Navigate Customers Through Uncertainty with Agile Infrastructure
Unlock the ability to seamlessly transition between cloud, network, and service providers during times of rapid change.
Authored by: Glenn Dekhayser, Global Principal and Brian Thomas, Segment Marketing
What do the following three dates have in common??
The answer is that they were all major inflection points for enterprise IT. After each of these dates, many businesses had to either adapt their IT strategies or throw them out altogether. In each case, it didn’t matter how good their strategy was before; it mattered how flexible and resilient they could be going forward.
For those curious, here’s what happened on each date:?
But the events themselves aren’t important. There have been others like them before, and there will be many more in the future. Indeed, it’s not that the last five years have been particularly volatile. The diagram below shows that going back to 2006, there hasn’t been a five-year period without at least one major disruptive event.??
How do enterprises respond to change??
There are three main types of organizations when it comes to change:?
What makes a company fall into one category and not the others? Recognizing the need to adapt is the easy part. Making the needed infrastructure updates is more complex and time-consuming. That’s why enterprises must already be deployed on a flexible, agile infrastructure platform?before?disruption occurs, and they may need partners like you to help them do that.?
This agility is exactly what?Platform Equinix??provides. It’s why so many customers have successfully adapted to ensure positive outcomes in the aftermath of disruptive events and will continue to do so in the future. For example,?Zoom?emerged as one of the most prominent change agents during the COVID-19 shutdowns. They were able to scale infrastructure capacity rapidly on Platform Equinix to keep up with skyrocketing demand for their services.?
Further, The Equinix digital ecosystem, comprising over 10,000 companies, is invaluable for organizations navigating change. Disruptions often necessitate quick shifts in service providers. Platform Equinix is vendor-neutral, offering customers extensive options within our ecosystem.
As an Equinix partner, you can provide customers access to our foundational infrastructure, enabling them to pivot swiftly as needed. You can also offer your own integrated solutions within Equinix.
Equinix enables change resilience
Equinix enables our partners to build change-resilient architectures for customers—an interconnected environment where they store at least one current copy of their data. This core environment is positioned adjacent to the cloud and other service providers, and enterprises can?move their data?in ways that allow them to take advantage of new services on demand.??
They can then utilize their data in the cloud without having to sacrifice control over that data.?
The diagram below shows how architecting for change-resiliency at Equinix works:
领英推荐
How to help customers architect for agility?
As an Equinix partner, you play a strategic role in helping customers architect for agility, giving them the flexible infrastructure they’ll need to respond to future inflection points. We may not know what those inflection points will look like, but we do know that enterprises are starting to deal with change drivers today that will continue to create ambiguity going into the future, including:??
Read on to learn what partners need to know about each of these issues, and how you can help customers prepare.?
What does AI-ready infrastructure look like??
Most enterprises recognize that adopting AI is a strategic imperative. However, they don’t always know how to get the AI-ready infrastructure they need. They’ll likely have many questions, including:?
There are many unknowns, but there’s one thing that’s obvious: Legacy on-premises data centers don’t offer the scalability or flexibility to support AI workloads. Enterprises also don’t want to make capital investments in existing data centers, which would lock them into an infrastructure environment that may no longer meet their needs in the future.??
In contrast, working with Equinix and our partners can help enterprises access a high-performance data center platform built with the requirements of AI in mind. No matter what curveballs AI throws in the future, our partners have the resources they need to help customers adapt.?
Meeting governance requirements?
The regulatory landscape is becoming increasingly complex worldwide. For example, the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act introduces new governance requirements for enterprises building AI datasets, making data control and visibility more crucial than ever.
Enterprises must also be cautious about moving data to the public cloud to protect data privacy. A private AI strategy allows them to develop AI models on secure infrastructure without transferring data outside their security domain.
Additionally, enterprises often face data residency requirements for AI workloads. Deploying AI inference pods in strategic edge locations ensures proximity, low-latency connectivity, and compliance with data regulations. Equinix partners are well-positioned to help customers navigate these challenges securely and compliantly.
Modernizing multicloud environments?
Cloud modernization and vendor lock-in cannot peacefully coexist. If moving workloads between clouds is costly and time-consuming, enterprises will hesitate to make those moves, leading to stagnation as data grows and lock-in occurs.
Equinix partners are equipped to help customers build their infrastructure architecture in a way that ensures workload portability. Thus, whenever a workload is no longer in the right cloud region, moving it elsewhere is quick and easy.?
Equinix partners can help customers design their infrastructure for workload portability, making it easy to relocate workloads when necessary. With the architecture shown above, customers can confidently access the right cloud providers as their needs change.
Additionally, Equinix's leadership in low-latency cloud on-ramps?enhances this flexibility. With numerous cloud provider options available, your customers can thrive if they establish an agile data architecture. As a trusted advisor, you can guide them in implementing this architecture on Platform Equinix.
Learn more and get started?
Hear Glenn and Brian dig into the concept of creating change-resilient architectures in more detail, in this 30-minute on demand webinar: https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/4727388/F2F79F40DEDCA41A97A71E49EABAB73E?partnerref=Febarticle