OREANDA-NEWS. September 20, 2016. The enterprise is moving steadily toward hybrid cloud infrastructures, with more and more organizations committing to “cloud-first” strategies. Industry experts are bullish about hybrid cloud growth and IDC predicts that more than 80% of enterprises will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017.

As enterprises increasingly adopt hybrid clouds and integrate them into their IT infrastructures, they are seeing direct interconnection as critical to their digital strategies. The ability to directly connect to a range of cloud services globally solves a host of problems for the enterprise by enabling secure, flexible, high-performance interconnection to whatever cloud services its users or applications need, from wherever they are.

At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week, we’ll be talking with Oracle customers about how they can gain direct and secure interconnection to Oracle Cloud at Equinix and develop the hybrid cloud solutions that work for them. The partnership between Oracle and Equinix has been long and productive, and that’s an advantage for the enterprise as markets change and cloud needs grow. Together, we can help them deploy the best production-proven hybrid cloud options to meet whatever business requirements they have.

Interconnection Comes First

In the digital age, businesses must be able to reach users anytime, anywhere, on any device – that “omnichannel” experience is simply the default expectation nowadays. The enterprise is also adopting new collaboration and commerce models that require instant and simultaneous connectivity between partners, often in different global regions, just to execute basic business tasks.

And the growing importance of the Internet of Things (IoT) and associated trends such as big data mean that to stay out in front of the competition, businesses need to be able to quickly and securely access huge data stores, data processing applications and analytics services so they can gain the insight they need from the deluge the data streaming in from the IoT.

The enterprise can’t meet these demands without the cloud, and they know it. Most are selecting and prioritizing which workloads and applications to migrate to and operate there and which to keep on site. So for the foreseeable future, the enterprise will need a platform that allows them to operate both on-premise private clouds and public cloud workloads and applications, and that’s the hybrid cloud.

The enterprise’s hybrid cloud strategies must be flexible and scalable enough to bring critical cloud services closer to users (employees, partners, customers) and data, wherever they all reside, right out at the edge of the corporate network. Equinix and Oracle make that possible.

Oracle FastConnect gives enterprises direct and secure access to Oracle Cloud from four locations spanning North America and Europe, and a fifth location will soon be available in Australia. This private route bypasses the public Internet, for low latency and superior performance. Private connections also greatly reduce the enterprise attack surface, adding a critical level of security. Overall, the interconnection Oracle FastConnect delivers establishes a hybrid cloud capability that allows the enterprise to maximize the Oracle Cloud.

Once inside the Oracle Cloud platform, businesses can find the partners and providers they need in a variety of unique ecosystems Oracle has cultivated through the years – from financial services, to advertising exchanges, to content and digital media. That kind of access to the right resources makes the transition to hybrid cloud that much smoother. And our professional services practice has the experience and capabilities to ensure the enterprise builds architectures that maximize the performance and operation of Oracle Cloud applications and workloads.

It’s clear hybrid clouds are critical for an increasing number of today’s enterprises and will be vital to the future of many others. The direct and secure connectivity that Platform Equinix and Oracle offer enables hybrid cloud infrastructures to deliver exactly the kind of interconnection enterprises need to compete in an evolving digital economy.

Download Equinix’s Oracle Cloud Solution Brief to learn how Oracle and Equinix work together to deliver a faster, more secure hybrid cloud infrastructure.

And if you happen to be in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld, please stop by and see us at Booth #415.