Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 08 | Page 13

D 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 13