Expanding in APAC? Your ‘fool-proof’ infrastructure plans can still fail

The region's long-standing complexity has a habit of exposing gaps in infrastructure strategies that had functioned well in Europe or North America, with the regulatory reality of operating across APAC making this complexity concrete. Unlike Europe's GDPR, which consolidates data rules across member states, there isn’t such unified regulatory framework for APAC. Enterprises must navigate distinct data sovereignty laws in each country they operate in, for example, China's PIPL, India's DPDP Act, Indonesia's PDP Law or Australia's Privacy Act.

A 2025 report from IDC indicates that 77% of APAC enterprises have already adapted their data strategies to comply with local data sovereignty laws, navigating differentiating frameworks. For enterprises operating across APAC markets, the gap between infrastructure designed for one regulatory context and the multi-jurisdiction reality of APAC operations hasn't been theoretical.

Why the infrastructure that worked elsewhere can fall short

For many enterprises, the first sign of trouble isn't a dramatic outage. It's the slow accumulation of performance complaints from users in Jakarta, compliance questions from a legal team in Tokyo, and rising costs that nobody budgeted for because the original infrastructure plan was devised with a single market in mind.

Legacy on-premises infrastructure or single-country colocation arrangements tend to share a few characteristics that make them poorly suited to APAC expansion. They were designed for a known workload profile that might not hold true in another market. Connectivity is treated as a utility rather than a design consideration. And they were built for one regulatory context, not the five or more distinct national frameworks an enterprise typically encounters across a meaningful APAC footprint, spanning markets like China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Australia.

The result is infrastructure that technically functions but creates friction at every layer: higher latency between markets, increased complexity when regulators ask where data sits, and a support model that wasn't designed for the time zones or operational realities of a distributed APAC footprint.

One hub rarely covers the entire region

Treating APAC as a single infrastructure zone is one of the most common yet costly mistakes enterprises make when expanding into the region. Singapore is a common first choice for enterprises establishing an APAC infrastructure presence and for good reason: its connectivity infrastructure, regulatory environment, and proximity to Southeast Asian markets make it a natural hub. However, enterprises whose operations extend to Japan, India, or Australia quickly discover that a Singapore-centric approach introduces latency and compliance gaps that a single-hub model wasn't designed to handle.

Markets like Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, and Ho Chi Minh City are now attracting significant colocation investment from both regional operators and global hyperscalers, driven by improved fibre infrastructure, lower real estate costs, and government incentives. As of mid-2025, over 360 new data centre facilities are planned or in development across APAC outside China, with contributions from more than 180 operators. This pipeline reflects how quickly enterprise demand in these markets is outpacing existing capacity. Enterprises that move early to establish local infrastructure presence in these markets find themselves better positioned to support growth and to meet the data localisation requirements that regulators in several of these markets are tightening.

Latency is a regional problem, not a site problem

One of the persistent misconceptions about APAC infrastructure is that latency is simply a matter of choosing the right data centre location. In practice, latency in this region is shaped by factors that don't appear on a data centre spec sheet. Submarine cable routes between APAC markets vary significantly in quality and resilience. Traffic between certain country pairs routinely travels via third-country hops that add unpredictable delays. A facility in one city may have excellent connectivity to cloud providers but limited direct paths to the markets an enterprise needs to reach. Plus, the routing options available are largely determined by which carriers having physical presence in the chosen facility—a constraint most enterprises miss out from the original decision.

For latency-sensitive applications such as real-time payments, trading platforms and customer-facing digital services, the difference between a well-connected colocation facility and a poorly connected one can be substantial. Financial services firms and e-commerce operators have learned this first-hand, and increasingly, so have enterprises running AI workloads that depend on fast, reliable data movement between edge and core.

These workloads demand high bandwidth, low latency, and consistent reliability—requirements that an infrastructure approach designed for another region and retrofitted for APAC may struggle to meet.

What a better approach looks like

Rather than retrofitting an existing infrastructure strategy for APAC, enterprises that handle regional expansion competently tend to start with a clear picture of where their data needs to live, how it needs to move, and the connectivity support they'll need. That means choosing colocation facilities that are designed for APAC's specific conditions and ensuring that connectivity is treated as a foremost consideration, rather than an afterthought.

Telstra International's global network spans more than 600 managed, partnered, and resell data centres across 37 countries, with a specific depth of presence across APAC that reflects a heritage of building and maintaining connectivity infrastructure in the region. For enterprises navigating expansion into markets where the infrastructure stakes are high and the regulatory landscape complex, that kind of local knowledge and network reach matters.