The Benefits of Peering in Hybrid Cloud Environments

By Paul Andrews | May 7, 2015

At the enterprise level, cloud adoption continues to grow thanks to the benefits experienced by organizations, such as elastic capacity and utility pricing. However, those benefits, in some cases, are nothing more than tactical. Moving forward, companies will look for providers that are helping them get over the hurdles associated with wider cloud adoption. Beyond that, enterprise customers want their providers to help them succeed even further in their cloud environment with optimized performance, end-to-end.

We’ve realized that a critical driver and key differentiator is the ability to interconnect, also known as peering – the ability to connect networks and customers instantaneously. Deploying cloud environments in addition to colocation is really increasing the return for customers, but proximity is a huge factor in the two coinciding together.

It truly helps if the data center boasts an interconnected ecosystem of network service providers – one that lets customers choose the service performance that matches their goals and objectives. Doing so enables consistent low-latency and high-performance, and optimizes cloud service delivery as well – all while reducing complexity for new users.

As we all know, at this stage in the game public cloud environments are lacking in performance. Extremely low latency is critical for certain applications, and achieving this often means that data storage and infrastructure need to be physically located close to one another. For mission critical applications that demand high performance and always-on uptime, local hybrid cloud and colocation architectures are the optimal choice.

So, to recap – the benefits of peering in hybrid cloud environments include but are not limited to:

Confidence in proximity

Consistency Low-latency

High-performance

Optimized cloud service delivery

Reduced complexity

Increased adoption

When considering how to fully bake your hybrid cloud and colocation strategies, ensuring that your cloud service provider offers peering is part of a solid recipe for success. As a reminder, The Boston Internet Exchange is New England’s only hub for creating and developing IP peering partner relationships – and it is housed right in our facility at One Summer Street in Boston. It houses our data center customers and more than 80 domestic and international network providers that interconnect across a Carrier-Class switching fabric. We are really proud of our state-of-the-art design, mostly because for our customers, it optimizes network performance, lowers overall IP transit costs and allows for the most efficient exchange of traffic.

If you are interested in hearing more about the benefits or learning about our own carrier hotel onsite at the Markley Group, please email us at info@markleyix.com.