How Zenlayer helped a global IT leader scale in Saudi Arabia and what it means for your enterprise network strategy.

If you’re responsible for deploying and managing an enterprise network today, you know how change comes with the territory.

Over the years, enterprise networks have consistently seen annual traffic increases of 20-30%. Now, as cloud-based services grow in popularity and become more video- and AI-intensive, those already high growth rates are spiking even higher.

Nokia predicts that enterprise AI traffic alone will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 57% through 2033, significantly outpacing consumer AI traffic growth.

Increasingly, this shift is playing out on a global scale, and that’s what matters to us here at Zenlayer. Our core mission is to make the global connections between clouds, businesses, and people simple and effortless — truly Zen-like.

Read on, and you’ll discover how we did just that for a major IT company that wanted to expand its operations into Saudi Arabia.

Ensuring consistent performance across global operations

Consider the challenges facing a global SaaS provider or a company engaged in deploying e-commerce or AI services. Doing that effectively on a global scale means ensuring consistent performance. You want your users in California to get the same low-latency response times as users in Singapore.

The congested, unreliable public internet alone won’t get you there. You need a high-speed, private network path designed to support that kind of performance.

AI training and inference workloads add another layer of complexity, as they involve massive data transfers between cloud regions, data centers, and edge installations. Taking an AI model trained in New York and efficiently deploying it in Tokyo and Frankfurt, for example, depends on having the right global backbone. In this case, it’s one that supports AI workloads running on GPUs and TPUs in multiple locations, reducing data replication time and facilitating direct connections to cloud providers.

Finally, many enterprises (e.g., in finance, healthcare, government) require private, encrypted network paths to comply with data security regulations. For that you need a private global backbone, but also one that can be tailored to provide dedicated network links for sensitive workloads, reducing exposure to the DDoS attacks and cyber threats that are proliferating on the public internet.

Delivering speed and reliability where it matters most

Zenlayer’s network was designed specifically to help businesses overcome these kinds of enterprise challenges, with:

• 300+ edge Points of Presence (PoPs) strategically located in key markets, including emerging economies in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
• A high-capacity global network delivering 180+ Tbps of bandwidth. In the Asia-Pacific, our upgraded fiber leverages 800-gigabytes of single-fiber bandwidth technology to ensure rapid, reliable data transmission between AI compute clusters and other latency-sensitive, data-intensive applications worldwide.
• Extensive peering 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.

Even with a strong backbone, individual links and paths can still become congested or fail. That’s why intelligent routing is essential: dynamically selecting the best paths based on application performance requirements and real-time network conditions. Our network architecture enhances reliability by continuously monitoring both primary and backup routes, enabling sub-second failover to deliver consistent performance and minimize disruption across regions.

Powering customer success – enterprise expansion in Saudi Arabia

What’s a typical scenario for an organization relying on our services to extend its global reach?

Consider this example of one of the world’s leading networking and IT organizations.

The company has a global workforce of over 80,000, but when a major opportunity arose in Saudi Arabia, the company was hamstrung. With no existing local presence, business entity or operational staff in-country, the company found it virtually impossible to get deployments off the ground.

To address the challenge, the company turned to our Edge Colocation services designed to simplify IT infrastructure deployment and management in strategic global locations.

Thanks to ongoing, collaborative relationships with leading data center providers like Equinix and Digital Realty, we have access to a vast network of facilities worldwide. Combined with our private global backbone, this extensive reach enables businesses, like our customer in Saudi Arabia, to rapidly scale up an operation.

Supporting global deployments from start to scale

Zenlayer doesn’t just connect the network and walk away. We offer a range of support services including:

• Proof-of-concept testing to validate solutions before full-scale deployment.​
• Real-time network monitoring tools provide visibility into infrastructure performance and health, helping ensure uptime and reliability across global deployments.

We back all of this up with local expertise: Our customers get full access to people on the ground who are ready to provide region-specific strategic and regulatory guidance, technical advice, and a full range of logistics capabilities right down to purchasing, delivery and customs clearance assistance.

With our support, the customer was able to get out of the starting block in Saudi Arabia, smoothly deploying new data centers in Jeddah and Riyadh. Further, secure, high-speed connectivity was established via our global private backbone to backhaul data between two existing sites in Mumbai, India, ensuring a high-performance and reliable network to support the customer’s global business units.

Our rapid deployment capabilities and economy of scale, including enduring relationships with local service providers and logistics partners, helped the customer meet its deadlines in Saudi Arabia efficiently and cost-effectively.

The customer turned to Zenlayer for support with their expansion into Saudi Arabia due to our track record of successfully helping them deploy into India, South Korea, and other strategic locations. Building on that foundation, we helped them navigate the region’s complex requirements and continue scaling their global infrastructure with confidence.

Accelerating your global edge strategy with Zenlayer

In the era of AI, a private global backbone plays a key part of any performance-enhancing enterprise network strategy. But what exactly is being connected, whether that be data centers, edge locations, cloud resources, remains up to you.

That’s why in addition to more than 300 PoPs around the world, we also maintain direct connections to the top cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and IBM Cloud. And we provide full support for bare metal deployments designed for enterprise, AI, and other data intensive deployments.

Our customers get access to both cloud and on-premises resources through a single port, adjusting bandwidth and connectivity according to their changing demand levels.

The result: global performance that’s designed for you.

Talk to an enterprise networking expert today to see how you can put our global reach and collaborative relationships to work for you.