Equinix Brings Direct Links to Amazon’s Cloud to Osaka Data Center

Equinix has given its data center customers in western Japan the option of plugging directly into Amazon’s infrastructure cloud inside its Osaka data center.

This is the second Equinix data center in Japan to offer AWS Direct Connect, fourth in Asia-Pacific, and ninth worldwide. The service is also available at an Equinix facility in Tokyo.

AWS Direct Connect and comparable services by Amazon competitors, such as Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, or Google Cloud Platform, cater to security and performance conscious enterprise IT shops that want to use public cloud services but don’t want to do it via the public internet. The services give them a direct, private cross-connect from their servers in a colocation data center to the servers of the cloud provider of their choice hosted in the same facility.

Equinix is one of close to 70 data center providers and telco carriers offering AWS Direct Connect services around the world. Carrier Level 3 offers the service in the most locations, including data centers in the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

For data center providers like Equinix, such services are a way to take advantage of all the user growth the public cloud giants are seeing, while protecting their colocation business from shrinking as a result of companies moving applications to the cloud. They also make those customer deployments in their data centers “stickier.”

Providing private links to public clouds has been the fastest-growing source of revenue for Equinix.

Other Equinix data centers in Asia-Pacific where AWS Direct Connect is available are in Sydney and Singapore. In the US, it offers the service in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Northern Virginia. It’s also available at Equinix data centers in London and Frankfurt.