Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the global interconnection and data center company, today announced that the company has experienced tremendous growth in the number of enterprise customers accessing Azure in Equinix’s International Business Exchange^TM (IBX^®) data centers around the globe. As one of the first data center providers to deliver direct access to Microsoft’s cloud services on a global scale, Equinix has enabled enterprise customers to speed hybrid and multi-cloud deployments by directly connecting to Azure in Equinix data centers across five continents including North America, South America, Asia, Europe and Australia. 

In the past year, availability of this direct access offering has expanded to 16 markets, and Equinix has facilitated hundreds of connections to Azure via Platform Equinix, and specifically Equinix Cloud Exchange™.  Businesses are recognizing the power of direct access to improve cloud and application performance while maintaining enterprise-grade security and reliability. Recent Equinix customers taking advantage of private access to Azure include GE, HarperCollins, Hitachi Data Systems, and Red Lobster, among others.  Equinix CTO, Ihab Tarazi, will be discussing the company’s success with Microsoft today at 10:30 a.m., EDT, at Microsoft’sWPC Conference during a session titled, “Growing your Business with Azure.” 

Equinix is also working closely with service provider channel partners including Datapipe, Unitas Global and ScienceLogic to develop custom solutions that further help enterprises create hybrid clouds, maximizing the public cloud through Azure and ExpressRoute, paired with dedicated on-premise infrastructure and services inside Equinix. For example, a large, multi-national retail provider recently approached Unitas Global and Equinix looking to implement a public/private cloud solution to power their point of sale system. The solution combined a private global VPN network with private cloud infrastructure located in Equinix and Microsoft Azure computing resources. This enabled the retailer's custom software applications to run independently of any physical infrastructure, decreasing cost and increasing IT flexibility. In addition, the company had a very short timeframe to accomplish the project, and by using Azure cloud resources, time to deploy was cut to less than three weeks.