Partner POV | What Is an Interconnection Hub? It's Where Digital Ecosystems Connect
In this article
Article written by Eric Olinger, Global Principal, Equinix.
The adoption of hybrid multicloud architecture has become the backbone of modern enterprise IT. It enables organizations to achieve agility, scalability and resilience. A global survey of senior IT leaders conducted by Foundry reveals that 50% of enterprise application workloads now run in multicloud or hybrid cloud environments. This shift highlights the strategic importance of robust networking solutions. These solutions enable optimized placement of compute, data and network resources and ensure connectivity with a range of cloud, IT and network service providers, as well as technology partners. Organizations often find themselves facing requirements to comply with rapidly evolving data sovereignty.
The adoption of hybrid multicloud strategies has expanded in recent years. Companies now rely on more cloud providers and often distribute workloads across a mix of public clouds and private infrastructure in an increasingly dispersed IT landscape. Seamless, secure and timely data transmission across these systems is critical to leverage the strengths of each platform while minimizing inefficiencies and hidden costs. Further interconnection requirements are arising due to the influx of AI-specific demands from model training, inference and agentic AI workflows.
Software-defined interconnection solutions allow organizations to connect to multiple clouds. This reduces provisioning time, enhances scalability and delivers material operational benefits for organizations and their customers. Carrier-neutral interconnection hubs provide the reliable, secure and fast network connectivity businesses need to support their distributed IT infrastructure.
What are interconnection hubs? Are they data centers?
People still often ask us what interconnection is. Although it represents an important concept that makes our modern digital world possible, the term itself is not that well known. Interconnection refers to the private exchange of data between businesses. It involves deploying traffic exchange points that establish direct, private connections between entities.
An interconnection hub is where businesses can position and interconnect their infrastructure to a range of compute, data and network resources. They can deploy interconnection hubs both regionally and/or globally in shared, highly interconnected colocation facilities that are strategically located in proximity to clouds, networks, users and partners. These facilities make it quick and easy to interconnect, which streamlines data distribution across systems, ensuring it's readily accessible to compute resources.
Interconnection hubs maximize performance and deliver the lowest possible latency. This enables the high-performance, scalable and secure exchange of data across enterprise deployments in multiple colocation facilities and between diverse entities, such as cloud providers and business partners. They support cutting-edge digital use cases such as AI, which likely will require moving large volumes of data between both private and public clouds while models are trained and could then shift to neo-clouds or edge inferencing when trained.
Carrier-neutral data centers are ideal locations for interconnection hubs, with their centralized ecosystems of multiple network providers, neo and public cloud platforms, SaaS partners and enterprises that have already established physical and virtual connections in these facilities. It's where businesses can scale hybrid deployments, achieve network agility, and easily and securely connect to partners and providers.
4 use cases for interconnection hubs
Businesses are constantly finding ways to use Equinix interconnection hubs to solve critical business challenges, including ensuring business continuity, simplifying network complexity, future-proofing IT infrastructure and reducing hardware redundancy.
Develop a failover solution. Business continuity is crucial in today's hyper-competitive environments. Interconnection hubs enable businesses to prepare for rapid disaster recovery. When they have connections to two or more clouds, they can orchestrate connectivity to automatically reroute the traffic when necessary. Or they can build a failover solution into their disaster recovery plans to ensure multicloud connectivity and avoid outages.
Simplify SD-WAN connectivity. Cloud providers each offer distinct SD-WAN solutions, all of which have to be deployed and managed according to their own unique processes. This creates an additional layer of complexity in multicloud environments, making it essentially impossible to manage everything consistently and in a streamlined manner. Instead, businesses can deploy SD-WAN headend devices in a cloud-neutral interconnection hub, creating a single solution that connects the business to all cloud providers simultaneously. This removes the need to manage separate SD-WAN solutions for different clouds and enables organizations to have internet-facing SD-WAN that does not charge per GB for internet access, powering their SD-WAN deployments.
Migrate IT infrastructure to interconnected colocation. Stadler, a global manufacturer of customized trains, needed to share secure access to systems and applications with their global users, to quickly expand production. Another priority was to expand their IT infrastructure footprint and improve network connectivity among users, partners and applications, including their centralized SAP hub.
Stadler migrated their on-premises IT infrastructure to interconnection hubs they established at Equinix colocation data centers. This enabled the company to increase network performance and provided the security, reliability and scalability required to future-proof their IT infrastructure.
Eliminate hardware redundancy with cloud-neutral firewalls. An enterprise with nearly 50 cloud regions globally, across AWS, Google and Microsoft, was using a single Azure ExpressRoute and public VPNs to other cloud providers. Protecting this organization's cloud edge were highly available pairs of firewalls, each with load balancers. Due to this design, the client was incurring egress fees in both directions. By implementing a geo-redundant pair of cloud-neutral firewalls inside their interconnection hubs, they eliminated the need for load balancers and the associated egress fees, while maintaining high availability across cloud providers. They reduced failover times and shifted to an egress fee structure that didn't charge per GB. They were able to achieve this because their interconnection hub gave them quick and easy access to internet, edge security and cloud providers in the same location.
Establish interconnection hubs where they add the most value
Businesses that deploy interconnection hubs in Equinix high-performance data centers can maintain control over their data and ensure privacy by implementing a private storage environment that becomes their Authoritative Data Core. By placing data and infrastructure in Equinix-based interconnection hubs, organizations can achieve the best possible performance and lowest possible latency with their cloud applications. They can store data as close as possible to cloud services in Equinix's vendor-neutral facilities, then establish private data repositories and share those with multiple clouds.
Equinix has the largest share of native cloud on-ramps worldwide—more than twice as many as the nearest competitor. With 270+ locations in key business hubs across six continents, establishing interconnection hubs at Equinix makes it easy to securely and privately distribute data to the extensive global ecosystem of leading cloud, network and IT services providers and technology partners already deployed at Equinix. There are also specialized ecosystems for financial services, payments and commerce, manufacturing, distributed AI and more.
Equinix gives businesses the widest selection of low-latency private connectivity options, including highly flexible, on-demand virtual connectivity and high-performance physical connectivity.