Today, Equinix announced the launch of Equinix Cloud Exchange, a service that enables customers to access cloud providers by means of a direct, secure connection that bypasses use of the public internet. Equinix Cloud Exchange provides customers with a Cloud Exchange Portal and APIs that customers can use to create direct, high performance connections with cloud providers. Whereas enterprise customers are typically accustomed to provisioning virtual machines and managing infrastructure by means of the public internet, the Equinix Cloud Exchange promises to deliver an alternative networking infrastructure via Platform Equinix for connecting to managed service providers and cloud service providers that boasts enhanced privacy, throughput, latency, security and reliability. The Equinix Cloud Exchange delivers functionality analogous to Amazon Web Services direct connect and Microsoft Azure’s ExpressRoute service with the difference that instead of providing direct connections for one platform such as AWS or Azure, the product provides a one to many connection between customers and cloud service providers, thereby enabling an enterprise to enjoy the benefits of a direct, low latency, non-public internet connection to a collection of cloud vendors as illustrated below:
As told to Cloud Computing Today in a phone interview with Chris Sharp, Equinix’s VP of Cloud Innovation, the architecture of the platform features highly stringent rules to prohibit the commingling of data between different customers. The Equinix Cloud Exchange also boasts the ability to create partitioned connections for different business units within an enterprise, or clusters of business units in order to segregate highly-sensitive data from operational data streams as needed. Equinix expects to announce the list of cloud service providers that integrate with its Cloud Exchange over the next few months. All in all, however, the platform represents a disruptive innovation in the cloud computing space that promises to transform the fabric of the networking architecture in and through which enterprise cloud computing takes place. With the Equinix Cloud Exchange, Equinix launches an alternative, proprietary infrastructure for cloud-based network traffic that provides a higher degree of privacy, security, speed, reliability and performance than the public internet. Equinix Cloud Exchange builds on its recent announcement of its support for direct connections to Microsoft Azure by means of the Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute platform, and taps into an urgent need in the marketplace for increasingly secure and reliable connections to cloud service providers.
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