Equinix has released a number of startling findings from its Global Interconnection Index.

Perhaps most prominent of the discoveries is that interconnection bandwidth is growing at nearly twice the rate of the public internet, with bandwidth used in private data exchange between businesses to be a whopping six times that of the public internet by 2020.

As part of this huge growth, managing director for Ireland and emerging markets at Equinix, Maurice Mortell expects Ireland to contribute significantly in Europe as an increasing number of companies look to locate their data there,

“Interconnection in Europe is expected to grow 44 percent per annum in terms of bandwidth as businesses shift to digital. We will continue to invest significantly in Ireland in order to support the huge growth of private interconnections that the digital revolution demands,” says Mortell.

“As enterprises continue to adopt a new digital way of working, we expect Ireland to become a go-to location for international businesses needing to interconnect within Europe. The only realistic way for Irish and Irish-based companies to reach all the global markets, partners and people needed to scale and succeed is to adopt an interconnection-first strategy.

The effects of digital transformation is clear as companies create entirely new ways of connecting with customers, partners and supply chains.

The Index found global interconnection bandwidth – the total capacity required to privately and directly exchange traffic at distributed IT exchange points – will reach a staggering 5,000 Tbps by 2020, compared to an expected 855 Tbps for the public. Its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45 percent dwarfs the global IP traffic growth of 24 percent.

Industries leading the growth of interconnection are banking and insurance, telecommunications and cloud and IT services. It is also influenced by global trends including digital technology use, urbanisation and cybersecurity risk.

Mortell says we're seeing the emergence of a new internet where mobile, social, cloud and the explosion of data are creating disruption on the scale of the Industrial Revolution.

“In this new reality, it's scale or fail for companies. To succeed, they are choosing interconnection; locating their IT infrastructure in an ecosystem of companies that gather to physically connect with customer and partner networks,” says Mortell.

“Interconnection supports multi-cloud consumption at scale, improves network performance, enables greater operational control and reduces security risk.

Head of cloud and technology at Oracle for UK, Ireland and Israel, John Abel says data is now the lifeblood of organisations, and businesses in the UK and Ireland are increasingly relying on it to move closer to their customers and partners.

“It is vital that companies, large and small, ensure that they have infrastructure in place, and interconnection bandwidth provisioned, that is safe, secure and robust enough to provide them with access to all of their data sources and allow them to use this information to inform their decisions and drive their businesses forward in a digital world,” concludes Abel.