Andy Bastick, Senior Director, Product & Partner Marketing, Digital Realty
September 16, 2024

Over the past decade, enterprises have pushed for the fastest possible connections between their IT stacks and the immense computing power offered by the major public cloud computing providers. Ultra-fast connectivity is more important as businesses and governments adopt artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and high-performance computing (HPC) – all of which generate huge volumes of data.

The preferred choice for connecting directly to major cloud providers like Azure, Oracle, AWS, IBM and Google comes via ‘on-ramps’. These link enterprises’ systems to the cloud providers, and are typically available at colocation providers, such as Digital Realty.

What is a cloud on-ramp?

A cloud on-ramp is a direct, secure connection to a public cloud offered in a colocation data center. By offering the customers the option to connect directly, it removes the need to share data between the public cloud and the customer over the public internet, making on-ramps inherently faster and more secure. All of Digital Realty’s on-ramps are accessible both through a physical and a virtual connection.

For starters, enterprises increasingly want to connect to more than one public cloud provider to access a wider range of services and increase resiliency. Analyst group 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, has found that 79%of enterprises believe that having access to multiple cloud providers is an important factor for deploying new data platforms, and that adopting a hybrid cloud strategy is essential for their business to be successful.

However, while cloud on-ramps are a vital component of the connectivity puzzle, enterprises may also require other solutions with more flexibility and a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to enhance their hybrid multi cloud strategy.

Another consideration is Data Gravity, which lies at the intersection of IT and the laws of physics. In earlier eras of computing, data tended to be created in various locations and hauled back to centralized data centers for processing. Cloud on-ramps support this process, providing dedicated, low latency connections to the clouds.

Today, more data is being created in more locations, driven by inputs, from consumers’ mobile phone apps to Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in the field. Our research suggests that by 2024, the world’s top 2,000 enterprises (as defined by Forbes) will be storing an extra 622 terabytes of data every second across just 53 metropolitan locations.

This data is also being held and processed locally in a wider range of applications to enable enterprises to be more responsive to customers and better meet compliance obligations. For instance, Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the United States’ Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act are making it harder for enterprises to ship data across national borders.

But all this data has a ‘gravity’ to it that slows enterprises down, raises security concerns, and restricts the competitive advantages that can be gained from data analysis. Data is also becoming trapped in silos across enterprises with international reach.

To overcome this problem, these large businesses and governments need to redesign their technology infrastructures with a greater focus on how data is generated, stored, and processed. They need infrastructure that enables them to connect to a wide range of business locations and partners – including major cloud providers – while keeping data close to where it was generated and within mandated geographic boundaries.

At Digital Realty, we’ve been working hard to address these challenges for the global 2,000 companies and other customers. To support multi-location and multi-platform global connectivity, we launched ServiceFabric^TM.

Combined with PlatformDIGITAL®, our global data center platform, ServiceFabric™ enables companies, technologies and data to come together, on demand. It achieves this by combining software defined networking and a new, purpose-built physical backbone network to give customers fast, secure, and flexible connectivity.

This new solution enhances the options available to enterprises, enabling them to build on other key parts of the modern connectivity puzzle, including access points to cloud on-ramps and a robust ecosystem of technology and solution providers that, when combined, build out their data-centric architecture, bringing flexibility and enabling a competitive advantage for the enterprise.

Learn more about ServiceFabric^TM Connect here.

Cloud on-ramps and beyond: Expanding connectivity to increase flexibility and competitiveness