Financial service companies, as well as companies across all industry verticals, need to re-evaluate and redesign their enterprise IT infrastructure over the next two years or risk being left behind, according to a recent survey published by global data center operator Equinix.

“We are about to go through a change that we have not seen since the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the industry was concerned about integrating various applications and data sources,” said Tony Bishop, vice president, global vertical strategy & marketing at Equinix. “Instead of continuing to build peer-to-peer topologies, enterprises will need to locate traffic in regional zones, where they bring their users, applications, data and any cloud-based, cloud-connected or Internet connected external services.”

Bishop equates the new enterprise IT topology as the marriage of the Web’s hyper-scale and Wall Street’s high-performance computing that shifts a significant amount of computing capacity and services away from an enterprise’s network center to the network’s edge.

“Instead of just building for scale and flexibility, companies will need to design their IT infrastructure with many-to-many interconnections that support internal and external services,” he explained.

The industry migration to the interconnected topology is “in about the third inning,” according to Bishop. “You will probably see it ramp up in the next two years as digital disruption continues to force it.”

Authors of the Equinix white paper, Unleashing the Interconnected Enterprise, estimate that 84% of all enterprises will adopt the new topology by 2017, up from the current estimate of 38% of enterprises that have it deployed today.

Of the 1,000 IT decision makers surveyed by Equinix, 58% of the majority respondents, 58%, stated that they adopted the new enterprise IT topology to improve revenue opportunities while 42% of the respondents cited cost savings as the primary driver for adoption.

The authors cite a Fortune 500 financial services firm, which adopted the interconnected topology to deliver its applications to end users quickly and securely, lowered its Internet-access costs up to 45% and saved up to 30% in its multi protocol label switching (MPLS) costs.

Such savings are not uncommon, according to survey results, which stated that 37% of firms that had adopted the topology created more than $10 million in additional value by doing so.

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