What is IBM Cloud Direct Link?
Use IBM Cloud® Direct Link to seamlessly connect your on-premises resources to your cloud resources. The speed and reliability of IBM Cloud Direct Link lets you extend your organization’s data center network and offers consistent, higher-throughput connectivity — without touching the public internet.
Delivering interconnectivity
Private connectivity options
IBM Cloud Direct Link Dedicated makes it easier to establish a single-cloud fiber cross connection in an IBM Cloud network point of presence (PoP). If you can’t connect at an IBM PoP or don’t need quite so much bandwidth, you can use IBM Cloud Direct Link Connect or IBM Cloud Direct Link Exchange to connect to IBM Cloud through a supported service provider.
Connect to your IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
IBM Cloud Direct Link provides low latency, highly available connections so you can reliably transfer data between your on-premises and IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud networks. Your VPC network's IP addresses are then directly accessible from your on-premises network.
Access IBM Cloud services
IBM Cloud Direct Link offers direct connection to IBM Cloud Service — including services such as VPC, bare metal compute, VMware and cloud storage — making it easier to take advantage of the benefits of cloud while maximizing the value of your existing investments.
How customers use it
Extend and connect your on-premises resources
Use IBM Cloud Direct Link to connect and add resource capacity to your existing data centers.
Use IBM Cloud for storage, backup and disaster recovery
IBM Cloud Direct Link is ideal for data migration, replication for business continuity and disaster recovery, and to back up or store data from your data center to IBM Cloud.
Connect your IBM Cloud infrastructure to other clouds
Use IBM Cloud Direct Link connections from the IBM Cloud directly to a service provider-managed WAN or a client-managed cloud backbone to facilitate multicloud connectivity.
IBM Cloud Direct Link versions
IBM Cloud Direct Link Dedicated
Create a single-cloud fiber cross-connection with a dedicated service provider in an IBM Cloud network PoP.
IBM Cloud Direct Link Dedicated Hosting
Choose the lowest latency option for secure connectivity directly into the IBM Cloud POD where your compute workloads are running.
IBM Cloud Direct Link Connect
Get private access to your IBM Cloud infrastructure, plus other network service provider clouds. This is ideal for multicloud connectivity in a single environment.
IBM Cloud Direct Link Exchange
Gain private access to your IBM Cloud infrastructure, plus other exchange provider clouds. This is ideal for multicloud connectivity in a single environment.
Why IBM Cloud Direct Link
Consistent network performance
Traffic between your on-premises and IBM Cloud networks doesn’t touch the public internet. This means your traffic makes fewer network hops and has fewer points of failure where connections can be disrupted or dropped. IBM Cloud data centers and PoPs are connected by a private network backbone so traffic stays exclusively on the IBM Cloud network when it travels between facilities.
Scalable connection capacity
With options from 50 Mbps to 10 Gbps, IBM Cloud Direct Link delivers the right amount of bandwidth to your organization. You can easily provision multiple connections as additional capacity is needed.
Global reach
With IBM Cloud Direct Link global routing capabilities, you get connectivity to regions around the globe from a single IBM Cloud Direct Link connection. You can also take advantage of IBM Cloud Direct Link service provider partners to establish more secure interconnectivity for your workloads around the globe.
Pricing and documentation
Pricing
See pricing options for IBM Cloud Direct Link.
Documentation
Find out how to get started with IBM Cloud Direct Link.