Barely a week into 2016, Amazon Inc. has already fulfilled its first New Year’s resolution. The pair of South Korean data centers that the retail-turned-cloud-giant promised to customers last November are now fully operational, complete with a direct connectivity option courtesy of local provider KINX.

The ability to access Amazon’s infrastructure through a private link that is not shared with other customers like public carrier networks avoids the traffic delays that usually occur during peak browsing hours and a whole range of related issues. The resulting improvement to data transfer rates is a major boon for the large organizations that the vendor is targeting with its platform, particularly those with latency-sensitive workloads such as databases and real-time web services. Or in the case of Nexon Co. Ltd,, multiplayer mobile games.

The South Korean studio is a long-time customer of Amazon that plans to migrate the backend services supporting its most popular title to the new facilities in order to improve response times for players. Nexon will also take advantage of the local infrastructure to mount a push into the desktop market, where users have much steeper expectations for how smoothly their games should run that couldn’t be properly accommodated before. Jeff Bezos’ firm promises to facilitate similar operational improvements for the thousands of other regional clients that rely on its platform.

But perhaps most importantly, the expansion will also enable Amazon to target organizations that weren’t able to use its public cloud prior to the launch of the South Korean facilities due to various logistical considerations. Companies in sensitive industries such as the healthcare and financial services sectors, for instance, are legally barred from moving personally-identifiable customer data to foreign jurisdictions. That slice of the market represents a lot of potential business, although not all of it will go to the cloud giant.

Besides well-established local providers, Amazon can also expect to face competition from Microsoft Corp., which has long been rumored to be plotting an expansion into the Korean peninsula. And with the industry’s two largest infrastructure-as-a-service providers entering the region, it’s safe to assume others are planning to follow suit.

Image via Wadams