Digital transformation has become a necessity for businesses
striving to deliver value and innovate in a globally connected
economy.
The value of cross-border data
flows at the heart of today’s global
digital trade surpassed the value of merchandise trade
for the first time in 2015, propelled by real-time interactions
that require the interconnection of people, locations and clouds
as well as an interconnected mesh of metro hubs and colocated
digital capabilities where trade flows. At least half of global
GDP could be digitized by 2021, according to IDC.
Hisham Muhammad, director of Global Solutions Architect at
Equinix Asia Pacific, highlighted how interconnections help
businesses in this digital ecosystem to:
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Capture digital value from supporting real-time interactions.
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Establish proximity via edge computing
nodes for reduced latency in digital service
delivery and accelerated business interactions -
Understand and optimize the interaction between customers,
partners and employees via digital business processes
Additionally, managing data that are used globally while ensuring
compliance with local data regulations requires the
interconnection of data storage, analytics and networking
colocated in relevant business regions. Businesses will also have
to manage cybersecurity risk by creating necessary safeguards
through the interconnection of applications, data, networking and
security controls colocated across regions.
As digital transformation accelerates for every company in every
industry, Equinix’s Global
Interconnection Index volume 2 (GXI) projects
interconnections between enterprises and cloud and IT providers
in Asia-Pacific to grow exponentially by 99% CAGR through 2021.
Businesses will build out new digital services and migrate
workloads to third-party cloud platforms. Regionally,
Asia-Pacific’s interconnection bandwidth is expected to grow at
51% CAGR to 2,200+ Tbps by 2021 – much faster than the US and
Europe – with Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney and Tokyo expected to
contribute 61% of overall interconnection traffic.
“A key to successful transformation will be the conversion of IT
from being the back-office enabler of internal business processes
to playing a prominent role as the engine powering digital
business flows between people, things, and data, all of which
live at the edge of the business,” noted Richard Villars, vice
president of Datacenter and Cloud, in an IDC
Perspective.
Catalytic fabric
To this end, the Equinix Cloud Exchange
Fabric (ECX Fabric) inter-metro connectivity enables
enterprises and organizations across Asia-Pacific to scale,
secure and optimize traffic flows on demand to any other ECX
Fabric customer in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne and Perth), Hong
Kong, Japan (Tokyo and Osaka), Singapore, or other major cities
in the Americas and EMEA. Equinix ECX Fabric customers can
also connect in near real time to service providers, suppliers
and other businesses in their digital supply chain on-demand,
locally or across
metros.
The ECX Fabric integrates direct physical and virtual connections
spanning 200 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers
in 52 markets around the world and linking more than 9,800 of the
world’s largest enterprises into a unified Platform Equinix. The platform
expands interconnection
opportunities for businesses and enables vertical
ecosystems such as financial services, content and digital media,
and cloud exchanges.
For example, interconnections can help financial services firms
to expedite the integration of global subsidiaries obtained
through M&A. Digital retailers could leverage better
proximity to advertising and digital payment partners in specific
metros to provide faster, more personalized consumer shopping
experience. And media and entertainment companies can develop a
more productive value chain to streamline the global creation and
distribution of media content to more viewers for less cost.
“ECX Fabric leverages software-defined networking capabilities to
allow customers to dynamically enable multiple connections
through one port to any customer on the ECX Fabric, or to its own
infrastructure within Equinix in the region without traversing
the public internet,” said Hisham. “Customers can implement
cost-effective data replication and synchronization for business
continuity by enabling inter-country or city connectivity to back
up cloud instances.”
This is a QuestexAsia feature commissioned by Equinix.