If you’re a forward-thinking digital business, you’ve probably put much thought into your connectivity strategy. You understand the need to ensure all your apps, teams, and business locations are robustly connected so your data flows can be uninterrupted, fast, and reliable. This is what today’s day-to-day operations depend on — and it’s what the all-important bottom line depends on as well.
Maybe you’ve moved your IT (or parts of it) closer to the edge, or perhaps you’ve invested in advanced fiber capabilities. There are a lot of ways to improve your connectivity, and many organizations are at the point today where they’re keeping pace with customer demands. However, depending on how they’re built, these networking and connectivity strategies can still hide dirty secrets like high levels of latency, inefficiencies, or even just missed opportunities. With demands still evolving rapidly and requirements for fast, reliable networking reaching new all-time highs every day, it’s clear that we’re firmly in an era where custom connectivity is king.
Why is Personalized Connectivity Paramount?
They say that if you want something done right, do it yourself. Of course, this is a hard motto to follow when businesses are looking to outsource to preserve time and resources for their core competencies. Not everyone can be a networking aficionado — trusted partners that are true experts are needed in order to get the best outcomes. Still, every time a company hands a crucial piece of its operations to an external manager, it loses some amount of control over those operations. This challenge has plagued connectivity strategies for quite some time, and the need for control is what has been reshaping connectivity as we know it in recent years.
In the old days, handing off traffic to third-party entities or transit providers meant you relinquished the right to choose how your data went to where you wanted it to go. This led to inefficiencies and a diminished level of reliability. (You can read more about this in one of our previous blogs, ‘Peering – Your Alternate Route Around Internet Congestion’.) In today’s day and age, it doesn’t matter how that traffic is managed — every organization still has to take responsibility for the customer outcomes and service quality those connections created. The world needed a balance of control and support from an external expert — and thus, the great shift toward internet exchanges gained a large amount of momentum. Peering through an IX puts control back in the hands of the business while still allowing them to rely on a trusted partnership with the IX provider and its ecosystem.
For any organization, leveraging an IX is the first step toward truly customized, personalized connectivity. But once you’re in the ecosystem, how do you make sure you can find your perfect place and architect a fabric of connectivity that has everything you want and nothing you don’t?
Optimizing the IX: What Happens Next?
The beauty of an IX is that it opens up a world of direct connections that businesses can leverage to get their traffic to its destination quicker, more efficiently and more securely. In this way, the customized nature of the connectivity is already improved — organizations get to pick and choose their data’s paths, they get to change and adjust with greater flexibility on an as-needed basis, and this all can be done without transit costs. The trick, however, is making sure you have the right connections at your fingertips in order to truly personalize the connectivity experience.
When selecting an IX, it’s important to check out who is in their ecosystem, as well as where their ecosystem sits. For an in-depth look at this selection process, you can read more about it here. These strategically located peering connections with the most ideal members of the IX ecosystem become like a “choose your own adventure” tool for business networking. Now, you don’t have to settle for someone else’s choice in handling your data, and you don’t have to just hope for the best — you can build exactly what you want in the exact way you want it.
This is where the future of connectivity is headed. Ready to jump in?
