As enterprise operations grow increasingly global, many organizations encounter barriers to a swift and successful expansion into the Asia-Pacific due to infrastructure gaps, long-distance latency, and compliance complexities. From sourcing vendors on foreign soil to providing users with consistently high levels of service, companies must divest valuable time and resources to gain a steady foothold to ensure timely market penetration and sustained user retention.
To alleviate these challenges, Zenlayer, the world’s first hyperconnected cloud and Equinix, the world’s leading digital infrastructure and interconnection company, have come together to offer joint connectivity solutions to help your business expand to Asia and other emerging markets as smoothly and effortlessly as possible.
Global expansion challenges: Asia and other emerging markets
According to recent studies, Asia’s GDP growth rate reached an estimated pace of 4.5% year-over-year in 2023 compared with 3.3% in 2022, significantly outpacing the world’s GDP growth rate, which contracted from 3.2% in 2022 to 2.7% in 2023.
As income rises across nations throughout the region, its vast population is creating a huge consumer market for agile businesses to tap into. But without a provider who can offer robust network and compute services along with regional expertise, expansion can be challenging due to obstacles such as:
- Limited user reach – Asia’s varied infrastructure complicates service delivery to remote users in hard-to-reach areas. Long server-to-user distances cause high latency, compromising user experience.
- Service quality instability – Businesses serving a broad user base often encounter challenges like operational hurdles, public network disruptions, and fluctuating demand that impede the delivery of consistently high-quality services.
- Costly network options – Asia’s fragmented peering limits cost-effective local network access, leading to costly piecemeal contracts from smaller vendors, most of whom can only provide limited or prepackaged options.
- Compliance complexities – Each nation has its own unique regulations that can be difficult to navigate without partnering with providers who are well-versed in local compliance landscapes.
- Disruptions to business continuity – Without strong regional partners, it can prove challenging to access top-performing networks to ensure seamless, secure connectivity to support a distributed workforce or meet performance standards.
- Increased time-to-market – Efforts to overcome the aforementioned barriers lead to delayed market penetration, costing businesses valuable opportunities and a competitive edge.
Zenlayer and Equinix can solve these problems to ensure a smooth expansion
Zenlayer and Equinix’s joint solution enables a scalable, high-performing global infrastructure that helps your business overcome the common challenges faced by companies expanding to Asia.
Leveraging our respective strengths, our joint Go-Asia Solution unlocks numerous key benefits that empower your business to:
- Achieve unparalleled reach, performance, and reliability in Asia
- Cost-effectively access a vast ecosystem of top regional service providers
- Significantly accelerate fully compliant market entry
Achieve unparalleled reach, performance, and reliability in Asia
Our extensive network in emerging markets combined with Equinix’s substantial metropolitan data center presence provides the largest coverage throughout the Asia-Pacific region to enable your business to deploy applications and services closer to end-users, regardless of location.
With nearly 200 points of presence (PoPs) covering 99% of the internet population in the Asia-Pacific, Zenlayer’s hyperconnected fabric optimizes and simplifies connections to challenging regions like Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and China. Our ultra-low latency, multilayer network supports high concurrency, overcoming performance limitations imposed by traditional single-layer networks to reach 85% of the world’s internet users in 25 milliseconds or less while cutting latency by 30-80% compared with public networks during peak hours.
Augmenting Zenlayer’s network fabric, Equinix Internet Exchange, or Equinix IX, is a platform offered by Equinix to enable the exchange of traffic between networks. Equinix IX lets network service providers, content providers, and enterprises connect their networks to exchange traffic directly without relying on public networks or any intermediaries. Equinix offers world-leading interconnection services in 251 data center facilities across 71 global metros, including Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) colocation data centers and Equinix xScale® hyperscale sites.
Leveraging Equinix and Zenlayer’s optimized network services across six continents makes it easy for your organization to establish an immediate presence anywhere by deploying and replicating digital infrastructure worldwide. Moreover, you can establish secondary sites on separate PoPs across our extensive global network to ensure “always on” continuity and rapid disaster recovery in the event of an outage or other events unforeseen.
Cost-effectively access a vast ecosystem of top regional service providers
Zenlayer and Equinix can propel your business into a massive ecosystem that helps you effortlessly access thousands of top clouds, network service providers, and SaaS partners to enable and complement your unique connectivity and deployment needs, whether you are planning a new setup for an upcoming expansion or upgrading those already deployed.
Leveraging our extensive network and partnerships with top service providers across Asia, we provide cost-effective solutions that bypass the need to juggle numerous costly local contracts, saving you time and money while minimizing compatibility concerns to ensure consistent service and reliability throughout the region’s diverse geography. Partnering with Zenlayer also unlocks managed hosting, custom colocation, and consultancy services offered through nearly 300 PoPs worldwide.
