TRENDING
The report says that in order to prepare,
businesses must modernise IT to become
virtualised, containerised and software-
defined to support the Edge. And they
should also consider new data centre
partners that can bolster Edge build-out and
prioritise infrastructure optimisation and
application communication costs.
As a result, Equinix anticipates Edge
Computing as a key driver in accelerating
hybrid multi-cloud adoption across every
business segment worldwide. The third
annual Global Interconnection Index
(GXI), a market study published by Equinix,
estimates that between 2018 and 2022,
private interconnection between enterprises
and cloud and IT service providers will grow
annually by 112%.
The report predicts that traditional cloud
computing architectures, which are highly
centralised, will shift as enterprises look
to extend cloud computing to the Edge
to solve for challenges introduced by the
highly distributed nature of modern digital
business applications.
The key challenges that the combination
of Edge Computing and hybrid multi-cloud
adoption will solve include:
• Lower latency and bandwidth savings:
Proximate high-speed, low-latency
connections (<60–<20 milliseconds) are
necessary for companies to materially
close the ‘distance gap’ between their
application and data workloads and cloud
service providers (CSPs). With agile and
scalable cloud environments closer to
the users at the Edge, data access and
application response times can be faster
and cost savings from reduced data
transport can be realised.
• Enterprise consumption of hybrid
multi-cloud: Enterprises generally
determine which cloud platform to
place their applications on by which CSP
delivers the best service for a specific
workload. This freedom of choice makes
it easy and practical for IT organisations
to experiment with different cloud
platforms to see which delivers the best
quality of service (QoS) at the best price.
Additionally, more than ever before,
enterprises require the flexibility of
retaining control and securely running
business-critical applications in-house
26
INTELLIGENTCIO
“
EQUINIX
BELIEVES
BUSINESSES WILL
CONTINUE TO
LEVERAGE PUBLIC
CLOUD SERVICE
PROVIDERS.
and want the flexibility of leveraging
both private and public hybrid cloud
environments, depending on specific
use cases.
• Political and regulatory factors: With
more frequent and complex incidents
of security and privacy breaches, many
countries are regulating where and how
data can be used. These privacy and data
sovereignty compliance requirements will
lead to more distributed data centres and
cloud services that keep data local to a
specific geographic region or country.
AI and IoT will drive new
interconnection and data
processing requirements at the Edge
Equinix predicts that enterprises will
accelerate the adoption of AI and Machine
Learning (ML) for a broader set of use
cases, requiring increasingly complex and
more real-time-sensitive processing of large
datasets originating from multiple sources.
An aeroplane with thousands of equipment
sensors, an autonomous vehicle producing
telematics data, or a smart hospital
monitoring patients’ well-being can each
generate several terabytes of data a day.
About 75% of enterprise AI/analytics
applications will use 10 external data
sources on average.
To meet the scale and agility requirements
of the above, Equinix believes businesses
will continue to leverage public cloud service
providers, while most will likely find ways
to use an optimal set of AI/ML capabilities
from multiple CSPs-effectively deploying a
distributed, hybrid architecture for their AI/
ML data processing.
Yet, Equinix believes for many use cases,
an additional set of stringent requirements
related to latency, performance, privacy
and security will require that some of the
AI/ML data and processing (both inference
and model training) be proximate to data
creation and consumption sources.
Equinix predicts this will create an
impetus towards new architectures
and the increased adoption of vendor-
neutral, richly interconnected, multi-cloud-
adjacent data centres at the Edge, which
deliver improved control, auditability,
compliance and security of AI/ML data, and
low-latency connectivity to remote data
and compute infrastructures.
Furthermore, Equinix predicts that greater
interconnection and data processing
capabilities will pave the way for new digital
data marketplaces, where data providers and
buyers can transact easily and securely at
scale within vendor-neutral data centres at
the Edge.
The rise in cybersecurity
threats will require new data
management capabilities
The World Economic Forum has ranked
breaches in cybersecurity as one of the
top risks facing our global community. No
company or individual is immune to the
cybersecurity challenges we face today or
in the future. The financial loss attributed
to cyberattacks continues to impact
economies worldwide.
With the increase in cyberattacks and
data privacy and protection regulations,
most companies are now moving towards
accessing cloud services over private
networks and storing their encryption keys
in a cloud-based Hardware Security Module
(HSM) at a location that is separate from
where their data resides.
This HSM-as-a-Service model allows them to
increase the level of control over their data,
to strengthen resiliency of operations and to
support a hybrid technology architecture.
Equinix predicts that new data processing
capabilities such as multi-party secure
computation, fully homomorphic encryption
(operating on encrypted data) and secure
enclaves (where even cloud operators
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