Five reasons why interconnection will continue to grow

Everyone knows that users connect to data centers and clouds over the public internet. But, data centers, cloud providers, colocation facilities, and even edge infrastructure sites, need more than simple connections to deliver seamless, predictable responsiveness. They need an overlapping mesh of connections. Or, to put it simply, interconnection.

Today, most organizations have more than one data center, most use more than one cloud, and many are evolving toward hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructures that span many sites in many countries.

Data suggests that around 40% of organizations' workloads run in a combination of private and hybrid cloud, while the remaining 60% is split evenly between public cloud and internal infrastructures. That means there is a significant amount of network traffic crisscrossing between data centers, cloud providers, cloud customers, and ultimately, users.

Therein lies the challenge for organizations operating these hybrid infrastructures. More often than not, the public internet isn’t fast or reliable enough to keep up with the traffic.

That's why having the right interconnection strategy is critical. If your organization operates on a hybrid model, a viable interconnection strategy ensures that you can distribute workloads across your entire infrastructure. So, instead of disparate nodes, you get an integrated, resilient mesh.

Those are the broad strokes of why interconnection still matters and will only continue to grow in importance for businesses. Here are five use cases to consider:

1. Cloud connectivity

When surveyed for Flexera's 2021 State of the Cloud report, 92% of respondents reported having a multicloud strategy while 82% said they are taking a hybrid approach—using a mix of public and private clouds. This statistic underscores the scale of network traffic moving in and out of the cloud. If your organization needs to leverage private, secure connections from the data center to major cloud service providers for compute, storage, network, and other services without going over the public internet, you need to ensure that the connection is absolutely reliable.

2. Multicloud connectivity

As you can see from the statistics above, most organizations use multiple clouds in their infrastructure. While 49% of respondents to the Flexera survey reported that they silo workloads in different clouds, many (around one-third) are using more advanced architectures that require workload mobility that span public and private clouds.

3. Cloud redundancy

In the event of a major disaster (natural or otherwise), individual connections may go offline. Interconnection enables business continuity by creating redundant connections from the data center to a single cloud service provider across different geographic regions.

4. Data center interconnection

Flexible pricing models, interconnected, high-speed connectivity, and the ability for users to connect to their own distributed infrastructure make colocation data centers attractive for a wide range of applications, such as backups, disaster recovery, workload distribution and more. That's why many organizations opt for data centers for latency-sensitive applications