Language concerns, regulatory hurdles, data privacy compliance, communications infrastructure, and a host of other issues often plagued the best-intentioned expansion plans and company ambitions.
Operating across international borders today demands an agile and reliable communications network to connect customers, employees and business partners. In addition, the network must support collaborative enterprise applications such as voice and video to effectively conduct business from any location securely.
Here are the top 4 risks enterprises face when expanding into Asia Pacific:
1. Extending your global WAN coverage across non-homogenous territories
When expanding abroad, most firms opt for a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Working with a global service provider (GSP) in the hope it will provide greater simplicity, consistency and better volume discounts, many firms select a ‘branded’ service provider.
But without the local ecosystem support or knowledge of a regional service provider (RSP), scaling the WAN coverage will be a complex and costly exercise, which will surely impact the service quality negatively.
2. Performance/ scalability vs reality expectations
IT infrastructure quality and investments vary significantly across many regional territories, especially in emerging markets. Often the WAN architecture is expected to operate in sub-optimal conditions because of the vastly different levels of service provider readiness in these countries.
This is especially so in Asia where scalability and adaptability of the infrastructure is in short supply. Companies expecting their GSPs to pick up the slack from inconsistent infrastructure quality in regional markets will be sorely disappointed when they realise how challenging it is to scale, manage and maintain service qualities to acceptable standards.
3. Operational reliability and business continuity
Asia has had its fair share of climate and natural disasters with increasing frequency in recent years. Earthquakes in particular have contributed to significant outages in connectivity when critical submarine cable connections were badly damaged.
For enterprises dependent on real-time connectivity and stringent legal and security requirements, the breakdown in network connectivity can be disastrous. It is important to ensure the service provider has multiple redundancies and diverse links to deliver adequate failover capacity when such events occur.
4. Strong cost containment
Businesses have to balance the trade-off between the total cost of ownership in extending the global WAN coverage against stricter controls over capital and operating expenditures.
GSPs who are cost constrained from investing in local markets will find it difficult to meeting agreed, client service level standards when scaling local network infrastructure to meet performance KPIs. The on-going operation, maintenance and management cost will translate into a lack of governance in regional operations in Asia, negating any ‘value-for-money’ contracts a GSP might offer.
Get going with a RSP
Managing a multitude of local service providers or using a GSP to build out and extend global WAN coverage can expose an enterprise to many inherent and real risks when conducting business operations in Asia.
The alternative is a blended approach of working with a strong regional service provider (RSP) who has deep links across Asian markets. An RSP offers an ideal combination of high service quality, low business risk, and reduced management burden because they have invested heavily in building the local infrastructure and have an established service ecosystem that can deliver on service level agreements. More importantly, they can scale connectivity more rapidly than GSPs because of the larger infrastructure investments made in-country and across their operating regions.
This approach is a more manageable option as it establishes a single point of capable of delivering all regional requirements.
As Asia’s leading connectivity provider and secure network services and solutions, Singtel is a one-stop ICT managed services provider with the largest IP VPN Network with deep integration across 4 domestic networks in China, India, Australia and Singapore.
We offer our customers with a single point of contact with a single service level agreement, single helpdesk, and a single portal to manage their network requirement with faster fault resolution capabilities, and create the best mix for companies expanding into Asia by simplifying and unifying all communications with advanced network solutions and extensive expertise.
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Singtel is the Market Leader in the 2018 IDC MarketScape: Asia/Pacific Next-Generation Telcos: Telecom Services 2018 Vendor Assessment
Frost & Sullivan ICT Awards - Asia-Pacific Telecom Group 2018 . The award recognises Singtel’s performance and market leadership in Asia Pacific
