Private Data Exchange Between Businesses Forecasted to Outpace the Public Internet by Nearly 2x in Growth and 6x in Volume by 2020

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Aug. 16, 2017

Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8059151-equinix-global-interconnection-index/

"Some of the greatest technology trends of our lifetime, including mobile, social, cloud and the explosion of data, are creating disruption on the scale of the Industrial Revolution," said Sara Baack, Chief Marketing Officer for Equinix, Inc. "In this new reality, it's a 'scale-or-fail' proposition and companies are succeeding by adopting Interconnection, locating their IT infrastructure in immediate proximity to an ecosystem of companies that gather to physically connect their networks to those of their customers and partners. Interconnection helps fuel digital transformation by supporting multicloud consumption at scale, improving network latency and performance, enabling greater operational control, and reducing security risk."

According to the Index, Interconnection Bandwidth is expected to grow at a 45 percent CAGR to reach 5,000 Tbps by 2020, dwarfing Global IP traffic in both growth (24 percent) and volume (855 Tbps)¹. It is also growing faster than Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), the legacy model of business connectivity, by a factor of 10x (45 percent to four percent)².

Key macroeconomic, technology and regulatory trends that are impacting Interconnection growth include:

• Digital Technology Use, which forces the need to support real-time interactions requiring more Interconnection Bandwidth. According to Accenture, digital technology use is projected to add $1.36 trillion in additional economic output in the world's top 10 economies by 2020³.

• Urbanization, which is transforming global demographics and creating a proximity need for digital services concentrated across metro centers globally. More than two billion people are expected to migrate to major cites by 2035, creating as many as 50 major urban metro hubs⁴ requiring dense Interconnection fabrics.

• Cybersecurity Risk, which expands Interconnection consumption as firms increasingly shift to private data traffic exchange to bypass the public Internet and mitigate against digital threats. By 2020, an estimated 60 percent of digital businesses will suffer major service failures⁵ as breaches permeate across physical and digital platforms.

• Global Trade of Digitally Deliverable Services, which ushers in a new era of dynamic business processes and demand for Interconnection. Global digital workflows require a global mesh of Interconnected metros to fulfill demand. According to McKinsey⁶, trade in digitally deliverable services now comprises 50 percent of total services exports globally, with an expected 9x increase by 2020.

Highlights / Key Facts

• The Index provides significant insight into regional differences in how Interconnection is accelerating in different regions of the world.  While the U.S. is forecast to have the largest amount of Interconnection Bandwidth, it is the most mature region, and other regions are more rapidly provisioning Interconnection Bandwidth to rival the projected deployment levels in the U.S. The following table outlines projections across all four regions: