Network-Enabled Colocation - Connectivity that Goes Beyond Low Latency

And while the team here at Flexential encourage our customers to make architectural changes to their applications to fully leverage edge computing, those changes alone will not meet new connectivity demands.

Understanding the value of edge deployments is key. In an earlier blog, I stressed the importance for enterprises of all sizes to define “their” edge, and to determine which data needs to be sent back to the core. The answer? Enterprises must seek a strong, network-enabled colocation provider, along with a host of service provider offerings, to make this a real and viable solution.

Why latency matters

While there are many advantages to working with a colocation provider that can deliver a private, secure, scalable network with 100% uptime guarantee, the most critical, by far, is low latency. In industries like healthcare and finance, latency down to the millisecond is everything. The ability to read and update data in real-time by skipping the roundtrip to the cloud can make the difference between life and death, or in millions of dollars.

When I was employed at PayPal and Godaddy.com, respectively, and now at Flexential, we knew that people’s livelihoods depended on our being up 100% of the time. The loss of connectivity at the wrong moment could break a sales person’s chances for making the sale of the year; outages were unacceptable, and 100% uptime service level agreements (SLAs), critical. Latency costs money. Speed drives revenue.

Going beyond latency

Not all latency issues have life-or-death consequences, of course, but even small delays in data response time can hamper productivity, increase end-user frustration and potentially affect an organization’s bottom line. It was with these thoughts and concerns that the Flexential team invested in a 100 Gbps, fully redundant network at Flexential that can reliably support interconnection, cloud connectivity and DRaaS (disaster-recovery-as-a-service). We know our customers have a business to run and don’t need to worry about the network, so we took it one step further by augmenting our internet product with automated DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) scrubbing at no additional cost. The goal: to deliver 100% uptime for our entire network and protect it from failures and malicious attacks.

With that solution in place, we confidently offer a 100% uptime SLA (service-level agreement) on critical services – similar to buying the most reliable car with roadside service – so customers can focus on the future of their AI/IoT applications and business apps, rather than worrying about the safe delivery of those services.

As billions of IoT devices, 5G technology and advances in AI drive interconnectivity to the forefront of IT priorities for enterprises large and small, we at Flexential have solved that problem for our customers. It’s called network-enabled colocation, and it’s about connecting our customers to the services they need to be successful.