Data center and colocation giant Equinix announced on Thursday that it has achieved Google Cloud Premier Partner status, which enables both companies' customers to more easily move and connect their workloads in to Google Cloud.
The expanded partnership pairs Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric (ECX) with Google Cloud Interconnect to enable scalable, hybrid multi-cloud services to support enterprises' digital transformations and growth. ECX Fabric, which is an on-demand, software-defined enabled interconnection service, allows any business to connect between its own distributed infrastructure and any other company's distributed infrastructure.
As an additional support to businesses looking to simplify hybrid multi-cloud infrastructures, Equinix recently rolled out one of its largest expansions of ECX Fabric, providing increased access to clouds, networks, partners and customers.
In addition, the integration of Equinix SmartKey and Google Cloud External Key Manager (EKM) provides customers with secure key storage, encryption and tokenization services to address performance and risk, which also supports governance and compliance requirements at the digital edge, close to clouds and carriers.
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Business IT teams are increasingly moving towards hybrid multi-cloud solutions due to the flexibility and scalability those architectures offer. Findings from Equinix's 2019-20 Global Tech Trends Survey showed a global trend toward the adoption of hybrid multi-cloud strategies and an increase in the number of IT functions dependent on the cloud.
As part of their digital transformations, enterprises and organizations of all stripes have been migrating their services and applications to clouds such as Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, among others. Digital transformations have accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic as businesses see the value of being able to pivot their services and applications to the cloud.
Equinix said customers of its interconnection services also benefit from support around the configuration of their telecom and service architecture, which speed up their digital transformations.
Equinix currently houses more than 35% of Google Cloud's on-ramps—in over 35 metros—through dedicated enterprise-leveraged or partner GCI services. In order to improve latency, enterprises can colocate equipment for hybrid multi-cloud workloads to the closest Google Cloud region.