For many years, Singapore has built its reputation to become the leading technology hub in ASEAN. Although the city-state remains the dominant market, controlling over 50% of the data centre capacity in the region, in recent years Vietnam has been stepping up the efforts to catch up and become the new regional data centre hotspot.

The Vietnam government has invested heavily into upgrading the nation’s IT infrastructure to make this happen and offer a number of favourable conditions and tax incentives to attract more companies to build their data centres in Vietnam.

Their commitment towards preparing Vietnam for a data-driven future was exemplified by the new Law on Cybersecurity which took effect at the start of 2019. The law has made it mandatory for international technology companies to establish a physical presence in Vietnam and store data locally in order to serve their Vietnamese customers.

Seen from a positive perspective, this means that there is now a great opportunity for companies to build their business by locating their data centres in Vietnam. The demand for new data centre floor space is definitely there and growing. The country has had an increase of almost 40% in capacity forecast, bringing in an estimated $1.4 billion in investments to new facilities in the past 2 years alone.

After all, in order to reach the nation’s target of becoming an advanced ICT country by the year 2020, there will be an accelerated demand for localised offerings of data centre and cloud implementations in the coming years.

Those who are quick to recognise and meet this demand will stand to flourish.

While the laws demand for mandatory data localisation, Vietnam itself is not a recluse state. It knows that it has to interconnect as well as compete with other nations and to achieve that, the ICT implementations and data centres will have to meet international standards.

The fact that more state-owned enterprises are being privatised, such as those in the telecommunications and banking sectors, means even more opportunities will open up for foreign investors.

At present, Vietnam is making good progress. The country is in the top 10 in terms of global IT outsourcing. There are around 30 data centres concentrated in two of Vietnam’s biggest cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. It’s definitely a developing country that’s experiencing one of the highest rates of ICT adoption.

If Vietnam keeps this up, with full support from its government, it won’t be long before this proud ASEAN nation becomes a regional leader in the ICT and data centre landscape.

On 21st February 2019, W.Media will be hosting the Cloud and Datacenter Convention 2019 in Hanoi, Vietnam’s first all-inclusive event where end-users, operators, system integrators, consultants & engineers are able to meet and connect.

The convention will highlight key progress, best practices, concerns and future of cloud and data centre innovations, featuring international speakers and industry experts from SAP, VNPT Northen Data Center, FPT Software,

Viettel IDC and the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) Vietnam. It is one not to be missed. If you are interested, please register here.