Taking a digital strategy global today almost always means going into emerging markets like Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
These regions are diverse but share one thing in common: fast-growing digital adoption. Urban centers are buzzing with mobile wallets, online marketplaces, and digital services, while rural areas are quickly catching up. Put simply, opportunity is knocking and digital is the key to unlocking the door.
Navigating uneven infrastructure conditions
Sophistication of infrastructure in emerging markets can be pretty uneven. While major cities may enjoy modern fiber networks and strong mobile coverage, remote areas often rely on fixed wireless, microwave, or satellite links that can be less consistent. In these environments, expect higher latency and occasional packet loss.
Power reliability can vary, too. Many urban hubs have stable grids, but rural and developing regions may still face interruptions.
And when it comes to cloud access, you may find that local availability zones aren’t always in place, necessitating cross-border data transfers. Local ISP interconnection can also be fragmented, limiting routing efficiency.
Understanding and resolving these kinds of challenges is what we do at Zenlayer. We’ve made it our core mission to make the connections between clouds, businesses, and people simple and effortless wherever the location — and especially in emerging markets.
In fact, as part of this blog, we’ll showcase how Zenlayer provided a leading agtech research firm with a flexible, high performance global network enabling its data scientists around the world to share data and collaborate on developing new kinds of crops.
Understanding the day-to-day impact of unreliable connectivity
But first, let’s look at two examples of how the infrastructure challenges in emerging markets play out on a day-to-day basis:
- Let’s say you have an AI-driven, e-commerce platform hosted in the Google Cloud in Los Angeles and want to drive more business with consumers in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Without network optimization, sending traffic back and forth across the Pacific can result in latency in the 150-300 ms range. You’ll be paying an opportunity cost from the slower page loads and abandoned shopping carts while also paying ever higher cloud costs for processing frequent data retrieval and inference requests over long distances.
- Or let’s say you’re a fintech startup in Nigeria or Kenya running an AI-driven fraud detection system hosted on AWS out of the London area. The round trip from Lagos or Nairobi to London and back adds significant latency that slows transaction scoring and delays real‑time prevention. While not the sole factor in stopping fraud, these delays can increase risk, and the cost of all those cross-border data transfers to AWS (~$0.08 per GB) can quickly add up.
It’s challenges like these that are leading more organizations to pursue edge computing strategies, which are typically a major component of the our end-to-end solutioning.
Leveraging edge computing and private connectivity
Smart use of edge computing, including colocation and caching options, minimizes cloud-to-cloud transfers by keeping data processing local. Typically, we also look at options for using our Private Connect to bypass unreliable public ISPs and, for certain regions, deploying our Global Accelerator to reduce congestion.
All of our strategies are backed by Zenlayer’s 180+ Tbps private global backbone network encompassing over 300 edge Points of Presence (PoPs) strategically located in key markets, including emerging economies.
We also peer extensively with leading global and regional internet service providers. As a result, we’ve been able to reduce the average number of hops between source and destination to just 1.5. It’s a key reason we can reach 85% of internet users in less than 25 milliseconds.
Accelerating global agtech research collaboration
One example of how we solve these challenges comes from a world‑leading agtech research firm developing disaster‑resistant, nutrient‑enhanced crops. With teams of data scientists spread across rural and urban field labs in the US, Singapore, Japan, China, and multiple countries throughout Europe, the customer frequently needed to exchange large datasets quickly and securely over long distances.
Their existing patchwork of providers created too many network hops, inconsistent cross‑border performance, and slow, unpredictable transfers.
We helped them consolidate onto a single, unified network designed specifically for emerging markets by combining our private backbone with premium local IP transit, targeted local loops for rural regions, and on‑demand bare metal for processing data closer to the source.
Our solution resulted in reliable, near real‑time collaboration between global research teams, reduced latency for data transfers between distant labs, and the ability to scale infrastructure anywhere their next research project takes them — without the delays or complexity of their previous setup.
Designing reliable, scalable connectivity for emerging markets
The agtech example above isn’t unique. It reflects challenges faced across industries when expanding into emerging markets. Based on our work with a multitude of enterprises across sectors from fintech to cloud gaming, three key takeaways stand out:
- Private connectivity beats public internet for critical workloads
Whether it’s financial transactions, AI inference, or research collaboration, bypassing congested public paths ensures predictable performance and security.
- Edge resources unlock faster time‑to‑market
Deploying compute, storage, and caching near end‑users or data sources can cut processing times dramatically and reduce reliance on costly cross‑border data transfers. - Local expertise is a multiplier
Working with partners like Zenlayer who have established relationships with in‑country ISPs, data centers, and regulators shortens deployment timelines while reducing compliance risks.
When enterprises address these realities from the start, they can ensure consistent performance and avoid the high cost of fixing network gaps later.
Partnering for success across the world
Our agtech client now has a truly one-stop solution — no more hassle of managing separate vendors for colocation, networking, IP transit, and local loop services. Less operational complexity means more options for scaling with efficiency and predictability, supporting improved collaboration and accelerated research processes.
Talk to an enterprise networking expert today to see how you can put our global reach and high-performance, hyperconnected infrastructure to work for you.
