Enhancing Business Agility & Flexibility: The CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange

By now you have likely heard that cloud is changing how companies develop and deploy applications. Whether you’re running enterprise apps like ERPs and CRMs or testing a development environment, the cloud provides the flexibility, agility, and scaling capabilities companies need to address their most pressing business concerns.

Of course, this wasn’t always the case. In the past, enterprises limited their cloud consumption amid concerns over security, scale, cost management and most importantly, the ability to efficiently connect existing environments using cloud architecture. But the allure of greater speed, computing power, and scale proved too much. Over the last several years there has been a trend of enterprises moving more workloads to public clouds, often using multiple cloud providers. Now, enterprises have a requirement for better cloud connectivity.

The introduction of CoreSite’s Open Cloud Exchange (OCX) in 2013 brought about one of the market’s first Ethernet platform for cloud interconnection. It provided direct connections and benefits between enterprise, carrier and cloud service providers for business applications to public cloud services.

Direct, private connections to public clouds enabled enterprises to allocate bandwidth across multiple cloud providers faster and more cost effectively than the public Internet. The OCX also eliminates the burden of having to manage ever-changing APIs and interfaces that could disrupt connectivity.

One of the first to market with direct interconnection

With the OCX launch, CoreSite was one of the first to proactively address a previously hidden market demand—one that became increasingly evident and massively underserved in the intervening years.

While other similar interconnectivity platforms were meant only for carriers to interconnect with one another, CoreSite repurposed the technology to develop a cloud provider Ethernet exchange. This approach was critical to establishing a cost-effective interconnection platform and accelerating time to market. However, like all solutions built on licensed technologies, it came with some limitations that needed to be addressed in order to deliver maximum value to customers and partners.

In particular, licensing the technology meant being locked into a single vendor environment that limited agility and adaptability. Adding new features or functionality was both time consuming and costly. Simple updates to cloud providers, like Azure, AWS, and Google, APIs were difficult to accommodate, there had to be a better way.

Providing simpler connections, more options, and greater value

Cloud computing—public and private clouds, in particular—has reshaped the landscape of the IT world and how we think about infrastructure.

While IT professionals have done an excellent job over the years making clouds from the various providers work together, that interoperability hasn’t delivered the performance businesses needed because it relied heavily on public internet.

CoreSite’s OCX rebuild preserved the direct, private, layer 2 Ethernet connectivity that solves these performance issues, but this time with greater agility and flexibility. Simplifying ongoing maintenance, connection management, and upgrades including additional resource adaptors for new cloud service providers and adding new features and functionality. CoreSite’s OCX now provides up to 100G ports, robust API libraries, and over-provisioning capabilities, among others. The OCX rebuild has made it easier to build a more efficient and cost-effective multi-cloud network because it is one of the few places you can deploy your infrastructure and interconnect distributed systems to fully capture the on-premise experience of low-latency, ultra-high performance connectivity.

A single platform for connecting hybrid workloads on demand saves time, money, and improves customer experience. Once there’s a direct, private OCX connection, between AWS and Azure, you can easily transition a workload between the two. This connection reduces latency, while saving up to 70% in data transfer costs compared to over-the-top Internet connections that are unreliable.

The OCX is ideal for network and cloud service providers looking to expand their customer bases leveraging the CoreSite ecosystem. For example, network providers can use the OCX and the built-in API management tools to connect directly with leading cloud service providers in any CoreSite data center instead of having to develop relationships with providers on their own.

Rebuilding the Open Cloud Exchange improved CoreSite’s ability to quickly and cost effectively support new and existing, network, cloud, and IT service providers. In addition to increased agility and flexibility, the OCX now provides up to 100G ports, robust API libraries, and single port connectivity to Azure, and over-provisioning capabilities. The CoreSite OCX now more than ever provides industry leading end-to-end solutions, services, and performance.

Key Takeaways from Open Cloud Exchange Rebuild

• Reduced time to market for new features, functionality, and provider API updates
• Reduced complexity of provisioning multiple cloud connections
• Increased solution value from improved service features and functionality
• Optimized performance to run each workload where it makes sense for your business and at lower cost
• Diversification of services to avoid vendor lock-in and create redundancy