In today’s digital world, the ability to move data quickly, securely, and reliably between networks, cloud providers, and business partners has become a competitive necessity.
Data center interconnections play an important role in this need for connectivity. This specialized infrastructure enables direct, private connections between different networks and systems without relying on the public internet.
In this article, we’ll revisit what data center interconnections are and their key benefits for modern businesses. We’ll also look at DataBank’s new Interconnection Marketplace to show how this platform helps customers research, compare, and connect with hundreds of network cloud providers in one place. This solution turns what was once a complex, time-consuming process into a streamlined experience.
Understanding Data Center Interconnections
As a quick refresher, data center interconnection refers to the process of establishing direct connections between networks, systems, or devices to enable seamless communication and data exchange. (For even more information, read our detailed blog article, Understanding Interconnections.)
Unlike traditional internet-based connections that route traffic through multiple intermediaries, interconnections create dedicated pathways that dramatically improve performance, security, and reliability. Deploying interconnection solutions for data centers is the infrastructure foundation of business-critical connectivity.
These connections take several forms, each serving specific business needs. These include:
- Cross-connects that provide direct physical links between different networks within the same data center facility, enabling instant data exchange without external routing.
- Cloud on-ramps that offer dedicated pathways to major cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, bypassing the unpredictable performance of public internet connections.
- Internet exchange points that allow multiple networks to interconnect and exchange traffic directly, reducing latency and improving overall network performance.
Each of these interconnection types offers clear benefits for businesses.
Why Direct Connections Matter: The Business Case for Interconnections
Speed is the first advantage most businesses experience. Latency drops dramatically when data doesn’t need to traverse multiple network hops across the public internet. This can reduce response times from hundreds of milliseconds to single digits.
Security is better with private, dedicated channels instead of shared public infrastructure. This approach eliminates many potential attack vectors and compliance concerns. Reliability also increases since businesses aren’t dependent on the varying performance and potential outages of multiple internet service providers.
Cost savings are often the biggest benefit. Organizations can reduce their reliance on expensive bandwidth purchases from multiple carriers. Direct interconnections can eliminate costly data egress fees from cloud providers, reduce the need for redundant internet connections, and lower overall networking expenses. For businesses running bandwidth-intensive applications like video streaming, large-scale data analytics, or real-time collaboration platforms, these cost reductions can make a real difference.
The benefits extend beyond technical improvements. The specific benefits of interconnection solutions translate directly into measurable business outcomes. Data center interconnections, enabled by robust interconnection solutions, are a direct driver of business agility. Faster applications mean happier customers and fewer complaints. Reduced outages translate to less lost revenue, higher employee satisfaction, and improved business value.
The Challenge of Interconnection Complexity
Despite these advantages, implementing interconnection strategies has traditionally been a complex, time-consuming process. Businesses faced the daunting task of researching hundreds of potential network providers, cloud services, and connectivity options without clear visibility into what was available at their chosen data center locations.
The process typically involved too many phone calls, emails, and negotiations with different carriers and service providers. IT teams struggled to compare options, understand pricing models, and determine which connections would best serve their specific requirements. This complexity was particularly challenging for businesses operating across many geographic markets, where interconnection options could vary dramatically between locations.
Traditional data center environments created their own additional barriers. Restrictive policies, complex cross-connect procedures, and little information about available providers made it even harder for businesses to implement the best connectivity strategies. Many organizations found themselves making poor decisions simply because they lacked detailed information about their options.
DataBank’s Interconnection Marketplace: Simplifying the Complex
Recognizing these challenges, DataBank recently launched our Interconnection Marketplace, a dynamic platform that changes how businesses make connectivity decisions. This self-service tool gives clear visibility into DataBank’s network, cloud, and SaaS providers across 67 data center locations.
The marketplace solves the information problem that has made interconnection planning so difficult. Instead of making dozens of phone calls and emails, customers can now see all available options in one place. The platform lets users filter by region, provider type, and data center location to find the right partners faster.
DataBank created the Interconnection Marketplace to simplify the process of researching and building connections that drive business success. Whether a customer’s business is trying to reduce complexity, scale operations, or improve latency and redundancy, this tool empowers users to navigate our ecosystem and create a customized interconnection plan that meets their specific needs.
The marketplace’s value extends beyond simple provider discovery. By offering visibility into more than 200 network, cloud, and SaaS providers, businesses can make better decisions about their connectivity. Companies can find backup connection options, identify the fastest paths to important resources, and improve their overall network setup.
A Better Way Forward
DataBank’s Interconnection Marketplace represents more than just a convenience. It’s an important tool for businesses that need better connectivity solutions. In an era where application performance, data security, and network reliability directly impact business outcomes, having clear visibility into connectivity options gives companies a real advantage.
The platform eliminates guesswork from interconnection planning, reduces time needed for new connections, and ensures businesses can make informed decisions based on complete information rather than limited research. For organizations supporting AI workloads, hybrid cloud setups, or demanding real-time applications, this level of connectivity information is increasingly important.
As businesses continue to evolve their infrastructure needs, tools like DataBank’s Interconnection Marketplace become more valuable. By combining comprehensive provider visibility with easy self-service capabilities, it transforms interconnection from a complex technical challenge into a manageable decision that can improve performance, enhance security, and reduce costs.
Frequently Asked Questions
By Kelley Edwards, Vice President of Data Center Operations and Danny Allen, Vice President of Critical Infrastructure, DataBank
In today’s hyperconnected business environment, data center downtime isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a competitive threat that can cost enterprises millions in lost revenue, damaged reputation, regulatory penalties, and other negative consequences. When critical applications go offline, the ripple effects extend far beyond IT departments to impact customer experience, operational efficiency, and bottom-line results.
There’s a huge difference between good and exceptional uptime. For example, four nines of uptime (99.99%) may sound impressive and results in only 52 minutes of downtime per year. However, that’s not good enough. Five nines (99.999%)—DataBank’s target metric— reduces that amount down to just five minutes annually.
For enterprise organizations running critical workloads, one extra nine can mean the difference between meeting SLAs or facing costly penalties, or between maintaining positive customer relationships or losing business to competitors.
In this article, we’ll explore the essential strategies and best practices that leading data center operators use to achieve exceptional uptime and prevent costly outages.
The Three Pillars of Data Center Uptime Excellence
The old saying, “hope is not a strategy,” rings true. Achieving maximum uptime isn’t about luck or wishing for the best results. It requires a systematic approach, an extremely proactive mindset from all employees, and a passion to help customers win.
At DataBank, our approach to uptime is built on three foundational elements. Each one is critical to eliminating single points of failure and helping create highly reliable, highly resilient infrastructure for our clients.
- Customer infrastructure decisions: The foundation of uptime begins with the choices customers make in setting up their IT assets. We believe the most effective data center design works in partnership with each customer’s infrastructure decisions. For example, we encourage them to use dual-corded power configurations that can provide automatic failover capabilities when issues arise as opposed to single-corded setups can lead to potential vulnerabilities.
- Engineering design: Smart infrastructure design goes beyond industry minimums to build in multiple layers of protection. For example, DataBank uses N+2 cooling systems that essentially provide backup to backup systems. This helps us make sure each data center is always at the right temperature, even if something goes wrong. This commitment helped DataBank’s Universal Data Hall Design win a Golden Globee Award in 2024 for our ability to accommodate high-density computing demands while enabling fast deployments without facility retrofits.
- Operational excellence and maintenance: The most sophisticated infrastructure means nothing without disciplined operational processes to maintain it. This includes rigorous maintenance procedures, comprehensive staff training, and a culture that treats complacency as the enemy of uptime. Consistent execution of proven processes, backed by continuous improvement and the application of lessons learned to all data centers, transforms good infrastructure into exceptional reliability.
These three pillars create the framework for exceptional uptime, but they’re really just the starting point. Leading data center operators build upon this foundation with additional best practices that turn theoretical reliability into actual results.
Operational Best Practices: From Reactive to Proactive Management
While solid infrastructure provides the backbone of uptime, operational excellence transforms that capability into measurable results. The most reliable data centers distinguish themselves through disciplined processes that anticipate problems, learn from every incident, and continuously improve performance across their entire portfolio.
Avoiding Complacency: The Roulette Wheel Mentality
Complacency in data center operations is like betting on red at a roulette wheel. The first time you do it, your odds seem reasonable. However, if you keep betting on consecutive reds, your chances of continued success get cut in half with each spin.
It’s an important mindset in data centers. The more times employees do something—even regular tasks—the more overconfident they become. While each individual procedure might have the same risk level every time, the reality is that repeated exposure to risk virtually guarantees eventual failure.
This is why data center operators need to maintain rigorous adherence to procedures regardless of how many times they’ve been successfully completed. It’s important to treat each task with the same level of caution and attention to detail as if it were the first time.
Comprehensive Training to Reduce Human Error
Human error remains one of the leading causes of data center outages, making comprehensive training programs essential for maintaining uptime. Effective training goes beyond basic procedures to include scenario-based learning and regular refresher sessions.
Consider a fictitious scenario where technicians were required to split their time across multiple facilities, making it difficult to stay current on equipment-specific procedures at each location. A simple misunderstanding about controls at an unfamiliar site could have led to an outage. This type of incident highlights the importance of increasing staffing levels so technicians can focus on fewer sites and ensuring every team member receives consistent, up-to-date training on all equipment they might encounter.
Rigorous Post-Mortem Review Processes
When incidents occur, thorough root-cause analyses (RCAs) and post-mortem review (PMR) processes turn any setbacks into learning opportunities. Effective post-mortem processes also include detailed timelines, technical analysis, and clear accountability for implementing corrective measures.
These sessions bring together subject matter experts from across the organization to conduct detailed root cause analysis and identify specific action items. It’s important to remember that the goal isn’t to point the finger but to understand exactly what happened and why. Instead, the goal is to create new institutional knowledge that prevents similar issues in the future.
Applying Lessons Learned Across All Facilities
One of the most important parts of operational excellence is ensuring that lessons learned at one facility immediately benefit all locations. When an outage occurs at any site, staff should conduct detailed audits across their entire portfolio to identify similar vulnerabilities. While unpredictable incidents may occur once, internal teams need to do all they can to proactively make sure it doesn’t happen again in any facility.
Effectively applying lessons learned and new best practices depends on the use of standardized implementation procedures and comprehensive communications plans that address all vulnerabilities and questions. It also demands a culture where sharing information about problems is encouraged rather than discouraged, creating an environment where every facility benefits from the collective experience of the entire organization.
Comprehensive Event Reporting and Historical Analysis
Maintaining detailed records of both critical events and advisories provides valuable insights for predicting and preventing future issues. Critical events impact customers directly, while advisories represent potential problems that were caught and resolved before causing service disruption. By tracking these events over months, even years, operators can identify patterns and trends that might not be obvious from individual incidents.
This historical analysis helps predict future maintenance needs, identify equipment that may be approaching end-of-life, and recognize environmental factors that could contribute to potential problems. Regular reporting on these metrics also demonstrates continuous improvement efforts and helps prioritize infrastructure investments based on actual performance data rather than assumptions.
Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Unified Focus on Customer Success
One of the most impactful best practices involves breaking down silos between departments to create seamless collaboration focused on customer uptime. When data center operations, critical infrastructure, engineering, construction, and vendor management teams all share the same goal — customer success — and the results extend far beyond what any single department could achieve independently.
Successful collaboration requires shared accountability for customer outcomes rather than department-specific metrics. When everyone understands that customer uptime is the ultimate measure of success, teams naturally align their priorities. Regular cross-departmental meetings, shared protocols, and unified dashboards maintain this customer-focused culture while accelerating problem-solving through diverse expertise.
