Equinix REIT : Getting Your Tech Start-up Ahead of the Curve with Equinix and HPE

From Shenzhen to Seoul, from Tokyo to Singapore, a tech boom is in full swing across Asia-Pacific. According to the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2020, published by San Francisco-based research and policy advisory Startup Genome, the region now accounts for 30% of the world's top start-up ecosystems, compared with just 20% in 2012. What's more, of the 11 start-up ecosystems that made it onto Startup Genome's top ecosystems list, six are in Asia-Pacific, confirming the region's growing web-tech clout.[i]

To navigate a highly competitive environment, Asian start-ups, just like their successful counterparts elsewhere across the globe, increasingly recognize that they need to compete not only by delivering innovative products and services, but must also equip themselves with a scalable technology platform to stay ahead of the game.

It is critical for start-ups to react promptly to market requirements. As such, the frictionless ability to adapte quickly and efficiently to changing business demandswill be key to its growth. Consequently, cloud has enabled early-stage Asian start-ups to enjoy the benefits that flexibility can offer.

Emerging challenges of public cloud adoption

While offering many new opportunities for start-ups, cloud adoption also comes with challenges. This is especially true for start-ups that utilize public cloud exclusively. According to Gartner, 'Proponents of multicloud cite better disaster recovery and easier migration for data and services as the prime benefits though the decisions are generally based on three major drivers:

1. Sourcing: The desire to increase agility and avoid or minimize vendor lock-in. Multiple factors could drive this decision - availability, performance, data sovereignty, regulatory requirements, labor costs.
2. Architecture: Modern applications are designed in a more modular style and can support multiple cloud providers.
3. Governance: To ensure operational control, enterprises want to unify the administration and monitoring of their IT systems.'

These three drivers are extremely relevant to start-ups which need to be agile when opportunities strike to ensure that their IT infrasture will not hold the business back. Instead of being constrained by the capabilities of a single cloud service provider, a hybrid and multicloud architecture enables start-ups to cherry pick the solutions based on each service provider's strengths, build a resilient and optimized environment to maximize these benefits to facilitate their business development. Increasingly, there are more enterprises adopting hybrid multicloud infrastructures at the very early stage of their development to eliminate the IT bottleneck.More importantly, this enables them to integrate the best of private and public clouds - the private fulfills regulatory requirements and addresses latency issues, while the public supports the scalability of IT resources and access to innovation accelerator services.

This trend is reflected in a latest Gartner survey of public cloud users, which 'finds 81% of respondents using two or more providers.'[ii] More and more start-ups willl be following the successful example set by industry unicorns including Dropbox, Netflix and Zoom - currently deploying hybrid multicloud approaches to both safeguarding and expanding their fast-growing businesses.