6 Essential Strategies for Global Tech Expansion
Entering new markets presents significant opportunities for software and technology companies, but also introduces complex challenges. These challenges, ranging from operational hurdles to cultural differences and regulatory variations, can hinder growth potential. Even with robust architectural best practices for global expansion, risks may persist when launching in new regions. By combining a custom-lens approach with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Framework review, businesses can proactively address potential problems and enhance their global strategy.
This article outlines six key areas of risk that software and technology companies should address to build resilience, improve customer experiences, and meet regulatory demands during global expansion.
- Addressing Technical Debt First
Over time, your software architecture may have organically evolved, potentially accumulating technical debt. Outdated architectural patterns, depreciated components, and legacy code can create compatibility issues, performance bottlenecks, and operational challenges when expanding into new regions. Modernizing your technology stack by resolving existing technical debt, refactoring legacy systems, and adopting cloud-native principles like microservices or serverless architectures will facilitate a smoother global expansion journey.
- Automating Manual Processes
As software and technology businesses broaden their reach into new markets, operational overhead often increases. Many companies increase their teams to manage growing infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, and maintenance tasks. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) can help you scale operations without increasing manual workloads or operational complexity. IaC automates cloud infrastructure provisioning and management, saving time, preventing errors, controlling costs, reducing risks, and facilitating rapid responses to new business opportunities.
This automation approach enables your team to focus on product development and meeting business demands rather than managing infrastructure configurations or deployments.
- Gaining Feature Parity Through Flexibility
Are the appropriate services and features available in your target region? When entering a new geographic area, a subset of core services might be initially available, which may not fully support your workload. Designing a flexible architecture gives you the greatest freedom and options. You can deploy a self-managed solution or AWS Partner Network service as temporary alternatives until corresponding native AWS services become available. While the AWS Services Available by Region page helps with informed decisions, flexibility supports product improvements.
Although AWS services are gradually added to new regions, you can contact your account team with desired services, features, and software releases that can influence prioritization and potentially accelerate global market launch timelines. If you don’t already have a dedicated account team, reach out to the AWS sales team.
- Managing Capacity Constraints
Quota constraints can create delays if they are not addressed proactively. Before launching in a new market, it’s critical to request service quota increases well in advance if your workloads require significant capacity for specific services. These requests require time for review, processing, approval, and deployment, making early planning essential to avoid bottlenecks. Consider various reservation options, ranging from on-demand capacity reservations to choosing flexibility with Availability Zones (AZs). Your account team or another AWS expert can help you.
For instance, when GPU instances have limited capacity in specific regions and AZs, you can mitigate risks by using alternate AZs, AWS Inferentia, or AWS Trainium instances.
- Optimizing Cloud Computing Costs
Building a strong business case for international expansion can be difficult when steep costs stand in the way of success. Many cost-optimization opportunities are available for reducing expenses. For example, a pay-per-invocation model is ideal for managing costs during periods of growth, while options like Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances offer flexibility and substantial discounts for predictable or flexible workloads. Furthermore, right-sizing workloads using AI and machine learning (ML) can reduce costs.
- Managing Data Compliance
Handling local rules and regulations is complex when you’re facing different requirements for data sovereignty, residency, and localization. Proactively thinking about compliance needs from the start helps your business avoid fines, sanctions, or civil liabilities. The AWS Shared Responsibility model reduces the operational burden on customers since AWS manages the security of the cloud, including the infrastructure while customers are responsible for security in the cloud.
A wealth of support and resources for meeting compliance requirements are available at the Customer Compliance Center, and tailored support is provided by industry-certified assessors within AWS Security Assurance Services. AWS customers inherit comprehensive compliance controls, supporting 143 security standards and compliance certifications, including PCI DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, GDPR, and NIST 800-171.
By utilizing AWS tools, services, and support across these areas, the prospect of region expansion is significantly less daunting. Conducting a Well-Architected Framework review coupled with this custom-lens approach helps software companies confidently mitigate potential risks.
For companies looking to expand in new AWS regions, the AWS Global Passport program supports their strategy through best practices and comprehensive support.
