With many companies now branching out beyond domestic clientele, there are so many firms that are serving international clients. In the IT sector, the cost of hiring a local developer in Europe or the USA can be 4 or 5 times as much as hiring someone with equal if not better skill sets in Asia or South America where the cost of living, business taxes and expenses, employee wages are lower. As a result, companies operating in these zones are able to offer remote services at a fraction of the price.
There does come some issue with dealing with businesses abroad. For example, competitor research from a location in marketing can spit out a different set of results if the research performed in the location of the client. This can often lead to confusion and sometimes a lot of wasted time and effort when it comes to delivering reports that the client just doesn’t agree with.
Other situations include restriction of access to logging on to customer websites. The most common being that if you are not in the country where the servers are located, then you cannot access them. Try to think about it like this from a personal perspective. You want to get Polish Netflix abroad. However, you are in the USA, so you can only get US Netflix. You would need a way to get a Polish IP address for t4eh Netflix server to recognize that you need the Polish version of their movie vault.
This is here geolocation software tools come into play.
Proxy IP Addresses
Many companies will buy a dedicated proxy IP address that resides in the country they need access to. There are shared versions that are cheaper, but they can be slow and irregular, so if you are a business, then dedicated is the way to go. The proxy IP can be inserted into software tools as well as your browser and turned on and off.
VPN Software
Virtual Private Networks were originally invented for wide area network communications. A company in Poland could have an office in London. They need to share the same resources and so a VPN would be used to connect the two offices to the same servers. These days there are numerous companies out there that offer VPN software for free or paid versions.
Within their software, there is nearly always a choice of multiple servers in certain countries and even down to particular cities in the world that the software will connect to. All external data leaving your device from your web browser will be processed by the VPN server. Once again going back to the Netflix example, you ould be able to watch one Netflix per line for the border.
Exactly the same applies to any business that wants to log into their customer servers or gather local data from an external geographical location. There are also dedicated servers you can use, but these are beyond the scope of this article and only needed if you have a large budget.
