Businesses across all verticals are now looking to expand into Asia’s emerging markets, which offer billions of potential customers and massive growth potential.
Asia’s emerging markets pose unique challenges that can make it difficult to provide high-quality digital experiences for end users — like geographical barriers, local regulations, and limited cloud infrastructure. But thanks to edge computing, Asia’s emerging markets are now within reach for organizations of all sizes.
In this article, we will discuss why edge computing is booming in Asia’s emerging markets— and how shifting away from centralized cloud environments and embracing edge computing can help your business grow and maximize profits in Asia.
Growing Network Connectivity Trends in Asia’s emerging markets
Before we dive into edge computing, let’s take a closer look at Asia’s emerging markets and what makes this region so important for digital connectivity and internet network expansion.
To clarify, an emerging market is an economy that is going through rapid growth and development and transitioning into a modern industrial state. Emerging markets are attractive for businesses because they offer high potential returns and rising digital populations.
Asia’s top emerging markets currently include China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia (1). Countries like Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia are also attracting a significant amount of attention. These economies are going through strong consumer class expansion, rapid technological adoption, and digital transformation.
– India will have 1 billion smartphone users by 2026 (2)
– In the Philippines, the internet economy is on pace to grow by 30% annually through 2025. (3)
– Google predicts Vietnam will be one of the fastest-growing internet economies in the next 10 years. (4)
But as more people throughout Asia’s emerging markets simultaneously connect and access digital services, the traffic spikes are straining local networks. Public internet congestion is a now a top concern for companies doing business in emerging Asia as it leads to issues like latency and jitter, which jeopardizes user experiences. Since customers are increasingly expecting to access fast and reliable digital services anywhere anytime, companies that fail to ensure this will take a hit on their bottom line.
Even worse, foreign services with applications hosted in data centers outside of Asia will find it very challenging to compete with local players due to the latency caused by the long-distance data overhaul.
Hence, having a distributed, private network with intelligence built in is critical for success. You will need to deploy elastic infrastructure that provides low latency, advanced traffic engineering, and high capacity to truly gain a competitive advantage in these high-growth regions.
Why is Edge Computing Critical for Emerging Market Business Growth?
Businesses can use edge computing to avoid infrastructure bottlenecks and more efficiently process social media, IoT, streaming video, and gaming workflows. At the same time, edge computing is enabling efficient and cost-effective public services and smart cities throughout the region. Demand for edge computing is rapidly growing in Asia — especially in APAC, where the market will reach $17.8 billion by 2025. (5)
To visualize edge computing, think of how a basketball team functions on the court. Players think for themselves, and make split-second decisions about where to run, who to pass to, and when to shoot. As a result, the game runs smoothly without having to call time out every play and ask the coach what to do.
Similarly, edge computing involves decentralizing computing functions from data centers and pushing them closer to data sources. For example, a company might have local edge PoPs in places like Manila, Jakarta, and Bangkok. By deploying local edge PoPs, companies can avoid routing most of their data over long distances through the public cloud. This reduces latency and allows companies to process data faster and more efficiently at the edge of the network.
As we point out in a recent blog, edge computing will not replace the public cloud. Rather, edge computing complements the cloud by reducing data bottlenecks.
Businesses across multiple industries can use edge computing to improve their digital presence in Asia’s emerging markets. Edge computing can support a variety of use cases like streaming media and entertainment, cross-border e-commerce, enterprise SaaS, IoT/ blockchain, and more.
Edge computing can lead to the following benefits:
– Stronger digital experiences
– Enhanced data security
– Rapid global scalability
– Cost savings
– Lower bandwidth consumption
Zenlayer is the leading edge cloud provider in emerging markets. We can help you expand into Asia with speed and agility, so you can focus on business growth instead of network builds. Some of our most popular services in emerging Asia include Bare Metal Cloud (BMC), Cloud Networking, and the new PaaS-based Zenlayer Global Accelerator (ZGA).
Resources
(1) https://www.euromonitor.com/article/emerging-asia-to-lead-global-economic-and-consumption-growth
(5) https://www.globaldata.com/edge-computing-will-17-8bn-business-2025-says-globaldata/
