Driven by surging DDoS attacks and AI-scale data demands, 61% of enterprises are adopting private interconnection to bypass public networks, enhance control, and secure critical workloads.
As cyber threats grow increasingly sophisticated and artificial intelligence unleashes unprecedented volumes of data across global networks, enterprises are fundamentally rethinking how business-critical traffic moves. A new study commissioned by DE-CIX, the world’s largest Internet, Cloud, and AI Exchange operator, and conducted by Censuswide, reveals that security vulnerabilities and DDoS attacks now rank right alongside latency as top enterprise cloud connectivity concerns.
The findings highlight a major architectural shift: rather than relying exclusively on public internet infrastructure, 61% of organizations already utilize private, direct cloud connectivity, with an additional 31% actively considering implementation.
According to the research, 27% of IT and infrastructure decision-makers across the US and UK expect security vulnerabilities and DDoS attacks to be among their biggest cloud connectivity challenges over the next 12 months. This anxiety is well-founded against a backdrop of record-breaking cyber activity—such as Cloudflare blocking 47.1 million DDoS attacks in 2025, which included a staggering 31.4 terabits-per-second hyper-volumetric attack.
Security concerns now sit shoulder-to-shoulder with traditional performance metrics, such as latency or slow performance (28%) and downtime or reliability issues (26%). Furthermore, 23% of respondents cited data sovereignty and geopolitical issues as leading connectivity hurdles.
“The public Internet was never designed to carry every mission-critical enterprise workload,” said Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX. “Every additional hop across a public network ultimately creates another point where traffic can be delayed, intercepted, or disrupted. Interest in private interconnection has been growing steadily as businesses prepare for the low-latency, high-performance demands of real-time AI, but this research tells us that security is also very much front of mind.”
While the survey found that 96% of IT leaders feel confident their networks are ready for future cloud and AI initiatives, an operational paradox remains: organizations still waste an average of 11.5 staff hours every week resolving routine cloud connectivity issues.
“Confidence is important, but confidence isn’t the same as operational readiness,” Ivanov noted. “If IT teams are still spending more than a full working day every week resolving connectivity issues, that’s time they can’t spend improving security, modernizing infrastructure, or helping the business deploy AI.”
By shifting workloads to direct, private interconnection architectures over controlled infrastructure, enterprises can eliminate unnecessary internet hops, streamline predictable routing, and drastically reduce their externally exposed attack surface.
Brandon Ross, Senior Interconnection Consultant for the Americas at DE-CIX, added: “Cybersecurity has to be about more than simply building stronger defenses around every connection. Organizations know this, which is why they’re questioning whether traffic should have been travelling across the public Internet in the first place.”
