A little more than three years ago, it was just an idea: Not only offering peering to our customers at DE-CIX, but also offering them the best possible cloud connectivity, bypassing the Internet. The idea developed into the DE-CIX DirectCLOUD service, and now, three years later, we look back at an impressive success story. More than 50 cloud service providers are available at the DE-CIX Cloud Exchange, the connected bandwidth only used for cloud connectivity will reach 1000 GE this year, and more than 50 ISPs and data center partners included DirectCLOUD into their service portfolio.
“Like with our peering services, we wanted to build a cloud ecosystem offering customers cost-effective and secure connection to a variety of cloud service providers” explains Harald “Hacki” Kriener, Director Business Development Cloud Services at DE-CIX. “I am especially proud that we managed not only to bring the leading cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft Azure on board, but also numerous regional and local specialist providers.”
Mr. Cloud and the cake
After driving forward cloud services at DE-CIX, his colleagues have nicknamed Hacki “Mr Cloud”. The whole DE-CIX team celebrated the three-year anniversary with cake in our Frankfurt headquarters at the beginning of March and Hacki had the honor of cutting the cake. (At that time, most of our colleagues who are now working from home were still in the office.)
“As the internet continuously expands, it is important to have access to business-critical cloud applications separate from the public Internet. This is why we are working on expanding the availability of DirectCLOUD in further locations and developing our partnerships with cloud service providers and ISPs to enable an end-to-end secure, stable, and reliable connectivity between the user on premise and the cloud. Our goal is to secure business in the cloud," Hacki comments on the next steps for DirectCLOUD.
The DirectCLOUD service allows customers to use their existing access to DE-CIX to connect securely to several cloud service providers, just via an additional VLAN. Find out more here.