Equinix REIT : How Europe and the Middle East Are Gearing Up to Lead in the “Digital Decade”

There's no doubt that digital transformation is accelerating in EMEA. In a recent survey of 600+ European IT leaders, nearly two-thirds (66%) said they are running over half of their enterprise business applications in the cloud, and 87% said they are operating in a multicloud environment using two or more clouds.[i] We are seeing similar trends in the Middle East as I discussed in my previous article, 'Accelerating Digital Transformation via Hybrid Multicloud in the Middle East,' where rapid cloud adoption is speeding up digital transformation across the region. And, like the rest of the world, EMEA is fast-tracking digital progress in response to COVID-19. Consider these indicators from 2020:[ii]

• In the U.K., the e-commerce share of total retail jumped from 20% to 30% in just two months, while online grocery purchases nearly doubled from May to June.
• In France, there were almost half a million online telemedicine consultations in just one week, a 12.5x increase over the 40 thousand the month before.
• In March, following a surge in video streaming, Netflix agreed to reduce the bitrate for its streams across the European Union (EU) to lessen demand on networks.

Many EMEA organizations still in the early stages of digital transformation were not prepared to address rapid changes like these, or the large-scale shift to remote work brought on by the global pandemic. To adapt, these organizations turned to service providers to help them build more agile digital infrastructures at the edge. As a result, digital service providers are expected to make up over half of Europe's interconnection by 2023 according to the Global Interconnection Index (GXI) Volume 4, published by Equinix. Specifically, Telecommunications and Cloud & IT Services combined are projected to comprise 54%, or 2,052 Terabits per second (Tbps) of Europe's total installed interconnection bandwidth (3,782 Tbps) by 2023.