As enterprise demands for ecosystem access, infrastructure performance and network agility increase, they want a platform that can connect them to everything and everyone that matters to their business.
For example, global provider of risk, retirement health insurance AON employs 50,000 professionals in 120 countries. The COVID-19 pandemic saw it pivot 100% of its workforce to remote work without any reduction in services. It also managed to roll out new capabilities during the same period.
Rakesh Inamdar, senior director of Core Infrastructure Services at Aon, attributes this to the company’s digital infrastructure running on Platform Equinix.
Inamdar said this provided the most connected footprint of capabilities and services, including an ecosystem of technology partners on the Equinix Fabric.
“By harnessing the power of the Equinix platform, we were able to bring together and connect our core infrastructure globally, in a highly secure and cost-effective manner,” he added.
Marketed as the largest carrier-neutral telecom aggregation points, the Equinix Fabric offers a single interconnection approach to connect between all their (customers) physical and virtual devices located within Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centres.
This includes connecting physical devices located within Equinix colocation, and automated bare metal servers available with Equinix Metal, with virtual devices such as routers, firewalls and SD-WAN gateways available on Network Edge, which help enterprises seamlessly bridge the distance between their distributed digital infrastructure.
Jennifer Cooke, research director, Cloud to Edge Datacenter Trends at IDC said: “With the pandemic accelerating the pace of digital transformation today, many enterprises are challenged with traditional infrastructure that was not built to meet the demands of a digital business world.”
She noted that connecting digital infrastructures is increasingly complex and costly for many companies.
“Connectivity challenges have also been increasing as data traffic continues to explode. Solving these challenges requires a new approach. It requires assembling foundational infrastructure on demand and bringing together an interconnected ecosystem of providers on a global platform. By deploying their digital infrastructure on Platform Equinix, many enterprises can quickly and easily achieve this today,” she opined.
According to Anthony Ho, director of Regional Product Management at Equinix Asia-Pacific, “ our solutions are designed for companies that look for IT infrastructures with flexibility and scalability to support business continuity.”
The Forrester Consulting report “The Total Economic Impact (TEI) calculates that Equinix Fabric customers could reduce latency by a minimum of 30% and lower cloud connectivity and network traffic cost by 60% to 70%.