OREANDA-NEWS. April 11, 2016. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, projected that the number of components per integrated circuit would double every year for at least a decade. Then in 1975, he revised the estimated rate of growth to double every two years. His prediction, better known as “Moore’s Law,” became the bar that the semiconductor industry used for long-term planning for many decades, and its impact on today’s electronics is seen in the more than 3 billion smartphones that can out-compute the super computers of the 80s.

Then came the cloud. And, according to a recent article in the Economist, “After five decades, the end of Moore’s law is in sight.” Not that computer processing development is going on a hiatus ̶ Intel says that compute power is currently doubling every 2.5 years, just slightly slower than Moore’s revised prediction. It’s just that the cloud offers vast and scalable resources that enable a collection of computers to deliver outstanding performance without frequent hardware updates.

But even with large amounts of processing power moving to the cloud, the next technology frontier lies in actually accessing these resources and services offered by SaaS, IaaS and PaaS cloud providers. According to the Economist article, the shift to cloud computing depends on “fast and reliable connectivity.”

We couldn’t agree more. And as more businesses are becoming increasingly cloud-enabled, they need reliable, secure and instantaneous connectivity to clouds to compete.

According to IDC, 60–70% of all software, services and technology spending will be cloud-based by 2020. This major shift in IT delivery will require a new approach to interconnection that allows ubiquitous access to multiple clouds over direct and private connections that are fast to establish and easy to manage.

Here are some best practices for interconnecting to clouds that should be considered by cloud consumers and cloud service providers:

  • An interconnection platform that is vendor-neutral and will accommodate multi-cloud architectures, whether they are private, public or hybrid clouds
  • Virtualized, private direct connections that bypass the public Internet and provide higher security and performance for less risk and a greater user experience
  • Access to global cloud ecosystems that include the top cloud service providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc.)
  • An API-programmable or portal-based cloud interconnection architecture that allows scalable provisioning and management of private, secure connections to multiple cloud services
  • Lower network costs, because access to lower latency connections means more available bandwidth, which leads to reduced WAN expenses

Interconnection can give enterprises and services providers the ability to scale their cloud coverage and tap into opportunities that will increase their growth rate. Learn more about creating an interconnected cloud service via the Equinix Cloud Exchange.