Interconnecting at the Edge

The explosive growth of internet-connected devices, along with new applications that require real-time computing power, are forcing businesses to rethink the ways they manage and transport data. As businesses continue to turn digital, they’re moving their computing from centralized data centers to a hybrid infrastructure at the edge. At its basic level, this means moving computation and data storage closer to the devices where it’s being gathered, rather than relying on a central location that can be thousands of miles away.

This transition requires moving from a centralized IT services model to one that is geographically distributed and regionalized with cloud, resulting in a hybrid multicloud infrastructure. The convergence of significant macro, technology, and regulatory trends has made it more complex for businesses to make this transition to the edge. Most businesses today are successfully navigating their way by deploying private traffic exchange points between counterparts – otherwise known as interconnection services. This is because leveraging multipoint connectivity via direct, private traffic exchange points between users and local services, gives business ready access to third-party, cloud-enabled apps and analytics services.

Macro trends like digital business, data loads and compliance, urbanization and cybersecurity are accelerating the need for a secure, compliant and responsive global business platform, fundamentally supported by interconnection. They require real-time interactions that are locally and regionally distributed, and are secure and compliant. As businesses continue to interconnect at the edge, they’re setting higher standards for business performance; and as customer and partner expectations rise, the shift to an interconnected, edge-first workload and application architecture will be essential for a digital-ready infrastructure that helps enterprises stay competitive

There is a consistent set of distributed IT services that requires a digital business platform for superior performance, security, and data exchange at the digital edge. As businesses continue to adopt these, interconnection bandwidth compounds, and producers and consumers become increasingly interconnected. According to Equinix’s Global Interconnection Index (GXI) Volume 3 capacity is expected to reach 13,300+ Tbps by 2022, which represents a 51% compound annual growth rate. This leap is consistent globally and across all industries, including energy, healthcare, government, and manufacturing, pointing to the universal need for interconnection services.

Interconnection is expected to become more and more integral to business infrastructures as digital transformation continues to drive the business ecosystem. The GXI identified that when businesses spend greater than $50,000 per month on distributed IT services, the need for interconnection bandwidth capacity increases 4x on average to support real-time interactions. For businesses operating in more than three countries, the GXI forecasts a 5x increase in the interconnection bandwidth required to locally connect data sources and security controls to meet data compliance regulations and reduce cybersecurity vulnerability points.