OREANDA-NEWS. December 24, 2015. Mark Anderson is the director of the EMEA Global Solutions Architects. He has spent most of his 23-year career as an IT architecture consultant, focusing on both applications and infrastructure solutions with full-service outsourcing companies. Prior to joining Equinix, Mark worked for CSC, EDS, Fujitsu, Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP) Enterprise Services. He achieved Master Level Architect accreditation at HP, where he designed high-impact, large-scale business IT programs for global banks, which included aspects of governance, process, technology and organizational change. His experience has given Mark a rich view of the needs of enterprise customers, enabling him to help Equinix customers and prospects unlock the value of Equinix in developing their IT architectures.

Mark recently moved back to the U.K. with his wife, Michelle, and three children, Liam (12), Euan (10) and Neve (4), after almost 17 years working abroad in The Netherlands. He is looking forward to re-engaging with the natural beauty of Scotland. He and his family love going to the beach, eating out and frequenting the cinema. He also has a passion for building and flying remote control aircraft.

What are the top challenges that you and your team are helping your customers solve today?

Mark: Our enterprise customers, especially their IT departments, face enormous challenges in maintaining their “digital relevancy.” Social, mobile, big data, Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud all disrupt their service models and render many of their long-established IT system architectures inflexible and outmoded. This very large legacy infrastructure is hurting their capability to adapt and succeed in digital business.

Please tell us about a specific customer that demonstrates innovation and a great use of Equinix services and solutions?

Mark: There are so many Equinix customers using Equinix to power their innovation. Many of our service provider customers depend on Equinix to remain agile and service their diverse customer needs, utilizing the wealth of choices available on our global platform, as well as our dense ecosystems of network and cloud providers.

As for enterprise customers, one tremendous example of innovation and forward thinking comes in the form of General Electric (GE), where they are transforming themselves into a digital business. GE has brought all their software developers together under one framework for development called Predix, using this one platform for all their IoT-related Industrial Internet work. They are also enabling other companies to use the Predix cloud platform as well – truly demonstrating their innovation and forward-looking digital business thinking.

What are some of the new interconnection requirements that are developing within your customer base?

Mark: More and more customers are looking to interconnect to integrated security services, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS), managed firewall and IPsec. It’s not hard to see why, given the results of PWC’s 2014 “Information Security Breaches Survey.” Even though both large and small organizations experienced decreases in security breaches in 2014 compared to 2013, almost three-fifths of the respondents are expecting to see more security incidents in the future. The average IT spend on security is 10%, the same as 2013. For those companies that plan to spend 25% of their budgets on security, 15% are small businesses, while 10% are large organizations.

Equinix’s “Enterprise of the Future Survey” showed that 64% of the respondents felt that cyber-security was the biggest disruptive trend that could cause them to re-architect their IT infrastructures over the next 12 months. Therefore, some of our service provider customers are looking to us for help in offering FiSMA, HIPAA, FIPS and other government regulatory compliant services to their customers.