Building Unshakeable Infrastructure Through Continuous Excellence
Maximizing data center uptime requires more than advanced technology and redundant systems. It demands a culture of continuous improvement where every incident becomes a learning opportunity, and every team member takes ownership of customer success.
Organizations that master this combination of robust infrastructure design, disciplined operational processes, and collaborative culture don’t just achieve exceptional uptime. They build the foundation for long-term competitive advantage in today’s digital world.
By Autumn Salama, Vice President of Cloud Operations
Enterprise IT teams face difficult choices when it comes to deciding where to house their infrastructure and what models are right for their business. Traditional decision-making playbooks don’t really work anymore as these companies now face unprecedented and constantly changing challenges.
Consider the Mounting Uncertainties Now Keeping IT Leaders Awake at Night
- AI/ML workload demands: Enterprise IT teams are struggling to predict future computational requirements as AI and ML workloads become business critical. Current infrastructure may not be able to handle the massive processing power and specialized hardware these applications demand. Also, planning capacity becomes nearly impossible you’re dealing with workloads that may not have existed in your last budget cycle.
- Hybrid/multi-cloud complexity: The initial promise of cloud flexibility has created a new challenge: the need to now manage increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments. IT teams often struggle to maintain systems performance, monitoring, security, and cost control across disparate platforms. On top of that, they need to make sure everything integrates effectively without getting locked into a single vendor.
- Supply chain disruptions: Global supply chain instability has turned hardware procurement from a routine process into a strategic gamble. Lead times that once measured in weeks now stretch to months, forcing IT teams to make infrastructure commitments without knowing when critical components will actually arrive. For example, NVIDIA allocated nearly 60% of its chip production to AI tech giants in Q1 2025. This makes it extremely difficult for enterprise organizations to get their hands on the specialized hardware they need for their AI infrastructure plans.
- Aging equipment and technology obsolescence: IT teams must also always grapple with infrastructure that may be aging faster than upgrade cycles. Equipment that seemed to be cutting-edge just a few years ago now struggles with modern workloads like AI processing or high-density virtualization. It is extremely challenging to replace functional systems that can’t handle emerging requirements while also justifying major expenditures when the next tech innovation could make their investment obsolete within months.
- Economic uncertainty driving cost optimization: Budget constraints are tighter than ever; yet business demands for digital capabilities continue to accelerate. IT leaders must reduce costs while maintaining service levels, all while preparing for economic scenarios that could shift priorities overnight. The ongoing tariff uncertainties highlight this challenge. IDC recently cut its IT spending from 10% to 5% in 2025 while HPE increased server prices by 8%, forcing enterprise organizations to reconsider infrastructure budgets just as AI demands are accelerating. The day-by-day changes to tariffs that impact critical server and storage components can have drastic impacts to infrastructure prices.
These pressures have created a perfect storm that traditional hosting approaches simply can’t handle. The critical question has shifted from “Where should we house our infrastructure?” to “How do we give ourselves the most flexibility to react to an unpredictable future?”
The answer lies in managed services in the right colocation environments.
The Strategic Solution: Managed Services in Colocation
To future-proof any infrastructure environment, organizations need maximum flexibility paired with deep technical expertise. It’s important to remember that infrastructure decisions are a journey, and the final destination always remains unknown. Organizations that thrive can pivot quickly when business needs change, new technologies emerge, or market conditions shift.
This is where managed services within the right colocation environments offer a compelling advantage. Unlike traditional colocation models that lock you into rigid frameworks or force you to choose between control and convenience, managed services in colocation facilities provides the flexibility of dedicated infrastructure combined with the expertise of specialized service teams. You maintain complete control over your hardware and architecture decisions where you need it while gaining access to comprehensive options and support that can adapt as your needs evolve and elasticity is the priority.
