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Dr. Thomas King, Technical Director of DE-CIKS
Digitization is accelerating in all industrial sectors. Even non-digital products require digital processes and value chains, and more and more products and business models rely on data and digital service delivery. Whether it’s managing a multi-cloud scenario, building a smart factory, or securing connectivity to partner networks, companies require a combination of low latency, security, and absolute reliability in their network connections. Internet exchanges (IKS) play an important role here.
They guarantee smooth, secure and fast exchange of data packets between networks of any size, from city operators to streaming providers, cloud service providers and enterprises. Dr. Thomas King, CTO at DE-CIX, identified 5 trends that will shape the connected business world, the further evolution of technology and the business of interconnection in 2023:
1. Enabling Cloud-to-Cloud communication
The cloud has become necessary for the smooth running of any modern business. However, regulators around the world are increasingly concerned about cloud concentration, where companies become dependent on a single provider. More and more companies are adopting a multi-cloud strategy, which not only alleviates over-reliance on a single provider, but also allows companies to choose the best services from different cloud providers and prevents vendor lock-in. But simply finding services from multiple clouds is not a complete solution in itself.
As a result of data portability challenges, companies may find it challenging to switch between cloud providers so that individual workloads and applications may remain locked up in a single cloud. This is also the case with certain cloud providers that offer proprietary applications that are not available through other providers (eg certain AI applications). Cloud routers on interconnect platforms will become more prevalent in 2023, enabling cloud-to-cloud communication by ensuring that latency is minimized and available bandwidth is maximized so that different applications in two or more clouds can communicate. with each other as if they were hosted in the same cloud. This improves interoperability between all cloud environments and a given application, enabling data synchronization across a diverse carrier environment. This in turn will give an added boost to multi-cloud scenarios, making them easier to manage and providing additional protection to critical company data.
2. Scaling 5G use cases
Unlike previous generations of mobile networks, 5G is not a unique technology. Rather, it is a set of different standards, incorporating different features at multiple layers. This includes the frequency used, modulation and multiplexing and delay – developed with specific use cases in mind, such as improving mobile broadband, optimizing massive array machine-to-machine communications (MMIMO) and offering ultra-reliable low-latency communications (uRLLC) for time-critical use cases. The deployment of 5G is still in its infancy, although it appears to have been around for years. Sure, we already have 5G on our mobile phones, but it’s only a radio access network (RAN), not edge networking, service virtualization and function chaining, etc., which are envisioned as features that will come with software integration.
As companies begin to deploy 5G for IoT at scale and into production, we will see further evolution of the technology stack to meet growing commercial demands. As it develops, 5G will become a game changer: it can enable maximum data transfer speeds of up to 20 Gbit/s, with up to 1 million devices connected per km2, and data transmission is highly reliable, with latency as low as one millisecond. The 5G campus network is set to revolutionize the manufacturing industry, with automotive manufacturers such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, VW and Ford taking the lead in building and testing their own 5G campus networks for IoT scenarios. We won’t know the full operational power of 5G – as an enabler of innovation, products and services – for the better part of a decade as increasingly complex futuristic use cases become reality. But we expect to see more and more productive use cases over the next 12 to 24 months.
3. Bonding resistance becomes essential
Being able to trust the connectivity infrastructure and ensure its reliability and resilience is essential to digital business. Unfortunately, in the real world, incidents and outages are commonplace and a growing concern for companies that need to protect their data and digital assets. Therefore, another trend is to strive to build company connectivity to minimize the impact of external events on data flows related to company operations and business continuity. The Multi-X strategy – using multiple technologies, multiple locations and multiple providers – is an excellent solution for the design of your own and external infrastructure.
By building multiple layers of redundancy, it is possible to design a company’s digital infrastructure for critical data flows to prevent single points of failure. The Multi-X strategy offers a roadmap for building redundancy in terms of technology (eg using servers, routers and other network components of different designs and different manufacturers), ensuring that data storage is geographically distributed across multiple data centers and using redundant non-overlapping fiber paths to connect different locations as well as develop strong business relationships with a range of digital infrastructure providers to avoid vendor lock-in.
