To address data center closures, consolidation, migrations as well as emerging core-to-edge initiatives, organizations look towards colocation providers to provide additional services besides the traditional space, power and cooling. Today, the lines of distinction between retail, wholesale and managed service providers are blurred by colocation providers offering additional services to address hybrid and digital transformation initiatives. Organizations use colocation services with data center interconnect fabrics to integrate multiple applications, data types and data sources in a secure, predictable, lower-latency fashion enabling digital business success. In many cases, data centers are transforming into noncore, remote facilities relegated to non-x86 workloads and legacy applications. Some colocation providers offer interconnection services to enable edge-to-core digital objectives.
Software defined cloud interconnects (SDCI) provide private network connectivity between enterprises and public cloud service providers (CSPs). SDCIs pre-provision physical connectivity from their hubs to public cloud service providers, internet service providers (ISPs), and network service providers (NSPs). They serve as aggregators and intermediaries to quickly provision logical connectivity to cloud service providers and complement this with billing, monitoring/management, security, and administrative functions. For both performance and business continuity reasons, SDCI can be employed by enterprises with multi-cloud architecture.
Gartner defines WAN optimization tools as products that improve the performance of applications running across the WAN as well as reduce WAN service expenses. WAN optimization solutions continue to evolve, and now support four high-level needs: improving the response times for users of business-critical applications over WAN links or mobile connections; assisting in maximizing ROI for WAN bandwidth; optimizing data-center-to-data-center (DC-to-DC) traffic for faster storage replication and synchronization; and assisting in directing traffic across multiple WANS, such as a hybrid WAN or public cloud connectivity.