W.Media’s Cloud and Datacenter Awards 2022 awarded AIMS Data Centre’s (“AIMS”) ‘AIMS DC Connect’ in the category of ‘Connectivity & Innovation’. This Awards category recognizes the importance of connectivity in a data center.
Data centers are only as strong as the interconnection services that power them. Interconnection services ensure that applications and data can be connected quickly, easily, and securely to the networks and this category is judged on the basis of entries demonstrating innovation and excellence in delivering (inter)connectivity. In response to this Award, Chiew Kok Hin, Chief Executive Officer of AIMS said:
“With this recognition from W.Media, we hope to showcase our capabilities and commitment to grow not only the Malaysian market further but eventually, markets throughout Southeast Asia as well. This represents an excellent opportunity for us to tell our story about AIMS’ rich interconnection ecosystem that links customers and businesses for greater flexibility and provides connectivity options to access new markets. As well as highlighting the achievements of the APAC data center industry, the W.Media Awards demonstrate the industry’s potential, its competitiveness and a dedication to forward thinking that will undoubtedly forge connections globally and elevate data centre industry standards.”
Interconnection’s importance
Interconnection is the deployment of IT traffic exchange points that integrate direct, private connections between counterparties across networks. A data center’s interconnection ecosystem is therefore one of its most important features.
As flows of data continue to increase significantly, the demand for connectivity has never been higher. Workloads in all sectors have also become more averse to latency, which can mean that data needs to be processed as close to the end-user as possible. Interconnection solutions need to cater for different types of connectivity ecosystems, such as peering, cloud connectivity, closed user groups and security services.
Globally, businesses are moving all of their processes online. Most enterprises now run their core processes on a hybrid mix of cloud infrastructure and on-premise computing. In such a scenario, one of the key challenges is to offer a secure and resilient network infrastructure that interconnects all participants and digital flows.
Factors to consider
Interconnection may be better achieved hosted in carrier-neutral data center campuses, where distributed IT components are co-located. This is where an Internet Exchange comes in.
As the name suggests, interconnection allows for two or more data center facilities to share resources and storage space amongst them. An Internet Exchange offers direct, low-latency connectivity, serving networks of all kinds and an ecosystem including Internet service providers (ISPs), content networks, and content delivery networks (CDNs).
This enables specialist interconnection services to meet the needs of different enterprise sectors. The interconnection services may also include direct connectivity to clouds and business applications sourced from the cloud, such as Microsoft 365.
In conclusion, effective interconnectivity solutions in data centers enable organizations to increase flexibility in choosing how their workloads are distributed and prioritized and reduce the latency associated with these processes.
