Equinix Offers Office 365 Connectivity With Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute

Equinix says new partner opportunities will come about now that its data centers around the world offer Office 365 connectivity through Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute.

Enterprises can get direct connectivity to Office 365 that provides a combination of “more predictable network performance, flexibility and improved reliability, as well as enhanced data privacy since ExpressRoute enables most Office 365 network traffic to avoid the public Internet,” said Bill Long, Equinix’s vice president of interconnection services, in his latest blog.

Sean Iraca, Equinix’s senior director of cloud innovation, tells Channel Partners that proximity to Microsoft data centers will enable many offerings which would not function at “enterprise grade” over the public Internet.

“There are thousands of established Office 365 deployment partners,” he said. “These same partners will want to be able to expand their practices with offering hybrid solutions with ExpressRoute. This opens up many partnership opportunities with Equinix.”

Enterprises that use ExpressRoute in an Equinix data center also can implement hybrid and multi-cloud strategies that don’t scale well over the Internet or typical WAN networks, Long said. ExpressRoute for Office 365 is now available through the Cloud Exchange in 16 Equinix locations globally.

“Solutions such as SharePoint with a unified search database hosted by Equinix, disaster recovery of SharePoint online sites [and] Active Directory synchronization and backup are a few examples of opportunities (for partners),” Iraca said.

Equinix also is involved in the early phases of Microsoft’s launch of Azure Government over ExpressRoute. This offering enables U.S. local, state, and federal agencies to use private networking as a way to enhance the security and performance of their network connectivity to Azure Government.

“With Azure ExpressRoute available for the Azure Government cloud, the opportunities around hybrid cloud solutions that have been available to the non-government enterprises are now available to government agencies,” Iraca said. “This, of course, means that partners that deal with these government agencies can develop the same hybrid cloud solutions that are enabled in the regular Azure environment. Those partners that specialize in government work will benefit.”

The continued growth of Azure and Office 365, coupled with the availability of private connectivity to these cloud services through the Cloud Exchange, will continue to enable new use cases that drive the proliferation of hybrid cloud deployments, he said.