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EDITOR’S COMMEN
igital transformation has been
defined as the ‘process of creating
value, growth and competitive
advantage through new digital offerings,
new digital business models and new digital
business relationships’. One criterion for
successful digital transformation is to
adopt an interconnection-first architecture
that will enable you to decentralise IT
and networking, and establish a more
distributed, interconnected ‘digital edge’.
We’ve written extensively about an
Interconnection Oriented Architecture
(IOA) strategy and why it’s vital for digital
transformation and critical, in particular,
for enabling companies to establish a
digital edge. An IOA strategy is a proven
and repeatable architectural framework
that directly and securely connects people,
locations, clouds and data. It is being used by
more than 8,000 companies and is allowing
today’s enterprise and service providers
to re-architect their IT infrastructures so
that they’re no longer siloed and fixed, but
integrated and dynamic.
An IOA strategy shatters the
misconception that you can’t do anything
about physical distance. It enables you
to shorten the distance between your
users, applications and data. It helps
you localise traffic and services across
worldwide locations and markets and access
regionalised network and cloud services
to quick-start your business. By leveraging
digital ecosystem exchanges, you can access
multiple network, cloud and SaaS providers,
as well as a wealth of vertical industry
partners. And placing data and analytics
adjacent to each other, and the applications
that require them, improves response times
and increases scalability, while maintaining
data compliance and reducing the amount
of data that travels over less-than-secure
private and public networks.
Organisations can best meet the
performance needs of more dynamic,
digital applications and workloads by
moving IT to the edge.
Blueprints for success
To accelerate your IOA strategy, leverage
customisable interconnection blueprints
to help you determine how to best re-
architect your organisation’s network and
edge IT infrastructure. IOA blueprints
lay out how your organisation can make
your IT architecture more edge-centric by
integrating ‘edge nodes’ that flatten and
simplify your network topology, enabling
you to deploy a hybrid IT footprint of
on-premises and cloud infrastructures
that scale to meet your IT service delivery
capabilities and resources.
Start with a winning playbook
A good place to start learning how to
deploy an IOA strategy and access the IOA
blueprints you need to speed your path is
an IOA playbook, which lays out how to
become a digital business by implementing
four interconnection blueprints: network,
security, data and application.
The network blueprint gives you the
steps you need to localise and optimise
traffic, segment traffic flows, establish
hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity, offload
the Internet to the edge and connect to
digital ecosystems. It helps you leverage
multiple connectivity options to build a
mesh among edge nodes that maximises
bandwidth while balancing cost. You will
also be able to directly and securely connect
to multiple clouds at the edge to minimise
the distance between your customers,
employees and partners. All this aggregated
local connectivity maximises performance,
increases security and reduces cost, with
an average 85 per cent reduction in WAN
latency when bypassing the Internet.
The security blueprint helps you
localise security at the edge by:
• Extending your boundary control
• Creating an inspection zone
• Implementing policy administration
and enforcement
• Deploying identity and key
management
• Leveraging security analytics and
logging to allow for safe bi-directional
and international traffic among clouds,
partners and users
When you localise security at the edge,
you get the same latency and performance
advantages as you do when you locate
other IT infrastructures there.
The data blueprint describes how
you can place latency-sensitive data in
proximity to the edge services that need
it. Your analytics should also be at the
edge to give you real-time performance
and security, particularly when dealing
with monetised data, and compliance and
privacy regulations. You can still manage
inventory and metadata information
centrally, while protecting your other data
locally. By locating your data, clouds and
analytics at the edge, you minimise latency,
data loss and theft risks, and ensure data
residency and compliance.
The application blueprint provides
you with the steps to move application
services with latency or volume-driven
workloads to the edge, near the cloud
and the other components with which
they need to interact. This includes
implementing API management, creating
messaging pipelines, applying distributed
coordination, leveraging complex event
processing and introducing predictive
algorithmic services. APIs provide the
building blocks for application assembly
and life cycle management. Messaging
pipelines bring integration and cohesion
to the flow across services. Coordination
and governance keep everything running,
and analytics can infer complex events and
predict the need for automated actions.
4 steps to re-architecting
IT for the digital edge
Jeroen Schlosser, Managing Director, Equinix MENA
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