Today, global economics are at the cusp of a new age. Organizations are redefining their activities and their sectors on the basis of digitalization, which is characterized by the constant interconnection of just about everything. New and transformative technologies, like the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and 5G, are accelerating the pace of change in markets around the globe. Long and well-established digital companies as well as “classic” industry companies are changing their business models and entering new sectors. In the digital world of today and tomorrow, access to global data flows is as essential for business as the provision of electricity was for the industrial world. What’s more, the access to information and digital services is becoming more and more relevant for billions of users and to an increasing number of developed and developing markets in all corners of the world.
All of these disruptive changes in global economics have one thing in common: the need for new interconnection services and network strategies that meet the requirements of the digitalized markets. Workloads in all sectors are becoming both more latency-sensitive, meaning they need to be built close to the users (“close to the edge”), and security-sensitive, based on the requirement that interconnection should bypass the public Internet. In addition, flexibility plays a major role in terms of the need to respond to quick-changing interconnection demands.
And it’s not only corporations from the telecommunication industry that are strongly impacted by these trends. Corporations from all sectors, including the automotive, general mobility, healthcare, finance, and media industries, show a strong need for new interconnection services for enterprises, paired with cloud connectivity, and with global capacity interconnection needs.
The following two examples of different sectors illustrate this evolution.
1. Finance
Real-time payment services need a redundant, secure, and fast interconnection path between the involved parties. Investment banks look for the shortest path between banks and traders. Moreover, market research companies are highly interested in directly connecting to banks in different data centers in order to realize real-time delivery of research results.
2. Automotive
The monetization of interconnected cars might become the next big thing. User-based insurance, predictive maintenance, location-based services, and autonomous driving will rely on fast and secure interconnection.
DE-CIX: Growing vibrant and neutral ecosystems to serve customers’ diverse needs in connectivity marketplaces across the globe
These examples show that a huge data workload of different dimensions must be handled securely, flexibly, and with minimized latency. For this reason, the DE-CIX platforms – and ecosystems around them – are developed to cater to a variety of different services. The interconnection regime in the future will require different interconnection models and will need to cater for different types of capacity needs, such as peering, cloud connectivity, and security services. To satisfy the digital markets’ and particular modern enterprises’ requirements for reliable, high bandwidth, and secure connectivity within their exclusive supply chain networks, DE-CIX has established InterconnectionFLEX: an all-in-one solution. With this service package, customers receive interconnection consulting and a direct and flexible connection to over 50 cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, and Microsoft Azure. It allows direct interconnection (peering) to more than 1,000 local and international networks. All components of InterconnectionFLEX can be flexibly configured, which allows customers to optimally profit from the digital revolution.