REDWOOD CITY, Calif.,
Dec. 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/
-- Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the
global interconnection and data center company, released
its top five technology trend predictions for 2020, which point
toward the critical digital transformation that organizations are
making to lead in the new digital era. Equinix's expansive
footprint across more than 50 global markets, and its position as a
leading meeting and interconnection point for ecosystems of
networks, clouds, enterprises and nearly 10,000 customers, give it
a unique and holistic lens to view critical digital infrastructure
trends.
Equinix's 2020 technology trend predictions include:
1)
Distributed infrastructure and edge computing will
accelerate hybrid multicloud adoption
There is a seismic shift underway
across many industries as businesses are embracing edge computing
and hybrid multicloud architectures. Increasingly, businesses are
moving computing from centralized data centers to a distributed
infrastructure and toward the edge, where data exchange and
interconnection between businesses and cloud services are growing
at an exponential rate.
The advent of edge computing has
also become a foundational enabler for other emerging technologies
such as 5G mobile communications, which will allow internet of
things (IoT) and other edge devices to take advantage of faster
connectivity to data and compute resources with
single-digit-millisecond network latency.
According to analyst firm IDC, by
2023, more than 50% of new enterprise infrastructure deployments
will be at the edge rather than corporate data centers, up from
less than 10% today. And by 2024, the number of apps at the edge
will increase 800%. The IDC report says to prepare, businesses must
modernize IT to become virtualized, containerized and
software-defined to support the edge. And they should also consider
new data center partners that can bolster edge build-out and
prioritize infrastructure optimization and application
communication costs.1
As a result, in 2020, Equinix
anticipates edge computing as a key driver in accelerating hybrid
multicloud 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 & IT
service providers will grow annually by 112%. The report predicts
that traditional cloud computing architectures, which are highly
centralized, 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 multicloud 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
realized.
• Enterprise
consumption of hybrid multicloud—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
organizations 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 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 centers
and cloud services that keep data local to a specific geographic
region or country.
2) 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 data sets originating from
multiple sources (sensors, IoT, wearables, etc.). An airplane 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 toward new
architectures and the increased adoption of vendor-neutral, richly
interconnected, multicloud-adjacent data centers 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 centers at the edge.
3) 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 will face in the future.
The financial loss attributed to cyberattacks continues to impact
economies worldwide and is estimated to cost $6 trillion USD annually by 2021.2
With the increase in cybersecurity
attacks and data privacy and protection regulations, most companies
are now moving toward 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.
In 2020, Equinix predicts
that new data processing capabilities such as multiparty
secure computation, fully homomorphic encryption (operating on
encrypted data) and secure enclaves (where even cloud
operators cannot peer into the code being executed by a cloud
consumer) will move toward mainstream and will allow
enterprises to run their computation in a secure manner.
4) Data regulation
will influence enterprise IT strategies
Today, many enterprises buy and
sell data in order to get a competitive advantage, but these
enterprises must adhere to government regulations for personal data
privacy and protection. What started with the European Union's
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and is now transcending
into other local regulatory frameworks such
as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) among
many others, and is putting more pressure on enterprises to ensure
data compliance. In fact, there are 121 countries that have
either already announced or are in the process of formulating data
sovereignty laws that prevent the movement of their citizens'
personal data outside the country's boundaries.
In 2020, Equinix believes we will
see further complexity in protecting personal data as global
trends toward stricter or new data privacy regulations continue to
gain momentum, making it more difficult for global companies
distributed across multiple markets to navigate. In
a recent survey commissioned by Equinix of over 2,450 IT
decision-makers across the world, 69% of the global respondents
listed "complying with data protection regulations" as a top
priority for their business, while 43% of them reported "changing
regulatory requirements around data privacy" as a threat to their
company.
In 2020, Equinix predicts IT
strategies will increasingly focus on data privacy, with continued
application of the secure discovery, classification and encryption
of personally identifiable information (PII). Equinix believes HSMs
will be an integral part of a data security architecture and
strategy for encrypting PII and providing an exceptionally high
level of security for safeguarding data.
5) Digital
transformation will provide a foundation for a more sustainable
world
According to an Equinix Survey,
42% of IT decision-makers agree that the "greenness" of a company's
suppliers has a direct impact on their buying
decisions.3 Equinix anticipates that with increasing
pressures on the world's resources and the increasing desire by
many companies to cut emissions, digital transformation could begin
to set the world's economy on a progressively sustainable
footing.
In 2020, sustainability will
likely be an initiative for world-class organizations as
stakeholders increasingly look to digital businesses to lead and
innovate in areas of environmental responsibility and
sustainability. Equinix further predicts that digital and
technology innovations will provide companies with the opportunity
to overcome barriers, such as the geographic dispersion of supply
chains to the complexity of materials and deconstructing products.
Machine-to-machine and data analytics enable companies to match the
supply and demand for underused assets and products. "The cloud,"
in combination with mobile, can dematerialize products or even
entire industries. Equinix anticipates that as businesses
depend on data center resources to connect with customers and run
many aspects of their operations, they will look to vendor-neutral
colocation data center providers who are committed, vocal and
proven champions for advancing environmental sustainability.
Quotes:
Justin Dustzadeh, Chief Technology Officer,
Equinix
"We are at an exciting inflection point in
the history of interconnection, as the pace of digital
transformation continues to accelerate and as cloud-native
distributed infrastructure and hybrid multicloud
deployments become the de facto architecture of
choice. The ability to securely manage and process data at the
edge, while having direct, secure and low-latency connectivity to
partners and cloud ecosystems, is ushering new opportunities for
organizations to create greater value to users and customers, and
benefit society in new ways."
Additional Resources:
- Global Interconnection Index Vol. 3 – [report]
- Equinix Sustainability – [website]
- IDC- Rethinking Datacenter and Traditional Edge IT with
Interconnection – [analyst report]
About Equinix
Equinix,Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) connects the
world's leading businesses to their customers, employees and
partners inside the most-interconnected data centers. On this
global platform for digital business, companies come together
across more than 50 markets on five continents to reach everywhere,
interconnect everyone and integrate everything they need to create
their digital futures. Equinix.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release
contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and
uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from
expectations discussed in such forward-looking statements. Factors
that might cause such differences include, but are not limited to,
the challenges of acquiring, operating and constructing IBX data
centers and developing, deploying and delivering Equinix services;
unanticipated costs or difficulties relating to the integration of
companies we have acquired or will acquire into Equinix; a failure
to receive significant revenue from customers in recently built out
or acquired data centers; failure to complete any financing
arrangements contemplated from time to time; competition from
existing and new competitors; the ability to generate sufficient
cash flow or otherwise obtain funds to repay new or outstanding
indebtedness; the loss or decline in business from our key
customers; and other risks described from time to time in Equinix
filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular,
see recent Equinix quarterly and annual reports filed with the
Securities and Exchange Commission, copies of which are available
upon request from Equinix. Equinix does not assume any obligation
to update the forward-looking information contained in this press
release.
1 IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2020
Predictions
2 Source: Cybersecurity Ventures
3 APCO Global Insight survey of 2,485 IT
decision-makers, Aug 2019
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SOURCE Equinix, Inc.