Modern enterprises and service providers seeking to expand in the Asia Pacific (APAC) have much consider – not least an ever-expanding digital footprint.

The region offers some of world's fastest-growing and most rapidly digitalizing markets, but with that growth comes significant challenges. These include Data Gravity - the phenomenon where increasing volumes of data attracts even more data through new applications and services.

APAC’s Data Gravity Intensity is forecast to grow faster than the global average, at an annual compound rate of 153 percent through to 2024. Expanding in the region, therefore, demands a well-planned data strategy as well as the right data center partner and locations to help support that strategy.

In this article, we offer three key tips for preparing a data-led APAC growth strategy, starting with why Hong Kong might be an ideal data hub to help organizations boost growth.

Consider Hong Kong’s benefits

Access to suitable infrastructure and proximity to target markets are critical to the success of any geographic expansion. For example, Hong Kong is obviously an important gateway for companies seeking to expand into or out of China.

However, there are several other reasons why a growing business might choose Hong Kong as a location for a data hub. For example, the city offers:

A high-speed global data hub and Asia’s largest internet exchange point, connecting to terrestrial backbones to mainland China and 12 international submarine cables
Low-latency data exchange across China and East Asia, including 30-millisecond round-trip delay to and from Tokyo and Singapore
One of the world’s top financial centers, hosting 70 of the world’s largest 100 banks
A global trade hub, handling 4.2 million tonnes of air cargo in 2022
A business-friendly environment, with COVID-19 restrictions a thing of the past and the local government spending billions of dollars on business and investment initiatives

Re-examine your data architecture

Using Hong Kong as a data hub can help organizations decentralize their data architecture — a key strategy that leading global enterprises are adopting. As Digital Realty’s 2022 Global Data Insights Survey points out, 62 percent of large global enterprises have more than 50 IT infrastructure locations. More than nine in 10 companies say they will add new points of presence in the next two years.

Leading companies are decentralizing their data architectures to ensure workloads are located in the right places to fulfill regulatory requirements and to help them control bandwidth costs. It also minimizes performance issues, so that local customers and employees benefit from the best possible digital experiences.

While accommodating location-specific needs is important, so too is ensuring that your data architecture supports the organization's global requirements. That likely means supporting complex hybrid infrastructure across multiple locations. It 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 architecture may need to support data aggregation for advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, along with high-speed, distributed workflows to and from customers 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 — and that ideally can be managed seamlessly through a single interface.

Find the right global and local 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, and Singapore.

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’ that allows you to interconnect data workflows to and from just about any workload anywhere, using a single interface.

For enterprises that have identified Hong Kong as an ideal gateway for expansion, we offer two data center facilities: HKG10 and HKG11. Both are Uptime Institute Tier III design and construction certified and offer scalable, carrier-neutral facilities.

For example, our HKG11 multi-story facility has the capacity to help you scale easily - from single-cabinet to multi-megawatt workloads. It's also strategically located, with low-latency connections to more than 300 cloud, telecommunications, and other service providers in the area. With ServiceFabric™ Connect, HKG11 also offers virtual connectivity to every major cloud provider and more than 450 data centers globally.

Our Hong Kong facilities offer an ideal launching pad for expanding in China and elsewhere in East Asia. Combined with our global network and open platform, Digital Realty can help you through any data-related challenges you encounter on your growth journey through APAC.

For more details on how to plan your APAC using Hong Kong as a gateway, see our ebook: Your Data-First Guide to APAC Expansion: Spotlight on Hong Kong

The Rise of Hybrid Cloud: Shaping Digital Infrastructure in Asia Pacific and Hong Kong