The way we work today depends not just on cloud applications, but on how well those applications work together. When we think about collaboration, our focus usually moves toward messaging or video calls. While it’s important that those applications work well in isolation, real collaboration is a much broader picture. It’s the seamless handoff between Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and dozens of connected applications and workflows that span organizations, and sometimes even span oceans and continents. Organizations rely on these handoffs to share information, manage approvals, and stay aligned. But when those handoffs aren’t optimized and platforms don’t “talk” to each other quickly enough, the result is friction, frustration, and lost time.
In a Microsoft survey of more than 4,500 employees across the US, UK, and Japan, 85% said collaboration tools were essential to their job. Yet 72% wanted better compatibility across teams, and 64% said applications weren’t well embedded in their company’s workflows. Instead of enabling productivity, tool sprawl ends up creating more manual work – copying data between apps, juggling formats, or waiting on sluggish interfaces. The challenge here isn’t just bandwidth or buffering – it’s fragmentation. And fixing it starts with smarter, more consistent connectivity.
Fragmentation is its own form of latency
For years, enterprise IT teams have prioritized reducing latency as a way to improve cloud performance. But while low latency is still vital, another issue has quietly taken root: fragmentation. Across many organizations, different departments rely on different tools for similar tasks – sales may work primarily in Outlook and Excel and Dropbox, while marketing teams depend more on Teams, Slack, OneDrive, and other collaborative content tools. When these tools don’t integrate cleanly, employees are forced to bridge the gaps themselves. That often means reformatting documents, copying data between platforms, or repeating steps that should have been automated.
This disjointed experience takes a toll on productivity, especially as workflows become more interconnected and reliant on real-time collaboration. Shared workspaces, file syncing, live document editing, and cross-app integrations all demand more than just a working connection – they need stability and consistency across services. When collaboration tools operate in silos or behave inconsistently, the employee experience suffers, no matter how fast the underlying network might be.
The result is a new kind of inefficiency that isn’t always visible to IT teams monitoring uptime or bandwidth metrics. It shows up instead in lost momentum during meetings, stalled approvals, duplicated work, and a growing sense among employees that their digital tools don’t quite support the way they actually work. Addressing this challenge means looking beyond simple performance improvements and thinking holistically about how infrastructure supports collaboration at scale. And that’s where the Microsoft Azure Peering Service or MAPS comes in.
MAPS: Smoother workflows start with smarter routing
Behind every sluggish cloud experience, there’s usually an infrastructure issue lurking in the background, and employees are starting to notice. In a DE-CIX survey, 37% of office workers said they believed network overloads were to blame for poor performance, while 27% pointed to underdeveloped infrastructure. Another 21% suspected the problem lay within their own company’s network. When performance varies across apps, even simple tasks can become unpredictable. A video call may work fine, but a shared document takes too long to load. File uploads succeed in one office but time out in another. While we get annoyed with various applications, these inconsistencies aren’t always caused by the apps themselves. Often, they often stem from how traffic flows between company locations and the cloud. That “flow” is something Microsoft and DE-CIX are working to improve through MAPS.
MAPS allows enterprises to control their application dataflow to improve the user experience by sending data via the shortest and most reliable path. Instead of routing traffic across the broader Internet, which is prone to congestion no matter how “good” the connection, MAPS provides a direct, SLA-backed connection into Microsoft’s backbone infrastructure. This ensures predictable latency and stable bandwidth, which is especially valuable for organizations with large, distributed workforces or latency-sensitive workflows. Real-time collaboration features become smoother, file transfers more consistent, and Microsoft’s SaaS tools behave more like locally hosted software. For IT teams, it means fewer support tickets and troubleshooting calls related to SaaS instability. And for employees, it means fewer interruptions and a greater sense that their digital tools are working with them, not against them.
A hidden advantage: Built-in cyber resilience
While performance is often the top priority for IT teams deploying SaaS connectivity, security is never far behind. One of the underappreciated benefits of using MAPS is the reduction in exposure to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. Because MAPS enables enterprises to connect directly to Microsoft’s infrastructure, bypassing large segments of the public Internet, traffic enters a highly protected environment from the outset. Microsoft’s networks are built with native DDoS mitigation capabilities, meaning that malicious traffic is absorbed or deflected before it ever reaches the enterprise layer.
That means enterprises using MAPS may be able to reduce their dependency on additional security layers for cloud access, or at the very least, free up resources that would otherwise be spent defending against volumetric attacks. The more critical SaaS applications move into the cloud, the more valuable this kind of embedded protection becomes, not just as a technical safeguard, but as a cost-saving measure. For companies evaluating MAPS, it’s an opportunity to improve resilience while simplifying their overall security posture, especially when deployed as part of a provider-independent, multi-path connectivity strategy in colocation environments.
Mastering SaaS
As the demands on cloud collaboration continue to grow, performance, consistency, and security all need to be addressed together. Enterprises are increasingly looking for infrastructure that can deliver stable, responsive access to the tools their teams rely on every day, regardless of their location. MAPS offers a direct, optimized route into Microsoft’s SaaS services, improving reliability and user experience across entire organizations. With end-to-end peering support from DE-CIX, MAPS is the key unlocking the full potential of SaaS in modern work environments.
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Harald Kriener is Head of Global Success Management at DE-CIX. He leads a team of experienced interconnection experts and dedicated young IT professionals who support not only network operators but also national and international companies in planning and implementing various interconnection strategies and future solution scenarios. Kriener completed his training in the field of classic software development and organization. During his career, he was the managing owner of an internet service provider and systems integrator for over 20 years.
The Microsoft Azure Peering Service (MAPS)
The Microsoft Azure Peering Service (MAPS) is a reliable way for companies to connect to Microsoft's cloud services and to improve user experience. MAPS ensures predictable latency times and stable bandwidths by connecting your own company location to the software company's network via the shortest route. Those who use the service connect directly to the Microsoft infrastructure in a dedicated, service-level agreement-supported, and guaranteed DDoS-protected manner. Companies that want to use MAPS can do so particularly easily and simply if they already implement their connectivity in a provider-independent, redundant manner and ideally in a colocation data center. They also need to aggregate their traffic across the board. Both of these conditions usually apply to large companies and corporations. In addition, companies need their own Autonomous System Number (ASN) and routing equipment. A minimum bandwidth is not required. DE-CIX provides support for the connection and provides the necessary peering infrastructure and support.
