How software and technology companies can rise above the risks of global expansion

If you have grown your architecture organically over time, the chances are that technical debt is racking up. Outdated architectural patterns, depreciated components, and legacy code can all cause more problems if you carry them over to new regions. Carrying these inefficiencies forward may lead to compatibility issues, performance bottlenecks, and operational challenges. Modernizing your tech stack by addressing technical debt, refactoring legacy systems, and aligning with cloud-native principles like microservices or serverless architectures will allow for a smoother regional expansion journey.

As your software or technology business expands into new markets, operational overheads also mount up. Some software companies expand their teams to manage growing infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, and maintenance tasks. However, embracing approaches such as provisioning infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) can help you scale operations without increasing manual workload or operational complexity.

IaC automates cloud infrastructure provisioning and management to save time and prevent errors, while also controlling costs, reducing risks, and responding quickly to new business opportunities. This allows your team to focus on product development and meeting business demands rather than managing infrastructure configurations or deployments.

Are the right services and features available in your target region? When launching in a new region, you may find that only a subset of core services is initially available which might not fully support your workload—especially in smaller or recently launched regions. As you make product improvements, this can create an imbalance between capabilities across territories.

While checking the AWS Services Available by Region page and the AWS CloudFormation registry can help you make an informed decision and identify feature parity, designing a flexible architecture will give you the greatest freedom and options. This allows you to deploy a self-managed solution or AWS Partner Network service as temporary alternatives before their native AWS services become available. Although AWS services are gradually added to new regions, reaching out to your account team with desired services, features, and software releases can also 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.

Quota constraints can create delays if they are not addressed proactively. Before launching in a new market, it’s critical to do your due diligence and request service quota increases well in advance, particularly if your workloads require significant capacity for specific services. These requests take time to review, process, approve, and deploy, so early planning is essential to avoid bottlenecks.

Your reservation options can vary, from using on-demand capacity reservations to choosing to be flexible with Availability zones (AZs). Whatever your needs, your account team or another AWS expert can help you evaluate the best path forward. As an example, when GPU instances have limited capacity in certain regions and AZs, you can mitigate the risks by using alternate AZs, AWS Inferentia, or AWS Trainium instances.

Building a strong business case for international expansion can be difficult when steep costs stand in the way of success. That’s why investing in cost-optimization first is critical to maximizing benefits long-term—and there are several ways to do this. Take pricing, for instance. 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. Right-sizing workloads using AI and machine learning (ML) can also reduce costs by up to 25 percent.

Addressing local regulations is complex when you’re facing different requirements for data sovereignty, residency, localization, and transfer. Thinking about compliance needs proactively from the start can help you avoid fines, sanctions, or civil liabilities. The AWS Shared Responsibility model helps reduce the operational burden on customers by managing the security of the cloud, including the infrastructure, host operating system, and physical security of AWS facilities, while customers are responsible for security in the cloud, such as managing their data, configuring access controls, and securing their applications. A wealth of resources to help you meet requirements can also be found on the Customer Compliance Center, as well as tailored support from industry-certified assessors within AWS Security Assurance Services. It’s important to know that AWS customers inherit comprehensive compliance controls. AWS supports 143 security standards and compliance certifications, including Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HIPAA and HITECH), The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Federal Industry Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS 140-2), and National Institute of Standards and Technology 800-171 (NIST 800-171), helping customers address compliance requirements around the globe.

With AWS tools, services, and support available across each of these areas, the prospect of region expansion doesn’t have to be daunting. By conducting a Well-Architected Framework review together with this custom lens approach, software companies can be confident in mitigating risks.

If you’re seeking to expand in new AWS regions, learn more about how the AWS Global Passport program can amplify your expansion strategy through best practices and comprehensive support.