We jointly provide an ideal platform for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, offering a rich cloud ecosystem supported by Zenlayer’s global network fabric and Equinix’s IBX data centers, both of which are extensively interconnected with hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
The seamless integration between our two complementary platforms allows customers to reap the benefits of global ecosystem interconnection.
Significantly accelerate fully compliant market entry
Zenlayer and Equinix’s decades-long experience and in-depth understanding of local compliance and regulatory landscapes can help you smoothly navigate each country’s unique requirements. Our presence throughout the region lets you host critical data in countries where you provide service, ensuring compliance with increasingly stringent data localization initiatives.
Our specialty extends to cities throughout Southeast Asia and China, offering lightning-fast, private cross-border connectivity and direct interconnectivity between AWS US and AWS China, empowering you to accelerate applications and content alike to deliver smoother digital experiences to users in the region. Our rapid deployment services significantly expedite market entry by reducing provisioning times from months or years to weeks or even days, enabling you to capitalize on emerging opportunities before competitors.
Partnering with Zenlayer and Equinix unifies all your essential network services under one contract, simplifying everything down to a single point of contact for support to hasten resolution, boost productivity, and minimize time-to-market.
How do we do it? With Asia’s largest, most connected network fabric
Zenlayer’s global network has been helping enterprises simplify operations for over a decade throughout the major regions of the world – Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Asia-Pacific.
Equinix’s network is an integral part of the global cloud ecosystem, with AWS and Azure dedicating 40% of their respective access points to Equinix data centers, along with Google Cloud Platform’s 60%.
Working together, we help organizations land and expand globally using industry-standard IBX data centers, edge bare metal, and network edges. To improve regional interconnections, we also offer cross connects, metro connects, and access to Equinix Fabric.
Solving problems through collaboration – joint use cases in Asia
Improving manufacturing site-to-site interconnectivity
Leveraging our joint interconnection platform, we can improve the quality and performance of interconnections between manufacturing sites to enhance operational efficiency.
This manufacturing giant needed to interconnect their 13 warehouses, offices, and other sites distributed throughout eight locations in Asia to facilitate their outsized logistics operations.
We deployed Zenlayer Virtual Edge and Equinix Network Edge, leveraging IPsec tunnels, to solve for last-mile connectivity to our nearby nodes. The traffic is then routed to our carrier PoP, establishing direct connections to our backbone for accelerated site-to-site data transfers to support faster reporting and more informed decision-making.
Strengthening cross-border retail network resilience
To help this well-known retail enterprise enhance its cross-border connectivity and resilience after its previous VPN cross-border interconnection grew unstable from increasingly stringent Chinese regulations, Zenlayer and Equinix provided a tailored solution powered by our combined regional expertise and resources.
Zenlayer’s significant presence in key metropolitan areas throughout Chinameant that Zenlayer was already present in the same physical site as the customer, interconnected easily via Cross Connect or Metro Connect Services. In compliance with regional regulations that require the use of local operators for cross-border interconnections, we leveraged Ethernet Private Line services offered by one of China’s top three telecom providers for connections from Shanghai to Singapore and Tokyo. To optimize costs and retain existing infrastructure, Equinix Fabric was used to establish interconnections between Singapore and Frankfurt. This enabled the customer to retain their original design as intended, and leverage a joint solution to bring their core PoPs in Shanghai And Tokyo into their global network.
In addition to these solutions, we also helped the retail enterprise establish regional SD-WAN networks in China, Tokyo, and Frankfurt to strengthen connection performance to regional partners, users, and regional public cloud and SaaS providers.
Bridging international automotive locations
A leader in the automotive manufacturing space needed a reliable private network to interconnect their office locations in Singapore, China, and the United States for efficient daily operations. We deployed local loops and cross connects to connect the company’s corporate sites directly to our network, leveraging Equinix’s in-country data centers throughout the region.
Zenlayer’s hyperconnected cloud networking fabric now facilitates the automotive manufacturer’s site-to-site interconnections between Virginia to Shanghai, and Shanghai to Singapore while Equinix Fabric provides the interconnection between Singapore and Virginia.
All routes are engineered with primary and secondary backup paths to ensure the performance and availability of their operations and services across all three international locations.
Ready to fast-track your Asia expansion towards success?
Zenlayer’s extensive network combined with Equinix’s global data center presence gives you unmatched reach and optimal network performance in Asia. Together, we offer cost-effective access to a massive ecosystem of clouds, service providers, and SaaS partners, streamlining your operations to give your business agility and a competitive edge throughout the region. You can count on our expertise to help ensure regulatory compliance and quickly capture new markets with our rapid deployment services.
Simplify your expansion in Asia and accelerate your success with Zenlayer and Equinix by contacting one of our experts today.