This need for flexibility extends far beyond simple scalability or basic redundancy. Today’s infrastructure partnerships must evolve with your business on multiple fronts at the same time. This might mean rapidly deploying GPU clusters for AI workloads one quarter, adapting to new regulatory compliance requirements the next, or completely pivoting application architectures in response to competitive pressures.
The critical differentiator isn’t just having the right infrastructure today. It’s about having infrastructure partners who can anticipate and respond to tomorrow’s challenges.
The question isn’t whether dramatic change will come to your industry. It’s whether your infrastructure foundation and support team will be ready to capitalize on opportunities when they arise, rather than scrambling to catch up after competitors have already moved ahead.
The Managed Services Solution: Comprehensive Support That Drives Results
Think of managed IT services in colocation environments as having an entire IT department that never sleeps, never takes vacation, and stays current on every emerging technology. Your infrastructure gets round-the-clock monitoring, proactive security management, disaster recovery as a service, cloud integration services, and strategic planning and project management — all without the headache of recruiting, training, and retaining specialized staff in today’s tough tech talent market.
The benefits extend far beyond basic operational support. Instead of your internal team spending nights troubleshooting network issues or weekends patching security vulnerabilities, they can focus on projects that actually move the business forward. This approach also provides cost predictability through service-level agreements and eliminates the capital expenditure burden of constant technology refreshes and upgrades.
Leading data center operators are now taking this a step further by offering unified platform solutions that allow customers to access their entire portfolio of managed services through a single, intuitive interface. This platform approach simplifies service management, provides centralized visibility across all infrastructure components, and enables rapid deployment of new services as business needs evolve.
Most importantly, managed IT services in colocation environments deliver the flexibility to adapt quickly as business requirements change, whether scaling for unexpected growth, integrating new technologies like AI workloads, or pivoting operations in response to market shifts.
Turning IT Bottlenecks into Competitive Advantages
Consider the fictitious case of a regional financial institution serving customers across three states. Like many mid-sized banks, this company faces intense pressure to compete with both large national banks and nimble fintech startups offering superior digital experiences. Their customers expect seamless mobile banking, personalized financial insights, and instant loan approvals that rival what they see from industry leaders.
However, the bank’s small IT team spends 70% of its time on infrastructure maintenance tasks: monitoring server performance, applying security patches, managing network connectivity, and troubleshooting hardware issues. When a storage array fails at 2:00 a.m. or network latency spikes during peak banking hours, the same engineers who should be developing innovative customer features are instead running diagnostics and coordinating with vendors.
The result is a backlog of strategic projects that could differentiate the bank in an increasingly competitive market. Initiatives such as advanced fraud detection algorithms and AI-powered customer service chatbots that constantly stay on the list of “next quarter’s initiatives.”
In this case, a managed services team within a colocation environment could immediately offload the routine infrastructure monitoring and maintenance tasks that consume the bank’s IT staff, freeing them to focus on customer-facing innovations and strategic projects.
Additionally, the colocation provider’s cybersecurity specialists could implement and monitor advanced threat detection systems, ensuring regulatory compliance while the bank’s internal team develops personalized banking applications. Other options exist, too: for example, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) would eliminate the complex planning and testing requirements that currently drain resources, while strategic consulting services could help prioritize and accelerate those backlogged AI and customer experience initiatives.
Why Managed IT Services in Colocation Is the Smart Infrastructure Choice
In an era where infrastructure decisions can make or break competitive advantage, managed services in colocation environments offer the strategic balance that modern enterprises need. Rather than choosing between the control of on-premises infrastructure and the convenience of cloud services, organizations can achieve both through partnerships that provide dedicated resources backed by expert management and flexible service delivery.
For enterprises facing mounting IT challenges and resource constraints, this approach transforms IT from a cost center focused on maintenance into a strategic enabler of innovation and growth. The question isn’t whether your business needs more flexible, expertly managed infrastructure. It’s whether you’re ready to unlock your team’s potential to drive the innovations that will define your competitive future.