Transforming Global Connectivity: The SCiON Revolution at Digital Realty

From a chance meeting at SCION Days to driving a global networking revolution, this is the first step of the journey of Digital Realty's embrace of SCiON, transforming internet protocols and pioneering secure, interconnected networks across industries.

A Transformative Encounter at SCiON Days 2023

Just two weeks ago, at SCION Days 2023 in Zurich, Arne Benox of Digital Realty Switzerland tapped me on the shoulder. I had just stepped down from the lectern where I was expounding on the business value of SCION, and the stage was being set for the next group panel. I could hear the excitement in Arne’s voice; he told me he wanted to move forward with SCION enabling the Digital Realty data centers. And here I am, two weeks exactly from that date, on my way back to Zurich.  I have the networking equipment for the first Digital Realty SCION node tucked away in the belly of this Boeing.

How SCiON is Revolutionizing the Internet with Cutting-Edge Solutions

While many of you may be aware of the capabilities and benefits of Digital Realty's Service Fabric, the scope and features of SCION are probably new. In its simplest form, SCION provides the similar private network isolation of Digital Realty's Service Fabric, but across a global next generation public internet. SCION, an open source, next generation routing protocol, addresses the security, compliance, and resilience issues of today's existing public internet. With Digital Realty offering SCION global connectivity through its Service Fabric, the global footprint of Digital Realty data centers can now access this new global network powered by SCION.

Companies are moving off the Internet and onto private networks in order to resolve their security, compliance, performance, and resiliency issues. Our current internet has connected us globally.  Unfortunately, this move toward private networks moves us away from the future of a globally interconnected society and toward a set of disjointed, independent and isolated networks. Often, companies install  links to multiple private networks to reach their business partners - a feat of technical complexity and at great expense.

The internet's legacy networking protocols are over 30 years old and have been showing their age.  SCION replaces them with new protocols that utilize modern encryption and network algorithms. The resulting SCION-based internet allows for such novel features as instantaneous network failover on a global basis, concurrent usage of multiple independent network paths (for reliability and performance), logical segmentation of traffic (through strong encryption) thwarting DDoS attacks, and global control of transmission paths (useful for data sovereignty and compliance).

The Swift Integration of SCION in Various Industry Sectors

The adoption of SCION has been strong and swift. Financial networks, such as the Swiss Secure Financial Network (SSFN), have moved critical banking services off their legacy private network and onto SCION, thereby connecting its member banks. Mysten, a leading blockchain technology provider, has stated their intent to move onto SCION, investing $2M to back the protocol. And several other installations in the healthcare and energy sector are in production. The adoption is real.

If you're already at a Digital Realty data center, I encourage you to talk to your contact to learn more about how you could benefit from SCION. And if you aren't at a Digital Realty data center, well, how about you send them an invite to SCION Days 2024? I'll be in row 2.