Why network, infrastructure and compliance are key to a successful global capability center
The decisions that determine whether a global capability center (GCC) succeeds or stalls are rarely the ones that get boardroom attention.
With the number of GCCs in India growing by nearly a third since 2021 – more than 500 of the Forbes Global 2000 operate in the country – the choices that underpin a successful launch are treated as operational detail and left too late in the process.
Consider that nearly two thirds (65%) of GCCs are “average performers” according to a Boston Consulting Group study, with a further 8% underperforming. Just four out of every 50 qualify as “top performers.”
“How do you bring everything under one roof?” asks Murali Krishnan, AVP & Head of Business – Enterprise Network at Tata Communications. “Otherwise, when these things are highly distributed, it has a dilution factor with respect to what you potentially want to achieve – for example, if you are going to go through an artificial intelligence transformation. Having your entire knowledge in one place makes a lot more sense for an enterprise rather than having a distributed global workforce.”
This reflects the shift in what a GCC is expected to deliver. While cost arbitrage got the GCC operating model started, transformation and speed-to-market are now driving investment. The centers capturing that shift are the ones that sequence decisions correctly before they break ground.
“Design your GCC as a strategic business platform, not an offshore office,” says Anubhav Bhatnagar, Associate Director – Enterprise Connectivity Products at Tata Communications.
He counts six fault lines in a GCC’s digital foundation: data residency rules, AI workloads on networks never designed for them, a security perimeter that dissolves the moment a third party gets access. These sit alongside architecture, connectivity and vendor governance.
In this article we are going to explore the three biggest mistakes which expose these fault lines, and how enterprises can correct them to set up a GCC for future success.
Mistake 1: The network is treated like an afterthought
For many mid-market enterprises currently assessing whether to build a GCC, they bring a domestic-focused branch-office view of the network. It’s a line item in a spreadsheet, rather than a fundamental part of the center’s design.
Consider that 83% of GCCs are now scaling GenAI projects, according to EY. The same study found that 63% are prioritizing AI/ML and MLOps, including model development, ML pipelines, data infrastructure. And 70% are building out cloud architecture and DevOps capability, from zero-trust models to container orchestration and multi-cloud governance. None of these run on the traditional hub-and-spoke topologies on which many GCCs are built.
“In the past the network was really centric, it was a closed environment,” explains Johannes Sautter, Head of Connectivity and Colocation Services at WACKER Chemie AG. “And these days, of course, the network is hybrid…the network starts at your site but there is no end.”
“What works in Denver doesn’t necessarily work in Delhi,” argues Greg Wade, an independent strategic advisor who advises multinationals on GCC strategy and development. “The modern GCC environment needs architecture designed around the enterprise’s business requirements, including data movement, integration, cloud access and increasingly demanding AI workloads.”
Enterprise AI needs sustained east-west bandwidth and sub-50ms inference latency. India-to-HQ traffic often crosses six to eight network hops, adding 30-80ms of latency even over an optimized route – an unseen tax on every workload that people absorb.
“Any traditional application we have grown up with over the last two, three decades, and the way AI behaves – they are poles apart,” says Krishnan. “That means the network that follows AI also requires a phenomenal change in how the network behaves.”
Mistake 2: Infrastructure locked in before the GCC roadmap exists
Leaving infrastructure decisions until the last minute is more expensive to fix later.
“By the time infrastructure teams are involved, key architectural designs have already been made, and this actually can create unnecessary complexity and delays and definitely cost,” Wade explains.
The main issue is the sequence of decisions. Data-center choices, ISP contracts, and hardware commitments get signed while the capability roadmap is still blank, leading to issues down the line. Infrastructure belongs in the business case stage, which is where Wade sees the best GCC programs focus: “Infrastructure is a strategic enabler right from day one – it shouldn’t be a procurement exercise to get pipes into a particular location.”
Tata Communications’ Bhatnagar says companies must design to the specific center requirements, not a template.
“It’s not a cookie-cutter solution that we replicate across different global enterprises,” he says. “The starting point should be an assessment based on the exact customer requirements.”
The return on sequencing it that way is measured in months. Bhatnagar describes a customer who needed operations running in India within four months, against a network delivery that normally takes three. “We expedited the delivery of the network, and we expedited the integration,” he says. Time-to-market is the metric by which these programs are judged.
For mid-market businesses, which means committing to an infrastructure roadmap rather than a location: scoping what a center will become, rather than just the needs of day one.
“You should be thinking of the network architecture to support tomorrow’s business models,” Wade adds.
Mistake 3: Compliance is treated like a checklist
Data residency, cross-border transfers, and geographically specific regulations are architectural constraints, not paperwork to clear before the doors open.
A GCC in a new geography gives you “great talent and great economics,” says Krishnan. However, “it also comes with a pinch of these smaller nuances of how you make sure you’re compliant and conforming to the law of the land,” he explains. In countries like India, certain data handled by a GCC must reside in-country, which pushes most centers into a hybrid cloud by default.
The DPDP Act carries penalties of up to ₹250 crore (roughly $29–30m) per violation, alongside tight incident reporting windows that vary depending on where HQ is based.
“We need to have strong governance in every region because the regions really differ,” says WACKER’s Sautter. “Governance is the most important thing to avoid any failures.”
The answer is building a global governance framework with localized controls, rather than a separate compliance model for each geography.
Security follows the same logic. Enterprises that embed monitoring and observability into their foundations catch problems before they escalate. Third-party access is the primary breach vector at scaled GCCs, and contractor and systems-integrator traffic is rarely segmented with the rigor applied at HQ. Yet just one breach can curb HQ’s appetite to widen a center’s mandate.
Handled up front, it becomes an advantage. Krishnan argues it is what enterprises expanding into India are really buying: “They need someone who can confidently say, if I am with you, you’re fully covered. Not only from the infrastructure standpoint, but from the risk associated with the law of the land.”
Build for what you want the GCC to become
Any one of these blockers is survivable on its own. But a GCC running multiple infrastructure vendors has no single owner for incidents that cross domains. It means a latency spike, a cloud-connect fault, and a DNS failure in the same hour become a finger-pointing exercise between vendors instead of a fix.
Tata Communications estimates that vendor governance alone accounts for 15–20% of the infrastructure budget – a line item that doesn’t appear in the original GCC business case.
The gap between the 8% of top-performing GCCs and the rest that stall comes down to the architectural decisions made, or missed, before launch.
Get them right and, in Krishnan’s terms, the enterprise gets the conditions needed to “fail fast and recover” on the AI programs the center was stood up to run.
The decisions you make before your GCC launches can determine how far it can scale. Find out how Tata Communications can help you build the connected, resilient and frictionless digital foundation your enterprise needs to become Unstoppable here.
