Scaling digital business: Making “everywhere, everyone and everything” a reality

The opportunities that digital creates are endless.

By now, your company has probably already taken advantage of many of them. Perhaps you took your first step into digital when you harnessed a SaaS-based customer relationship management system to better track prospects and close deals faster.

Or maybe your organization adopted a cloud-first policy to speed your ability to grow in new markets.

Today, you are likely working to provide new ways to delight your customers, enable new forms of collaboration, innovate new business models and define entirely new ways of competing.

While digital creates new possibilities across all industries, it also poses a big challenge to traditional IT models.

The very nature of the distributed, dynamic and virtualized infrastructure required to conduct digital business flies in the face of the centralized, manual, physical IT architecture most enterprises have relied on for years.

Modern organizations need to be prepared to deploy digital infrastructure everywhere their business needs to be. They need to reach every customer, partner and vendor to provide the experience they deserve on demand.

And in order to do that, they need to bring people, clouds, data and things together in previously impossible ways. In short, they need the ability to scale at the speed of digital and they need it now.

As the use of digital technology increases, urbanization takes hold, cybersecurity and data sovereignty concerns rise and the flow of global digital trade speeds up, a whole new set of business requirements have emerged.

Your enterprise is expected to enable real-time interactions, provide proximity to digital services, protect data in motion and at rest, and globally interconnect with customers, partners and employees.

The primary driver for this work is to deliver truly differentiated digital customer experiences, and the only way to get there is to simplify, scale and dynamically adapt your digital infrastructure to meet the needs of this new world.

Today, we're announcing major advancements in the evolution of our global interconnection and data center platform that will equip enterprises to better meet these new expectations.

We're helping our 9,500 customers extend their reach in the growing digital economy by enabling them to privately connect on demand to companies in any of our global locations on Platform Equinix.

We'll accomplish this by providing them direct physical and virtual connection across our 190 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers, which span 48 markets worldwide.

This development ushers in a whole new level of interconnection: inter-metro connectivity. And, it's powered by a proven technology our enterprise and service provider customers are already using today—the Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX), which we have renamed the Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX Fabric) to reflect these new capabilities.

Our customers can now more widely use the software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities built into ECX to dynamically interconnect to participating Equinix customers over direct and secure connections, regardless of location.

This includes interconnecting their own edge deployments across regionally distributed Equinix IBX data centers.

With ECX Fabric, we are dramatically simplifying how companies enable private interconnection.

By allowing them to customize their connectivity with employees, partners and customers via a customer portal or a rich set of APIs that leverage programmable SDN capabilities, such as discovery and real-time provisioning, they can leverage all the benefits companies have come to expect from dynamic "as-a-service" models.

To provide additional global interconnection options to our enterprise and service provider customers, we're also expanding the ECX Fabric and the Equinix Internet Exchange in new metros in the EMEA and Americas regions, and extending the ECX Fabric to existing ECX locations in APAC.

Why is this a big deal?

Because it means enterprises will be able to more rapidly deploy digital infrastructures, participate in vibrant business ecosystems and expand into new markets.

Regardless of your industry, the ability to facilitate faster, more secure and more reliable interconnection among multiple organizations from one dynamic global platform built for digital business creates significant new value.

For example, financial services firms might capitalize on the ability to expedite the integration of the global subsidiaries they obtain through M-A.

Digital retailers could leverage better proximity to advertising and digital payment partners in specific metros to provide a faster, more personalized consumer shopping experience.

And, media and entertainment companies can now create a more productive value chain to streamline the global creation and distribution of media content to more viewers for less cost.

With the ECX Fabric, any company can:

• Create reliable business continuity and disaster recovery infrastructures by accessing cloud service providers on demand within or across metros to achieve geo-redundant or integrated multi cloud and hybrid cloud architectures
• Increase business productivity by connecting to SaaS platforms to leverage more cost-effective pay-as-you-go services, no matter where they are
• Improve performance by quickly integrating edge IT infrastructures in different regions for data replication or to access distributed applications/data
• Speed innovation by deploying high-bandwidth, reliable and secure physical and virtual private connections to strategic business partners
• Accelerate growth by rapidly scaling digital business operations across the largest markets globally, connecting to more business partners and destinations

Article by Brian Lillie, Equinix Blog Network