As the promise of COVID-19 vaccines raises expectations that the challenges of 2020 will abate in 2021, many companies are shifting their focus to growth strategies. According to Wells Fargo, “87% of U.S. companies agree that international expansion is needed for long-term growth, with emerging markets providing the greatest opportunities at 69%.” The appetite for international expansion extends to medium and small enterprises, which traditionally lack the scale to deploy IT assets globally.
These U.S. firms are likely asking themselves several questions as they build their strategies to digitally support global markets.
Choosing a partner with an established gateway into foreign markets is critical. Partnerships with global cloud providers and global IT implementation partners help U.S. enterprises navigate, with modest capital expenditures and personnel additions, the IT and data challenges regarding security, regulations/compliance and distributed global infrastructure management.
The simplest and generally most cost-effective way to enter a global market is by leveraging the IT resources that the public cloud providers have in place. In most cases, they have already addressed the legal and geo-political challenges that arise with global expansion. They also have negotiated and worked with governments to address concerns regarding data transmission across international borders. As a result, data going across the cloud provider’s network is found to be compliant from a data-transmission perspective. Using the public cloud through an open cloud eXchange (OCX) enables an enterprise to accomplish in days or weeks – with minimal investment – what otherwise might take months and millions of dollars of capital. This strategy also enables you to retain the flexibility required to rapidly change configurations or cloud providers in the future.
When an enterprise needs to ensure higher predictability in performance while maintaining control of the allocation of resources, the cloud providers offer bare-metal cloud solutions. Bare-metal cloud is a dedicated, physical server infrastructure deployed with cloud-like ease and speed – offering flexible commercial options. Since the bare-metal architecture is located within each respective country, enterprises can also meet data sovereignty requirements, such as the European Union-U.S. Safe Harbor Framework and the E.U.-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework.
Connecting to public cloud services should be easy, but that depends on the partner you choose. For example, CoreSite provides the CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange®. This innovative marketplace allows enterprise customers to establish direct, low-latency interconnection between their critical domestic applications and WAN/SD-WAN services to cloud providers and bare-metal cloud offerings. By deploying IT resources at CoreSite, customers can leverage the Open Cloud Exchange to access international cloud IT resources. This enables enterprises to find a solution that supports its digital business now – and future global business aspirations. This platform also eliminates costly IT and foreign capital infrastructure expenses.
Another vehicle for entering a foreign market is to engage with a global solutions partner. When a company needs dedicated physical deployments in another country for data sovereignty and their own security requirements, connection to a robust partner ecosystem provides access to private bare-metal assets throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia. These partners can also assist an enterprise with deploying and managing their own infrastructure, so the enterprise only needs one partner to handle both their domestic and global infrastructure needs.
As with the cloud provider solutions, the CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange and other interconnection options can be the enterprise’s best access point to the solution partner’s bare-metal resources. As a result, the enterprise can now focus on managing the distributed data instead of distributed global infrastructure and contracts with multiple entities.
Expanding into new markets – let alone new countries – can be challenging. Contact CoreSite to learn how our team of experts, and the CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange, can help you achieve your global access or expansion goals.