4. Network as Code – Gaia-X project Tellus will become operational
Network as Code is the next big thing in connectivity infrastructure. As digital infrastructure becomes more important to businesses, it becomes more complex and harder to manage. Network as Code is a technology that enables the programming of various network components to develop network architecture as software.
This makes it possible to take advantage of all the benefits that come from the software industry, such as repeatability, versioning and continuous configuration automation. The IKS-API Consortium does just that, providing interconnection services from IKS, data centers and ISPs, packaged as a Network-as-Code element. The Tellus project, funded as part of the European data infrastructure project Gaia-X, goes a step further, by not only packaging interconnection services from data centers, IKS and ISPs, but encompassing the entire supply chain of different interconnection providers. This is a software network that uses integrated software instances and homogeneous interfaces, which transcends the boundaries of individual providers and remains independent of the public Internet even though it is supported by its own infrastructure.
The TellusX software will be installed on devices as well as cloud and network service components. All Tellus-enabled devices, providers and services can communicate with each other in an automated manner, announcing their requirements and confirming compliance. This eliminates configuration effort and enables a secure, automated, high-performance connection between specific locations and cloud service providers, configured for a given use case. The first versions of TellusX are scheduled to be operational in 2024, providing a long-awaited component of the Gaia-X infrastructure design.
5. Building the Foundation for an Immersive Tactile Internet (aka “Metaverse”)
The dream of an immersive tactile Internet (also known as the “metaverse”) has been gaining momentum in the last year: a digitally engineered 3-dimensional virtual space, where digital twins will interact on their own in an environment that blurs the line between the physical and the virtual – where we’ll be able to shake hands with our business partners and look them in the eye while negotiating or socializing with them in cyberspace, experience shopping and gaming on a whole new level, and still hug our kids goodnight, even when I’m on a business trip.
For science fiction to gradually turn into science fact over the next few decades, each of us will need to be well-equipped with sophisticated gadgets that will power VR and AI, which will be interconnected in a fine mesh of high-performance networks. to ensure synchronized and seamless delivery of video, audio, sensory and cyber-location data to and from our physical location.
Digital infrastructure providers are already working to provide the foundation for what will become the cyber-physical continuum. Given that the human mind only needs half a millisecond to perceive delays in sensory input (depending on the sense involved), the delay must be as small as possible in the tactile Internet.
This means that the digital infrastructure – networks, data centers and interconnection platforms – will have to be densely built in all directions. For cases of using the immersive Internet with the lowest delay, the distance from the user/device to the location of data processing should be max. 35-50 km. And this will be needed everywhere, not only in digital hubs. No digital infrastructure provider will be able to build all of this alone. Of course, Internet giants are already starting to build some of this infrastructure, often working together in consortia to finance the investment. Social networking giants, VR companies, graphics chipset manufacturers and gaming companies, to name just a few of the sectors involved, are all working on their own version or their own contribution to what has been coined the “metaverse”.
Infrastructure providers of all kinds—optical, cellular, and satellite network providers, content distribution networks, content networks, data center operators, cloud service providers, and interconnect specialists—will need to work together in ever more precise ways around the world to create an interconnected a network of infrastructure that will support immersive Internet use cases. The first apps of the metaverse are already up and running – but the killer apps are just around the corner, waiting for the infrastructure to bring them to life.
Lower limit:
End-users are demanding better performance from their digital products, which means companies need to digitize their processes to cope with ever-increasing demands. They, in turn, need the support of a variety of digital infrastructure partners – from data center operators, Internet service providers and cloud service providers, to IT system integrators, to interconnection specialists such as Internet exchange operators. Digital infrastructure providers are working to provide the foundation for modern business, not only to people and companies in digitally developed hubs, but also in previously underserved regions. The guiding principles are the basic needs of our digital age: flexibility, security, resilience and speed.
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