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Direct Public Cloud Interconnection Is "Must Have" for Data Center Colocation

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Direct public cloud interconnection is a "must have" for 94% of IT leaders surveyed, according to the 2023 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite and CIO. The majority of respondents agree that a native, direct connection between colocation data centers and major cloud providers is essential for improved performance, enhanced security, cost savings and hybrid cloud connectivity.

Colocation enables organizations to outsource their data center by purchasing or leasing IT hardware that is housed at a colocation facility. The colocation provider builds and operates the data center, including managing power, cooling and security.

The report advises, "By partnering with colocation providers, organizations can greatly reduce their CapEx burden, allowing them to free up resources for investment in innovation and business growth. And just as important, when an organization's data center needs increase, it can contract for additional space and resources without having to invest in expanding or building a new data center of its own."

Other report findings include:

Hybrid IT Infrastructure Is the Norm

Survey results show that nearly 97% of CIOs have implemented or plan to implement a hybrid cloud model.

Some colocation providers offer direct cloud connections, native onramps to the major hyperscalers via dedicated high-speed, low-latency connectivity. As mentioned above, many IT organizations consider this an essential part of a colocation service.

"The way that businesses connect with each other is constantly evolving, and they require more efficient and automated ways to make today’s digital supply chain work," says Matt Senderhauf, VP of Interconnection Strategy at CoreSite. "Similarly, public cloud providers want to deliver their services to customers in a more efficient manner. Direct cloud connections deployed in secure colocation data centers provide the perfect ecosystem for cloud providers to reach the most end users and for those end users to connect to the public clouds securely, with the highest performance and lowest cost."

Colocation Successfully Supports Critical Workloads

The report found that IT decision-makers are more open than ever to moving critical workloads from public cloud to colocation:

■ 92% are considering moving AI/ML applications.

■ 84% are considering moving IoT connectivity and
management.

■ 92% are considering BI, data warehouse and data analytics.

Security is The Top Attribute Sought in a Colocation Provider

While performance, scalability, ecosystem and total cost of ownership are among the most important attributes in choosing a colocation provider, top decision-makers rank security as the most important in 2023.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

Direct Public Cloud Interconnection Is "Must Have" for Data Center Colocation

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Direct public cloud interconnection is a "must have" for 94% of IT leaders surveyed, according to the 2023 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite and CIO. The majority of respondents agree that a native, direct connection between colocation data centers and major cloud providers is essential for improved performance, enhanced security, cost savings and hybrid cloud connectivity.

Colocation enables organizations to outsource their data center by purchasing or leasing IT hardware that is housed at a colocation facility. The colocation provider builds and operates the data center, including managing power, cooling and security.

The report advises, "By partnering with colocation providers, organizations can greatly reduce their CapEx burden, allowing them to free up resources for investment in innovation and business growth. And just as important, when an organization's data center needs increase, it can contract for additional space and resources without having to invest in expanding or building a new data center of its own."

Other report findings include:

Hybrid IT Infrastructure Is the Norm

Survey results show that nearly 97% of CIOs have implemented or plan to implement a hybrid cloud model.

Some colocation providers offer direct cloud connections, native onramps to the major hyperscalers via dedicated high-speed, low-latency connectivity. As mentioned above, many IT organizations consider this an essential part of a colocation service.

"The way that businesses connect with each other is constantly evolving, and they require more efficient and automated ways to make today’s digital supply chain work," says Matt Senderhauf, VP of Interconnection Strategy at CoreSite. "Similarly, public cloud providers want to deliver their services to customers in a more efficient manner. Direct cloud connections deployed in secure colocation data centers provide the perfect ecosystem for cloud providers to reach the most end users and for those end users to connect to the public clouds securely, with the highest performance and lowest cost."

Colocation Successfully Supports Critical Workloads

The report found that IT decision-makers are more open than ever to moving critical workloads from public cloud to colocation:

■ 92% are considering moving AI/ML applications.

■ 84% are considering moving IoT connectivity and
management.

■ 92% are considering BI, data warehouse and data analytics.

Security is The Top Attribute Sought in a Colocation Provider

While performance, scalability, ecosystem and total cost of ownership are among the most important attributes in choosing a colocation provider, top decision-makers rank security as the most important in 2023.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...