The capacity for private data exchange between businesses is outpacing the public Internet, growing at nearly twice the rate and comprising nearly six times the volume of global IP traffic by 2020.
The latest figures are recorded in the Global Interconnection Index, a new market study published by Equinix that analysed the adoption profile of thousands of carrier-neutral colocation data centre providers and ecosystem participants globally.
The Index highlights how companies are translating digital transformation into action and creating entirely new ways of connecting with their customers, partners and supply chain. It provides an annual baseline to track, measure and forecast the growth of Interconnection Bandwidth, defined as the total capacity provisioned to privately and directly exchange traffic with a diverse set of counterparties and providers at distributed IT exchange points.
“The trend of digital transformation is revolutionising the MENA market, urging businesses to take innovative approaches such as cloud adoption,” said Jeroen Schlosser, Managing Director, Equinix MENA. “However, as this global report shows interconnection is key to ensure full digital transformation and for this, businesses will need to grow their interconnection bandwidth capacity (data exchange capacity). And interconnection means the ability to connect in many ways to the many partners, customers, employees and geographies today’s enterprises need to accelerate business performance and create new opportunities.
He added, “Every MENA business must understand and leverage interconnection bandwidth to compete in the digital age. This will require a regional drive among IT chiefs to re-architect their companies’ IT platforms. Our Dubai data centre acts as regional hub, interconnecting a critical mass of industry participants in one place, allowing businesses to enhance performance and increase user satisfaction while reducing operational costs.”
Brad Casemore, Research Director, Datacenter Networks, IDC, said “Interconnection is an integral building block for digital business. The Global Interconnection Index provides a barometer of the growing relevance of the need to solve for proximity to digital services across all industries. This need is driven by latency, accelerating time to market and integrating multicloud on a local basis.”
