Expanding Business Into Asia: Why It's Important, and How to Be Strategic

Culture and language: An important component of ICT that is often ignored is the understanding of local markets at a granular level. For example, many businesses consider Asia as a single market entity. The reality is that within Asia there are many different markets with vastly different ways of doing business. To excel in these markets businesses need to have technical expertise within each region.

One important feature to consider is choosing an IT partner that is a member of the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), an organization focused on creating awareness and understanding of the cloud market and associated capabilities in countries across Asia. This membership is ideal because ACCA also engages with governments and regulatory bodies across the region to share insights and encourage greater consistency and transparency on policies and capabilities in each country.

Increased flexibility: Due to today’s fast-moving, changing business landscape, organizations need to be flexible enough to tackle any unexpected changes in the market or meet fluctuations in business demands, especially when operating in a new region. This approach doesn’t just apply to processes, but must be reflected in the agility of a company’s IT infrastructure, which is an enabler for any organization.

Greater collaboration and support: As businesses expand into Asia and surrounding regions, the need for collaboration between offices across the globe is crucial to maintain productivity. Using a cloud-computing infrastructure enables employees from different parts of the world to sync up and work together in real time.

When operating across the world, CIOs are likely to encounter operational inconsistencies, with simultaneous projects and initiatives causing IT organizations to lose focus on key initiatives and resources to be wasted. The cloud helps to make the complex simple by acting as a global, consistent platform upon which applications can be built and delivered according to the same, or similar, specifications worldwide.

Through a consistent approach to technology, service and application performance, customers can seamlessly deploy applications and deliver business processes backed up by leading service-level agreements (SLAs) across multiple geographic locations.

Greater visibility and control over servers, storage and network consumption can also help IT departments to reduce the total cost of ownership and adopt a “right-sized” approach to infrastructure providing greater control and the ability to provision IT resources exactly to business demand.

Using the cloud, customers can quickly seize new business opportunities at home and abroad and get projects up and running faster without waiting for IT to be deployed. For instance, customers also benefit from intuitive cloud management that allows them to quickly add or remove capacity to meet their changing business needs.

Although each market presents unique opportunities and challenges, businesses should rest assured they are not alone in trying to interpret and understand these challenges with regard to localization, security, accessibility, and regulatory concerns.

Asia presents significant opportunities for US businesses, and success can’t be achieved by just taking a long-term approach to market entry. But by being flexible and adaptable and leaning on the wisdom of trusted partners, they will ensure that their approaches are well informed.

In order to make sure expansion into Asia is a success, companies should look for advice and expertise from technology partners that have the experience in the market and knowledge to guide them. By taking these actions, organizations can be sure their infrastructure will be ready for the business opportunities the Asian market presents.