Equinix recently announced that its Equinix Cloud Exchange platform will support private, managed connectivity to Microsoft Office 365 by way of Azure ExpressRoute, the infrastructure that provides a direct connection to Microsoft Azure that bypasses the public internet. As of Q3 of this year, Equinix will become one of the first vendors to deliver a private, reliable, low latency, high performance connection to Microsoft Office 365 via its Equinix Cloud Exchange. Equinix’s support of a direct connection to Microsoft Office 365 gives enterprises the valuable option of ensuring that their employees have access to the Office 365 productivity suite of applications with minimal downtime, latency-related interruptions or performance issues. By providing access to Microsoft Office 365 via Azure ExpressRoute, Equinix enhances the cloud security of data leveraged by Office 365 because of its private, non-public internet connection. Equinix’s direct access to Office 365 will be available in 15 markets worldwide including Amsterdam, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Osaka, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. One of the additional benefits of the Equinix Cloud Exchange’s direct access offering to Office 365 via Azure ExpressRoute is the ability of customers to modulate network performance to ensure high speed, secure access to Office 365 while concomitantly taking advantage of recent security upgrades to the Azure ExpressRoute infrastructure.
Tag: Equinix Cloud Exchange
Equinix Announces Channel Partner Program For Resale And Referral Of Its Interconnection Technology
On March 17, Equinix announced the launch of its global channel partner program that gives managed service providers, network service providers and other partners the ability to resell Equinix services. The release of Equinix’s channel partnership program promises to dramatically expand the distribution of Equinix’s products and services for creating multi-cloud deployments in collaboration with Equinix partners such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM SoftLayer. Partners can function either as a “reseller, referral agent or cloud technology platform partner,” and notably, in the case of a reseller or referral partner, stand to benefit from a recurring revenue stream resulting from the resale of the Equinix Cloud Exchange that provides their customers enhanced access to multiple cloud platforms to create hybrid cloud infrastructures. To date, the Equinix Cloud Exchange features approximately 100 technology partners including, most recently, companies such as Datapipe and Dimension Data. In early March, Equinix partnered with Cisco to facilitate multi-vendor orchestration and expanded its global interconnection footprint by opening data centers in the critical technology epicenters of New York, Singapore, Melbourne, London and Toronto, bringing the total number of Equinix data centers over the globe to over 100. Equinix channel partners can also implement the Equinix Performance Hub to distribute an organization’s data center in multiple locations to improve performance. The larger significance of Equinix’s decision to announce a global Channel Partner program, however, is that end user customers can now enjoy access to a platform for creating hybrid cloud infrastructures in multiple geographies in collaboration with channel partners with which they are familiar and trust. In other words, creating large-scale hybrid infrastructures just got easier now that Equinix’s technology can be resold by MSPs, NSPs, System Integrators and Solution Providers via a strategic offering that promises to expand Equinix’s market footprint further and subsequently enrich its product development by means of iterative feedback from a larger swath of customers.
GoGrid Joins Equinix Cloud Exchange
Equinix today announced that cloud provider GoGrid is now a participant in the Equinix Cloud Exchange, the service that enables customers to access cloud providers by means of a secure, direct internet connection that bypasses the public internet. By participating in the Equinix Cloud Exchange, GoGrid can offer customers faster, more secure connections to its cloud and Big Data solutions. The Equinix Cloud Exchange represents a particularly valuable addition to GoGrid’s deployment offerings because the speed and performance of the resultant connections enhances the ability to move Big Data based on platforms such as Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra, Riak and HBase from one infrastructure to another. As a result of the collaboration, GoGrid will connect its Cloud Bridge product offering, that delivers connectivity from customer datacenters to the GoGrid cloud, to the Equinix Cloud Exchange. Currently, GoGrid’s connection to the Equinix Cloud Exchange takes place by way of Equinix’s datacenter in Ashburn, VA, although it plans to extend its participation in the Equinix Cloud Exchange to Europe. The Equinix Cloud Exchange now boasts the participation of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Level 3 Communications, tw telecom and GoGrid. Assuming it can continue to sign up customers at an impressive clip, the Equinix Cloud Exchange promises to disrupt the cloud computing landscape by delivering an alternative networking infrastructure to the public internet marked by enhanced speed, security, performance and reliability.
Equinix Launches Equinix Cloud Exchange For Direct Connections To Cloud Service Providers
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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