Connectivity is so crucial to the cloud experience that, without it, the cloud’s value drops significantly. Think about it: how beneficial is it really to deploy an application from the cloud if its performance worsens because of high latency and slow connections? Great connectivity is how you meet service quality expectations in the cloud.
That’s one of the big challenges of expanding your business in the digital age. If you’re based in France but want to grow into Eastern Europe, you’ll need to ensure your network can reach those new markets. You must also keep in mind that, no matter where you launch a new service or application, customers maintain the same high expectations for service quality.
Colocation data centres help you deliver against those expectations by allowing you to deploy from in-market facilities that are optimized for connectivity through interconnection.
The Business Value of Interconnection
Interconnections provide a shared meeting point through which many different entities can directly and privately exchange internet traffic. From a strategic point of view, it makes sense for growing businesses to find a colocation data centre near their new target market and interconnect from that location.
This strategy allows you to limit latency by deploying applications closer to your customers. It also affords you the chance to more easily collaborate with potential partners that share that data centre space, whether for operational or commercial projects. You also get the security, agility, cost flexibility and performance benefits of working within a colocation data centre.
It’s just a matter of finding the right data centre, in the right location, with the right capabilities to deliver top-level performance.
If one single point of interconnectivity is valuable, then would connecting multiple different data centre “hubs” together extend that value? Could this strategy, which we’re calling the Interconnection Hub Model, allow companies further expand and optimize the performance of cooperate networks?
The Interconnection Hub Model
You can break down the corporate network into three main components – intracolocation, intercolocation and local access. These components are all part of the ‘interconnection hub,” which is a data centre facility where organisations would colocate their IT infrastructure to exchange data and traffic with one another.
The first component, intracolocation, is familiar to any business that takes advantage of a colocation facility for its peering benefits. Telcos have long embraced intracolocation, but it’s also taken off in online trading and digital content delivery, with companies across the digital space using this strategy to deliver accelerated performance and connectivity to their customers.
The second component, intercolocation, is how enterprises connect their different regional points of presence (PoPs) across continents. By doing this, customers can serve an entire continent through a few well-placed PoPs within colocation centres. Doing so essentially expands the enterprise network beyond a specific regional hub and across the entire continent. This access can reduce network costs while improving latency and availability for end users.
The third component, local access, is the connectivity between a local interconnection hub and the enterprise locations and corporate users in the region. The hub-based architecture proposes centralizing local access within a network-neutral data so that you can improve redundancy and reduce cost because of the choice of carriers available.
With all three components managed within strategically selected colocation data centres, you end up with regional connectivity hubs that allow you to deliver high performance to more customers around the world. It’s a faster and more efficient way of extending the reach of your business.
Benefits of the Model
Embracing the interconnection hub architecture model means gaining the same efficiency and performance benefits of the colocation data centre, but across larger geographic regions.
By establishing regional interconnection hubs and then intelligently connecting them, businesses can optimise their corporate network to serve their key national and international markets. Crucially, by colocating alongside hyperscale cloud platforms, connectivity providers and Internet exchanges, customers can optimise connectivity to their service providers, partners and out to their regional branches and corporate users.
It’s one example of how colocation data centres can innovate the way businesses can create and expand their IT network while meeting quality of service expectations along the way.
