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How to Use South Korea as Your Gateway to APAC Expansion
South Korea has much to offer enterprises looking to expand their operations in one of the world’s fastest growing and most rapidly digitalizing regions, the Asia Pacific (APAC).
In fact, APAC is on track to have the world’s highest volume of incremental data created and used by enterprises, reaching 461,000 exabytes by 2025, according to Digital Realty’s Data Gravity Index™ 2.0 report.
However, with that growth come significant challenges. These include data gravity — the phenomenon where increasing masses of data place cumulative demands on digital infrastructure, such as challenges with user experience optimization and data protection. Expanding in the region, therefore, demands a well-planned digital infrastructure strategy, as well as the right data center partner and locations to help support that strategy.
This article offers four tips for preparing a data-led APAC growth strategy, starting with why South Korea is an ideal data hub to help organizations boost growth.
1. Consider South Korea’s benefits
Designing a data architecture for expansion will depend on each enterprise’s growth plans — and APAC offers a rich variety of potential gateways for different business needs. South Korea, for example, offers:
- Asia’s fourth-largest economy and one of the world’s fastest growing developed economies
- Thriving high-tech and manufacturing industries, being home to the likes of Samsung and LG — two of the top 10 global electronics companies
- A highly connected population, with 97 percent having internet access
- The world’s fifth-largest ecommerce market and advanced broadband and mobile networks
- The highest adoption rate of public cloud in Asia and a government digital platform designed to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technologies
2. Re-examine your data architecture
Using South Korea as a data gateway can help organizations decentralize their data architecture and manage the placement of complex IT workloads — a vital strategy that leading global enterprises are adopting.
As our Data Gravity Index™ 2.0 report points out, 78 percent of enterprises plan to localize customer data for business and compliance purposes. These include adhering to regulatory requirements, controlling bandwidth costs, and minimizing performance issues so that local customers and employees receive the best digital experiences.
While accommodating location-specific needs is essential, so too is ensuring that your data architecture supports the organization’s global requirements. That likely means supporting complex hybrid infrastructure across multiple locations. Your architecture also needs to enable secure data exchange between multiple data sources and destinations, ranging from public cloud infrastructure and software-as-a-service providers to private cloud and legacy systems hosted in data centers.
In addition, your infrastructure may need to support data aggregation for advanced technologies such as AI, along with high-speed, distributed workflows to and from customers, partners and employees anywhere. It needs to be scalable and flexible to support growth plans, changing business conditions and, almost inevitably, data gravity .
To meet these challenges, your enterprise needs a global data network with fast, secure interconnections between workloads in the locations you need — ideally, managed seamlessly through a single interface.
3. Choose the right data center partner
As one of the world’s largest multi-tenant data center providers, Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions.
For enterprises and service providers seeking to expand their business presence, Digital Realty offers more than 300 data centers in 50-plus metros across six continents. That includes an extensive presence in APAC, with data centers in Hong Kong, Melbourne, Sydney, Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore and Chennai.
Importantly, we also offer the tools you may need to re-architect your data infrastructure. For example, our global data center platform, PlatformDIGITAL®, will ensure you get a consistently high level of service across and connectivity with hundreds of data centers around the world. Many of our locations feature ServiceFabric™ Connect, the industry’s largest open ‘fabric-of-fabrics’, which allows you to interconnect data workflows to and from just about any workload anywhere, using a single interface.
4. Ensure your local facility is highly connected
For enterprises that have identified South Korea as an ideal expansion gateway, Digital Realty’s ICN10 is a high-density, cooling-ready data center that supports 12 megawatts of IT load. It’s strategically located in Seoul’s high-tech precinct, Sangam Digital Media City, which houses some of South Korea’s biggest IT and media companies and is close to multinational enterprises located in Seoul’s financial and central business districts.
ICN10 is a carrier-neutral data center that offers high-speed access to all seven South Korean fiber-based operators, several international service providers, and 100-gigabit connectivity to local third-party data centers.
Our Seoul data center has an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect on-ramp, giving customers dedicated access to AWS services via a single cross-connect. It’s also ServiceFabric™ enabled, providing fast, secure connections to all major cloud providers, and easy-to-deploy connectivity to over 500 data centers globally.
With these advanced connectivity facilities, we can help your organization enter the thriving South Korean market and scale across the APAC region.
