What is digital infrastructure?

Digital infrastructure encompasses the digital technologies that form the foundation of an organization's IT and operations. The emerging digital infrastructure ecosystem is increasingly cloud-based. This focuses on ensuring real-time delivery of innovative infrastructure services to support digital business models and help align technology adoption and IT operational governance with business outcomes.

What are the challenges driving the need for digital infrastructure?

• Technology trends are accelerating the pace and scope of change, inspiring digital leaders to reimagine every aspect of how they architect infrastructure to keep their competitive advantage.
• Consumption models must transform, enabling companies to access and use digital infrastructure in new ways that are increasingly simple, virtual, and on-demand.
• Agility is key—enabling companies to rapidly create, build, and deploy new products and services that the fast-moving global marketplace demands.
• Businesses need to orchestrate and automate services delivered by using both internal and third-party providers.

Drive your digital infrastructure strategy with Equinix

As a global interconnection and ecosystem leader, we're dedicated to helping digital leaders bring together and interconnect their digital infrastructure on our global platform to gain maximum competitive advantage. We envision a future in which digital leaders assemble infrastructure on demand in minutes—anywhere in the world—from an ecosystem of providers.

Key features

• Simplify hybrid cloud deployments—creating best-of-breed hybrid multicloud architectures by using digital infrastructure services adjacent to leading public clouds and networks.
• Connect virtually instantly through the industry’s most reliable, secure and sustainable platform.
• Enable low-latency performance by deploying close to those customers and locations that matter most to your business.
• Increase performance, innovation, security, and scale by enabling direct and private software-defined connections to thousands of partners.
• Accelerate global delivery and consumption of digital services at scale with on-demand infrastructures

How secure is digital infrastructure?

Businesses rearchitecting their digital infrastructure should prioritise access control and segmentation (AC&S) with distributed security as the first control functions to design and implement. The shift to the digital edge requires placing strategic control points beside users, clouds and networks. This can be achieved by establishing Performance Hubs™ within Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers on Platform Equinix®.

In a distributed environment, basic AC&S principles including traffic inspection and the establishment of 'zero trust' zones are still viable. However, they must be strengthened with:

• New security zones accounting for cloud and SaaS applications.
  
• A distributed fabric architecture comprised of directly connected colocation hubs with visibility into all enterprise traffic to and from users and clouds. These hubs become extensions of the corporate network, with segmentation and access controls tailored to each region’s compliance and application needs.

Digital infrastructure vs. on-prem

Mega trends such as IoT, AI and the digital economy are driving growth in internet traffic, mobile data and data storage on a global basis. Traditional hardware infrastructures simply cannot keep pace with demand. Digital infrastructure can scale to meet demand spikes and faster deployment times. It also requires less maintenance and eliminates downtime to perform upgrades.