During these challenging times, every industry is experiencing a significant impact on their daily operations, readjusting their growth projections and activating contingency plans at an unparalleled rate. The quick transition of employees from office to home-based environments has forced companies to find innovative strategies to continue delivering high-quality customer experience solely on digital channels.
To maintain business performance and continuity, planned digital transformation journeys have been significantly accelerated. Web-based Video Conferencing, Instant Messaging and Collaboration Tools have been introduced at pace into the usual on-premise digital architecture. It’s clear to businesses that have the ability to continue to trade, these tools will help support their survival in these unprecedented times.
SaaS companies that have previously heavily relied on business optimised networks are now reviewing their own interconnection strategies, ensuring these platforms have the reach and stability required.
What is also extremely clear with this transformational journey, is that it’s here to stay.
A key factor that must now also be considered, is the underlying connectivity between your employees and the business tools provided strong enough to survive in the new normal?
Poor connectivity translates into delayed access to information and reduced opportunities for collaboration and innovation, which inhibit productivity and ultimately turns into delivering subpar experiences for customers.
Businesses and providers need to act swiftly to make sure they have direct and flexible connectivity options that allow employees and customers to stay unaffected.
Evolving connectivity patterns
Exactly what is the new normal?
Internet traffic patterns have changed dramatically since the beginning of this crisis, now that the majority of employees are working from home and consuming far more web-based applications.
This sustained growth of between 20-50% for carriers, content delivery networks and SaaS companies has led to an explosion in growth for Internet Exchange Points and private interconnection between networks. Interconnection hubs are now needed more than ever, ensuring business-critical applications have the physical reach to both traditional business and residential telcos and other platforms that underpin them.
Residential networks are becoming the new business networks, national and international telcos are reviewing and upgrading their edge interconnection strategies at an unprecedented rate. Although, the usual business-based SLA’s no longer apply and many smaller residential telcos don’t optimise their IP network for business-critical platforms.
This creates a new headache for SaaS providers, that need reliable connectivity to underpin their consumer experience in cases such as latency or traffic volume, but also smaller residential telcos that need to support businesses and their employees to consume these tools.
The rise of private interconnection and Internet Exchange consumption is directly linked to network leads trying to answer this new dynamic. Mutual peering between SaaS companies and smaller telcos facilitated by regional Internet Exchanges has a direct impact on the end-users experience.
Peering helps support the smaller telcos in accessing a multitude of platforms across different industries in one place, which is why we’re seeing substantial growth in adoption across the board from providers and the now residential networks to meet this new demand. Private interconnection between networks in mutual locations is also on the rise to protect sensitive traffic such as VoIP and VoD based services.
We know there is an ongoing significant shift to the major cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google that will mitigate some of these issues raised, but for companies that are implementing multi-cloud hybrid strategies, they will need to think about how is their platform going to be seen across both business and residential networks.
The lack of performance, reliable connectivity is a major concern across the board from businesses, residential telcos and SaaS providers. When employees don’t have the underlying connectivity they need to do their job effectively and efficiently, it negatively impacts the end businesses’ bottom line.
Now more than ever there is a significant emphasis on ensuring interconnection between businesses-based applications and residential telcos. Otherwise, it could affect the end businesses’ ability to trade and the SaaS companies ability to offer a service.
Solving connectivity challenges
Interxion provides solutions to these new connectivity challenges with a wide range of direct connectivity options, enabling businesses to reduce latency and improve performance through our portfolio of Cross Connects. Within our colocated data centres, these Cross Connects allow businesses to interconnect with their communities of interest – including their partners, suppliers and customers – in a flexible and scalable way, so they can maintain business continuity, despite any increase in demands.
Additionally, Interxion hosts internet exchanges in our carrier-neutral data centres, and with remote peering, businesses have the ability to connect to the leading internet exchanges, from anywhere, with any bandwidth. All it takes is one cross-connect to an Interxion platform to enable on-demand private connections to multiple third-party platforms.
Scalability and flexibility are key to maintaining business continuity since networks need to be able to keep up as demand fluctuates on a near-constant basis. Remote peering can provide flexibility and agility during this period of uncertainty, allowing businesses to scale bandwidth up and down as needed. Interxion also offers short-term remote peering contracts, giving businesses the flexibility to manage tight budgets effectively, since it’s impossible to predict how long demand will remain high.
In times of crisis, Interxion’s carrier-neutral data centres offer a one-stop-shop for businesses to access colocation and a variety of connectivity options, providing the infrastructure they need to stay online and continue to deliver the services that their customers expect and need.
To learn more about how Interxion provides the connectivity, scalability and flexibility needed to maintain business continuity, click here.