Cat videos driving companies towards direct data centre interconnections

According to new research from Equinix, private business connectivity will exceed global IP traffic by 2020.

Whether there are too many Tinder swipers or too many cat videos being played on YouTube, it would appear business leaders are sick of the congestion on global IP networks. This is according to Equinix, which believes private companies are using data centre interconnections to by-pass the internet and exchange information directly between data centres. Essentially, these companies are removing the middleman (the internet) and exchanging information with each other directly.

“UK business and industrial sectors are being disrupted in ways we could not have previously imagined,” said Russell Poole, Managing Director of Equinix in the UK.

“As the public internet has continued to expand, it has impacted how organisations do business and created opportunities for some of the greatest innovations of this era. This innovation, also described as the Internet of Things has resulted in an unexpected explosion of data which businesses are struggling to analyse and process by relying on the public internet.”

Equinix has put together a little Index to demonstrate their estimates as well. Interconnection Bandwidth is expected to grow at a 45% CAGR to reach 5,000 Tbps by 2020, which beats out global IP traffic in both growth (24%) and volume (855 Tbps). The Index also splits the demands into different regions across Europe.

Looking at the figures above, it would appear Brexit won’t have too much of an impact on the business in the capital, though another interesting little area is the surge in growth in the verticals. As you would expect, telco as well as cloud & IT services are top of the list currently, though Equinix believe the financial sector will be the big boy come 2020.

Bandwidth capacity is expected to reach 958 Tbps by 2020 in the financial sector, growing at a CAGR of 61%, whereas growth in the telco and cloud & IT space is not as generous, only reaching 826 Tbps and 820 Tbps respectively.

“Data is now the lifeblood of organisations today, and businesses in the UK and Ireland are increasingly relying on it to move closer their customers and partners in their respective ecosystems,” said John Abel, Head of Cloud and Technology at Oracle, one of the organizations making use of the data centre interconnection today.

“It is vital that companies, large and small, ensure that they have infrastructure in place, and interconnection bandwidth provisioned, that is safe, secure and robust enough to provide them with access to all of their data sources and allow them to use this information to inform their decisions and drive their businesses forward in a digital world.”

This cat video has almost 50 million views.