As the world--and businesses--become increasingly more connected, tech companies are busy building the next-generation digital connections that will bind organizations around the globe.
When it comes to the next-generation global network, its key distinguishing characteristic is that of maintaining and expanding a mosaic of owned and unowned infrastructure.
In hybrid work, online healthcare or smart manufacturing, applications and workloads must be delivered across an organization’s infrastructure – i.e. the part of the network the organization owns.
They must also be delivered across the unowned hybrid and multi-cloud environments, third-party networks, and the public Internet itself as the ultimate delivery mechanism of digital connectivity and performance.
Key physical components of next gen infrastructure include hundreds of data centers globally distributed close to population centers and interconnection with hundreds of internet service providers (ISPs) at each data center to provide north-south connectivity to eyeballs.
Other essential physical elements include private fiber connectivity between data centers and cloud providers for east-west connectivity and infrastructure diversity and resiliency to enable High Availability/Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) and avoiding Single Points of Failure (SPOFs).
However, limited resources in all areas will be the significant challenge in the near and long term future, be it power, equipment and capacity on existing or future subsea cables.
“The competition for resources has been ongoing and with an exponential growth of demand the need to ensure future resources early and utilize them best will be a key challenge,” said Jon Alexander, vice president of products for Akamai Technologies, a provider of content delivery network services, cloud security solutions, and edge computing services.
He added demand is outstripping supply for data centers and occupancy rates are at an all-time high, in part fueled by the massive surge in hyperscaler and AI demand.
“At the same time energy costs are rising which is leading to inflationary pricing in the data center market,” Alexander said.
In the end, whatever functionality or new service is being delivered, automated or consumed on-demand, all networks still must physically connect-- the global internet needs these connection points where on-ramps and off-ramps exist for a multitude of services.
Mike Hicks, principal solutions analyst for Cisco ThousandEyes, said in many ways the real key component of the next-generation global network isn’t what it looks like, but how organizations will be able to manage it.
“Brand, customer loyalty, and revenue is on the line when it comes to successfully leveraging the global network to assure and optimize access to applications and critical services to customers and employees at all times,” he said.
He pointed to the EU’s recently enacted Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) recently as an example of lawmakers recognizing the complexities of third-party provider interdependencies across the entire digital supply chain.
Hicks explained business outcomes depend on the IT team’s ability to consistently deliver always-on digital experiences to every user, everywhere, every time.
“If these teams can’t see the unowned infrastructure those experiences run on, they can’t see and identify when an issue occurs, and certainly not remediate in a timely manner,” he said.
From his perspective, that’s the most important requirement for these new global area networks: seeing them like you own them.
“Seeing the global area network is a critical step to achieve another demand being put on these global area networks—trusting them,” Hicks said. “Trusting the Internet as your new corporate backbone requires sophisticated solutions built for a borderless IT environment and a new approach to IT operations.”
Equinix, which operates a network of data centers across various regions, contributes to the development and functionality of next-generation global information networks by providing interconnection points inside major locations like Equinix IBX campuses.
The company has been facilitating and supporting the connectivity between businesses with other offerings like its Cross-Connect service.
“Today we are very close to achieving 500,000 interconnections across our platform,” said Brenden Rawle, senior director of business development, EMEA at Equinix.
He explained in delivering these services, what Equinix realized was that one of the crucial sources of competitive advantage for their customers is the ability to collaborate.
“With network services and next-gen technology it is important to provide services that are easy to use and consume,” he said. “And then to combine those with a rich ecosystem of service providers that people and companies will benefit from.”
What businesses want today is instant and automated access to major clouds, AI providers and network partners.
“Moving forward we can expect further developments around APIs, intent-based networking, virtualized functions and new models of federation that will help customers extend their reach and collaboration potential,” Rawle said.
Alexander explained the next generation of global connectivity requires a major reevaluation of physical hardware.
“This ranges from data centers and edge servers to undersea cables and fiber optic connections to satellites and cybersecurity systems,” he said. “No single company or public government entity can deploy these alone.”
There is a collective effort underway to move more complex and sophisticated compute, data and applications around the world in new ways.
He said while centralized data centers still have a role to play, companies worldwide are moving towards a more distributed cloud model.
This approach brings data closer to end users through massive networks of edge servers, lowering cost and latency, and enabling next-generation technologies like AI, self-driving vehicles and spatial computing.
Rawle acknowledged there are still some challenges around supply chain and build times, but added it feels like the industry is on top of most of that
“It is clear that there is strong demand for services, so we need to make sure we are building at the right scale and in the right places,” he said.
Part of the opportunity around the physical infrastructure is to ensure they are working closely with governments, communities, planners and policy makers to ensure digital infrastructure fits seamlessly into the urban fabric of a society to provide the best service and opportunity for people and customers with the least disruption to community.
“Applications and data exchange do not work without proper network resourcing, but the network is still a ‘supporting’ function only,” Rawle said. “Hence it should deployable, configurable and scalable on the spot, as that is what the application needs.”
Rawle explained AI is already playing a role in areas such as resilience, network capacity planning, predicative maintenance and traffic management.
“However, it’s a small role at this stage,” he said. “A lot of network operations has been highly automated for many years.”
Hicks pointed out managing a next-generation information network goes beyond human scale.
“Hundreds of billions of data points are generated every day when it comes to monitoring performance and it’s impossible for any IT team to overcome noisy data and surface actual insight,” he explained.
He said AI-native intelligence will be a critical functionality to correlate patterns and combinations to triangulate the source of a problem across both owned infrastructure as well as within cloud and Internet environments—before it impacts the digital experience.
In addition, AI-native intelligence will also play a critical role in accelerating closed loop automations across ecosystems within the global network.
Through interoperability efforts including the OpenTelemetry open standard and robust API integrations, AI-driven recommendations can be generated and translated into configuration commands.
These drive action across both owned and unowned domains—not just for remediation purposes, but for planning and optimization efforts.
Alexander said outside of the traditional demands of reliability, scalability, performance (i.e. low latency), cost and security, there’s a growing focus on the globalization and localization of those items as well as the flexibility to run applications from core sites, to distributed, to highly distributed networks.
“There is no one size fits all to networking, but there's also a need to obfuscate much of the complexity so we aren't introducing friction into the business or IT lifecycle,” he said. “It’s one of, if not the most, complex infrastructure we’ve ever built as a human species.”
