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With the growth of network-based applications, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and big data, the demand for secure, reliable, high bandwidth cloud and network connectivity is booming around the world. Canada is not only following this trend, it has emerged as a forerunner in cloud adoption.
As Canadian businesses move towards hybridization, they need to easily move data that spans their cloud, colo and on prem environments. Cologix helps Canadian business move their data in and out of clouds, to partners, suppliers, and clients. To support this data movement, Canadian enterprises are now requiring industrial-scale bandwidth to support their cloud and network connectivity as well as connectivity to a larger ecosystem. And physical proximity to the public cloud platforms is fast becoming a strategic advantage.
Cologix builds and operates one of the most critical parts of Canada’s digital infrastructure that supports this growth in demand, namely the gateways and hubs that link the thousands of different carriers that transport the traffic and that connect homes, businesses, devices and people with the applications that fuel our lives. These interconnection hubs – in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal – have grown dramatically as the Canadian economy has grown and as more of our lives transition to the digital economy.
In the past three years, public cloud adoption in Canada has accelerated exponentially, with more businesses running nearly all of their new applications in the cloud and an increasing percentage of their existing applications also moving to cloud infrastructure. As this shift occurs the bandwidth needed to connect to these applications increases and this has triggered increases not only in the size and volume of the fiber optic cables that are built-in and out of our facilities, but also in the matrix of interconnections. Traditionally an enterprise would connect to 2 or 3 carriers to provide their wide area network (WAN) connectivity and access to the public internet. In today’s world, the average enterprise needs connectivity to over 20 SaaS applications, 5 public cloud platforms and sometimes thousands or millions of clients. Today our average client interconnects with over 13 other clients directly and thousands indirectly as they connect to their clients or suppliers through the major mobile network or fixed network operators.
But it’s the enterprise’s connections to the public cloud platforms that we have seen dominate the landscape and that is set to represent well over 50% of all enterprise bandwidth needs in the near future. Today Cologix hosts over three-quarters of all of the public cloud onramps available in Canada, with onramps to Amazon Web Services® Direct Connect, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft® Azure ExpressRoute, IBM Cloud Direct Link, and Oracle FastConnect. These gateways are located in Cologix data centers across Canada. Colocating with onramps allows clients to vastly reduce the cost and increase the performance of their cloud connectivity. The onramps have rapidly become the center of gravity for the internet. In the same way that the railroad provided an economic stimulus to a local city, so cloud onramps have become a forerunner of GDP growth for any given market. And by that measure, Canada is booming.
Not only are we seeing growth from the bandwidth that surges in and out of the public cloud platforms every second of every day – but we are seeing hundreds of new network providers investing into the Canadian market, looking to carry this traffic both domestically and internationally. A slew of new subsea cables is also reducing Canada’s dependency on the USA’s digital infrastructure as state-of-the-art and discrete connectivity is being established. This is evidenced by transpacific and transatlantic cables being deployed – often by the global cloud players themselves- and terminating in the same Cologix data centers as the onramps, providing sovereign connectivity to Canada and to the rest of the world.
As part of our commitment to investing in the future and enabling digital transformation, Cologix has invested over CAD $500M in Canada over the past three years, including our most recent acquisition in Vancouver, VAN4. VAN4 is located at 175 West Cordova in the Gastown District of Vancouver, in the heart of downtown. VAN4 expands Cologix services in Canada, creating an Asia-Pacific gateway hosting several international and trans Canadian long-haul networks as well as all major Canadian telecommunications providers.
