Equinix is taking a swing at the cost and complexity of multicloud networking with its Fabric Cloud Router – a new virtual routing service that connects data and applications residing in a variety of public or private cloud environments. This move comes as more enterprises find themselves operating in multicloud environments and experiencing negative impacts from vendor lock-in.

“Every enterprise is now a multicloud enterprise,” Equinix’s Arun Dev, who leads the vendor’s global interconnection services, told SDxCentral. And according to research from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), 94% of organizations are using multiple, unique public cloud providers.

As IT teams juggle the reality of these complex digital infrastructures, a common shortage of skills in IT architecture/planning and cloud architecture/planning similarly contribute to this major pain point: Complexity is preventing multicloud from paying off.

“The complexity of these environments has become a barrier standing in the way of enterprises maximizing the potential of their multicloud approach,” Dev said.

To that point, Equinix’s FCR service hits on a major networking challenge – deploying and managing cloud-to-cloud connectivity. FCR is built to allow enterprises to “join private, virtual connections with different cloud providers and/or data center endpoints into a single routing domain from any of our 58 locations worldwide,” he said.

This service is designed to be deployed in less than a minute, with low latency and enterprise-grade multicloud routing capabilities. The cloud-agnostic service also claims to eliminate the issue of vendor lock-in by removing the networking constraints associated with migrating between cloud providers or deploying applications that use services from a few different cloud providers.

“We are cloud and network neutral and have been for 25 years,” Dev said. “We have industry-leading access to cloud on-ramps and the largest selection of cloud providers and service providers. Equinix is solving these top business challenges – cost, complexity, security/control [and] scalability – and preparing our global infrastructure for a digital (with a big dose of [artificial intelligence]) future.”

The FCR service was built atop the colocation data center provider’s existing fabric switching infrastructure. This foundation provides enhanced reliability, performance and simplicity when compared to a routing service that runs on virtual machines, according to the vendor. “We think of it as removing the complexity from the connectivity to clouds,” Dev said.

The new offering also represents “a natural extension to our Equinix Fabric Portfolio” that provides layer 3 routing as-a-service by removing the need for enterprises to install and manage a physical router. This characteristic simplifies the process of setting up routing to and from a cloud provider and between multiple Equinix services or data centers.

As of its initial launch, FCR connects to four hyperscale cloud providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle – using Equinix’s Quick Connect technology from its Fabric Portal or the Fabric API. Enterprises can also create connections with FCR to Equinix’s more than 300 fabric service providers using the Fabric API, with Quick Connect support arriving soon.

Equinix plans to continue investing in multicloud networking technologies with the aim to “provide customers high speed and large bandwidth interconnection, easing the pain of connecting multiple clouds and private infrastructure and reducing the cost of deploying network infrastructure,” Dev said. “This increases our ability to grow enterprise relationships by making Equinix more integral than ever to the overall cloud strategy of our customers.”