloud for digital business. During next week’s event in San Diego, we will be unveiling Network Edge, a new Platform Equinix® offering that will enable you to deploy vendor-neutral, virtual network services within minutes.

Today we launched a new generation of Network Edge services that will be a game changer for global businesses, equipping them to rapidly modernize their networks virtually on Platform Equinix®. With Network Edge, organizations can select, configure and connect virtual network services from industry-leading vendors like Cisco, Juniper and Palo Alto Networks at the edge in minutes—without additional space, power, hardware or equipment.

An increasing number of things once manifested as physical are rapidly becoming digital. Digital photography has virtually eliminated film and transformed the creation, distribution and consumption of media. When information can be found in seconds via a Google search there’s no need for a bookshelf of encyclopedias. It’s rare to find a printed map when GPS devices and applications can guide you down the road or around the world.  

Virtualization is now being applied to an increasing range of networking hardware. The functionality of purpose-built network hardware like routers, switches and firewalls is being replaced by network functions virtualization (NFV) architectures that run on commodity servers.

Two of the most powerful technology advancements in the past decade are mobile and cloud computing. Mobile puts more processing and communications capability in your hand than many organizations had in their entire data centers twenty years ago. The cloud efficiently and economically places services, applications and data in widely-distributed—and often remote—locations to meet the needs of market expansion, data sovereignty, new services delivery and optimized processing. Together, mobile and cloud have enabled more of the world to reap the benefits of an increasingly digital economy. 

Communications, network and cloud service providers have assumed much of this responsibility and make it easy for enterprises to take advantage of the latest network capabilities. Providers like Equinix play a major role in enabling enterprises to connect globally and manage network resources and interconnection far more efficiently and cost-effectively than ever before.

Cloud technologies have transformed not only the provisioning and delivery of computing services, but also IT business and financial models. Enterprises have delegated management of an ever-increasing amount of their IT infrastructure to cloud service providers, due to the realization of significant capital expenditure (CapEx) savings through the economies of scale delivered by the cloud.

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.