– Mr. Sudhir Kunder, Country Director, DE-CIX India
For businesses to grow in the digital economy, they need to be smart. They need to increase efficiency and speed of production and ensure the quality and performance of digital products throughout their lifecycle, wherever their customers go. They need to cut costs and increase their ROI, while at the same time ensuring the sovereignty and security of their data. They can achieve this and more by going serverless – by leveraging the enormous benefits of a well-designed cloud strategy.
Quite apart from reducing CAPEX IT investment and enabling flexible scaling according to needs, the myriad of services available in different clouds allows the automation of processes, the capitalization on the fast-developing AI technology, environments for software and product development, testing, and innovation, and location-independent work, among many other use cases. The cloud is perhaps the ultimate enabler for business success in the current tech environment.
So, a cloud strategy is a must. Your cloud strategy should be closely aligned with business objectives, as well as with your information security strategy, and it will inform and enrich your business continuity and disaster recovery (DL) strategy. But one essential topic which is often neglected in cloud strategies is how to even get to the cloud. Currently, it, unfortunately, remains the case that the most common way of accessing the cloud and transferring data to and from different services is via the public Internet. There are good reasons to avoid this route – it not only hampers performance and security, but it’s also more costly to get data back out of the cloud.
Connect directly to clouds to boost the performance of your cloud strategy
Using direct interconnection via a distributed Cloud Exchange is not only more secure, but it also offers the best performance, greater flexibility, and a significant cost reduction. It allows the corporate network to be connected directly to the cloud networks in use and bypass the public Internet. What’s more, getting data out of the cloud is significantly cheaper using a cloud provider’s direct connectivity service. What companies need, therefore, is more than just a cloud strategy: it is also a cloud interconnection strategy.
The Cloud Exchanges operated by DE-CIX India in Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, and Kolkata are unique in the Indian market. As the only interconnection platform operator in the market offering dedicated access to the direct connectivity services of the major cloud providers, DE-CIX India is revolutionizing access to the cloud and supporting companies to embrace their digital transformation journey, without the need for their own servers.
Connecting directly to cloud accelerates business
Using direct interconnection, it is possible to shorten the pathway between the corporate network and cloud networks. DE-CIX’s DirectCLOUD service, for example, enables companies direct access to 90% of the Indian cloud market, including dedicated and private connections to the Microsoft 365 and Dynamics clouds, via the Microsoft Azure Peering Service. Such interconnection improves the performance of not only enterprise applications (such as production-related analytics and design applications, ERP and financial apps, and virtual conferencing apps), but also customer-facing applications. This is because direct interconnection shortens the pathway that data needs to traverse, lowering the latency and increasing the speed and robustness of connections.
Latency basically means delay – it’s the time it takes for a data packet to travel from a device connected to the Internet, such as a smartphone, to a server (such as the ones where your cloud services are hosted), and back again so that you can actually see the result. Think about the heart-stopping delay that can occur after you’ve pressed the “buy now” button for an exclusive item on an e-commerce site, while you wait to actually see that your transaction has been processed and the product has been purchased. Time-outs when working with databases, unacceptable delays in financial transactions, poor quality of user experience for customers – all of these and more are the result of it taking too long for data to reach its destination. And delays are something modern businesses simply can’t afford.
To give you an example of how this works in practice: A consumer optics firm in Bangalore that uses Amazon Web Services but was experiencing a crippling 330 ms of latency when connecting to AWS in Singapore over the open internet. After making the switch to DE-CIX India’s DirectCLOUD service, their latency dropped to 40 ms, increasing the speed of their connection by a factor of 8.
Since implementation two years ago, they have experienced no difficulties with their connection at all.
The adoption of DE-CIX DirectCLOUD resulted in faster connectivity, faster patient treatments, and a more consistent experience overall. Even during busy times, the infrastructure can now scale up quickly in order to keep up with demand and share solutions more quickly. This is just one example of how direct interconnection, using DE-CIX’s DirectCLOUD service, can accelerate work in the cloud.
Connecting directly to clouds adds control
Directly connecting the company infrastructure to cloud networks also has major advantages in terms of security, because it is possible to control the data journey. The Internet, in contrast, was conceived as a “best effort” tool for communication, with no guarantees as to pathways, security, or performance. This is not sufficient for securing business-critical data or sensitive end-customer data. Setting up direct interconnection between the networks makes it possible to bypass the long and potentially dangerous route over the public Internet.
It also allows for greater flexibility in the way you work with clouds. Direct cloud interconnection using DE-CIX DirectCLOUD also significantly reduces the “cloud egress” costs involved in getting data out of the cloud when needed. This mitigates the risk of vendor lock-in and enables companies to develop a robust multi-cloud strategy, including setting up back-ups and disaster recovery processes in the cloud.
Cloud interconnection – breaking through the barriers to business success
There is no doubt: the cloud is an unparalleled tool for boosting productivity. But clouds themselves can also be accelerated using the right connectivity. Developing a cloud interconnection strategy will help you to make the most of the benefits of the cloud. Direct connections to clouds using DE-CIX’s DirectCLOUD service boost security, performance, and the bottom line. With DE-CIX working with you, and your clouds working at top speed, the sky’s the limit.
