Hong Kong’s Private Connectivity at the Edge Forecast to Grow by 55 Percent Annually

HONG KONG – October 15, 2019 – The latest Global Interconnection Index (GXI), an annual market study published by Equinix, predicts global private connectivity at the edge will grow by 51 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), and expected to exceed a total bandwidth capacity of more than 13,300 Terabits per second (Tbps), which is equivalent to 53 zettabytes (ZB) of data exchanged annually.  This is enough bandwidth to support every person on earth simultaneously downloading a complete season of Game of Thrones in ultra-high definition resolution in less than a single day. The GXI market study finds that interconnection bandwidth is an essential component to digital business and validates that to compete in the digital economy, companies must address growing data volumes and increasing data exchange velocity across a rising number of clouds and business ecosystems. 

In Asia-Pacific, interconnection bandwidth is expected to grow at 56 percent CAGR to exceed 3,825 Tbps by 2022, contributing 29 percent of the global capacity. Among industries, Cloud and IT services is expected to consume the most interconnection bandwidth, reaching 914 Tbps in Asia-Pacific, which is forecast to outpace growth (50 percent CAGR) of clouds in all other regions. Hong Kong is expected to see the second fastest interconnection bandwidth growth in the region, increasing at 55 percent CAGR from 2018 to 2022.

In addition, a separate independent survey commissioned by Equinix of more than 2,450 global senior IT professionals, including more than 100 senior IT professionals in Hong Kong, shows that 60 percent of Hong Kong organizations are currently expanding into new regions, countries or metros, and 66 percent of them plan to use virtual connections to support their expansions.

“People, software and machines are creating and consuming data faster and in all the places where we work, play, and live,” said Rick Villars, Research Vice President, Datacenter & Cloud, IDC. “The significant increase in data created, aggregated and analyzed in these new locations is contributing to a major shift away from deploying IT in traditional corporate datacenters. Enterprises need access to robust, modern datacenter facilities near the edge locations where businesses want to deploy dedicated infrastructure and interconnect to the increasing number of clouds, customers and partners that are at the core of digital transformation efforts.”

Key Findings
The GXI Vol. 3 delivers insights by tracking, measuring and forecasting growth in interconnection bandwidth—the total capacity provisioned to privately and directly exchange traffic, with a diverse set of partners and providers, at distributed IT exchange points inside carrier-neutral colocation data centers. The GXI finds:

The ability to exchange large volumes of data through interconnection is essential to compete in the digital economy

• The GXI forecasts that in order to manage the growing volumes of data, global enterprise consumption of interconnection bandwidth will grow at a 64 percent CAGR (68 percent in Asia-Pacific), outpacing other forms of business data exchange.
• The GXI shows that to manage increasing volumes of data, enterprises globally are on average deploying in nine locations, with a total of 340 interconnections to networks clouds and business partners.

• The Equinix survey found that almost half of global IT decision-makers (46 percent in Hong Kong) believe interconnection is a key facilitator of digital transformation, and nearly half of all global IT decision-makers (45 percent in Hong Kong) believe interconnection can help their business to gain competitive advantage within the marketplace.

Distance is the biggest performance killer for digital business

• Deploying direct, private connections at the edge propels both application performance and user experience.
• According to the GXI, today’s latency-sensitive workloads require response times ranging from <60 to <20 milliseconds, forcing IT infrastructure closer to the points of consumption.
• According to the Equinix survey, more than one-third of global IT decision-makers (40 percent in Asia-Pacific and 50 percent in Hong Kong) are using interconnection to increase speed of connectivity.

Leading businesses are gaining competitive advantage using a combination of key interconnection deployment models

• Interconnecting to multiple network providers across multiple edge locations is the most prominent use case for interconnection bandwidth and is expected to grow 4x by 2022.  
• Interconnecting to multiple clouds and IT services across multiple edge locations and cloud regions represents the next largest and fastest use of interconnection bandwidth and is predicted to grow 13x by 2022.
• Interconnecting to digital business partners for financial services, content and digital media and supply chain integration makes up the remainder of interconnection bandwidth use cases and is forecasted to grow 5x by 2022.

Quotes

• Sachin Gupta, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Enterprise Networking Business, Cisco

“As enterprises embrace the imperative of digital transformation, they increasingly adopt multiple cloud-based applications to meet their objectives. This places pressure on the network to deliver a fast and secure application experience to users located anywhere in the world. With both applications and networks becoming more distributed, enterprises today will continue to require a low-latency, interconnected architecture to securely connect end users with business-critical applications.”