Why Businesses are Moving to Everything as a Service – Interconnections – The Equinix Blog
EMEA IT leaders face unique challenges
These statistics raise an interesting question: What is it about the digital business landscape of EMEA that makes the region unique when it comes to XaaS adoption?
It seems likely that stricter regulations around data privacy and data sovereignty in the European Union may play a role in making businesses more hesitant to rely on external providers for key services. This idea is backed up by the fact that EMEA markets outside of the EU are showing far less hesitation: In the United Arab Emirates, 85% of IT leaders said they were moving toward XaaS, while 74% of IT leaders in Africa said the same.
Moving to an XaaS model would require European businesses to share their data freely with external service providers. If those XaaS providers don’t take the proper precautions to protect that data, it would create noncompliance risk that would be passed on to their enterprise customers. Equinix is helping address these concerns by joining the Gaia-X initiative to support the development of a sovereign digital infrastructure for European service providers and enterprises.
How Equinix Digital Services can help simplify XaaS in EMEA
With a cloud-adjacent infrastructure, businesses can move the right data sets to the right partners at the right time. This helps them make the most of services from external providers without placing their data at unnecessary risk.
Equinix Digital Services can help support cloud-adjacent infrastructure. Equinix Fabric™, our software-defined interconnection service, and Network Edge, which offers virtual network function (VNF) devices from top vendors, can form the upstream layer that connects the data hub to cloud and XaaS providers and the downstream layer that connects it to metro edge locations. Equinix Metal®, our Bare Metal as a Service offering, can help customers quickly set up dedicated compute and storage capacity in edge locations, thus enabling a holistic edge-to-cloud approach to acquiring needed services.
Equinix Digital Services can be used in a manner that complies with European data regulations. For instance, a customer could:
- Store data within one of our Equinix IBX® colocation data centers in Europe
- Take advantage of Equinix Metal for compute services on demand
- Move data to service providers within Europe using Equinix Fabric interconnection or Network Edge VNF devices
At no point in this scenario would the customer ever have to give up sovereignty over their data.
To learn more about how Equinix Digital Services can help provide flexibility and agility benefits while also decreasing costs, read “The Total Economic Impact™ of Equinix Digital Services,”[1] a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Equinix. Among other benefits, the study found that virtual infrastructure supported by Equinix Digital Services improved speed to market 10x over physical infrastructure deployments.
[1] “The Total Economic Impact™ Of Equinix Digital Services,” A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned by Equinix, Forrester Consulting, September 2022.
