Business agility and the need for speed from IT are fueling growth in cloud computing in Asian countries. In its report IDC FutureScape : Worldwide Cloud 2020 Predictions — APEJ Implications, survey results indicate that at least 91 per cent of enterprises’ spending on cloud was set to increase.
Among the rising infrastructure complexities and costs, Cloud investment desired benefits – simplifying IT, business agility, and ensuring security meets compliance requirements – are not being met by enterprises.
More than 85 per cent of Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) organisations struggle to cross the cloud maturity chasm and gain agility from cloud adoption, hampered by the low internal competencies within their organizations to support these cloud adoption and migration activities.
Daphne Chung research director of cloud services and software at IDC Asia/Pacific said this has driven the need for a more consistent and standardised availability of automated cloud resources to enable developers and line-of-business (LOB) teams to execute at speed and cost.
“By 2021 over 90 per cent of enterprises across the region will employ a mix of on-premises, public cloud, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs,” she said.
According to the report as cloud services become core to enterprises, the IT environments they operate in grow more complex – multiple public cloud, private cloud, and traditional systems requires to be interconnected, integrated, and collectively managed.
Coupled with the relatively low skills in the region to manage cloud implementation across private and public cloud, the situation is forcing enterprises to seek for a managed cloud services deployment model to help them effectively manage and optimise their on- and off-premises cloud.
Asanga Wanigatunga, VP of Cloud and Service Providers at Veeam, told CIO Tech Asia while IDC’s findings are encouraging, when broken down market by market it’s clear that some regions outperform others.
“Veeam’s 2019 Cloud Data Management report found Japan to be one of the most progressive markets across APJ,” he said. “The report revealed an overwhelming 96 per cent of Japanese enterprise have confidence in Cloud data management solutions, with nearly two thirds (59 per cent) agreeing that the deployment of digital technologies is critical to their organisation’s success.
Conversely, the report found that Australian organisations were among the least progressive across the region, with a mere 46 per cent of organisations using cloud for back-up and 42 per cent using disaster-recovery-as-a-service; while only 47 per cent of Australian enterprises view the deployment of digital technologies to their business as critical to their success.
According to Wanigatunga Cloud-native strategies, which decouples data platforms from the underlying infrastructure to deliver scalable and agile applications via the public cloud, “will undoubtedly play a big role in the future of cloud technology”.
This approach essentially renders the physical infrastructure irrelevant and allows a business to run applications in any cloud and on any device.
“We are finding customers develop a robust data protection technology platform to handle the complex requirements in relation to backup and retention of the Hybrid Cloud architectures,” he said. “This is being achieved by identifying what data needs to be backed up “To the Cloud” and what data sitting in the cloud needs to be protected “From the Cloud”. Not to mention applications and data running “Within the Cloud”, which is protected across multiple clouds as well.”\
As the next generation of cloud sees businesses adopt a multi facet strategy to accelerate their cloud journeys.
A key strategy for CIOs would be to “lift and shift key applications” from on-premise infrastructures (where those infrastructure assets are coming to end of life) to cloud hosted platforms predominantly on the large hyperscalers.
“Organisations should be thinking about their long-term strategies, where their need to re-platform applications using cloud native architectures matches their digital transformation objectives,” he said.
“We have also noticed that for businesses with on-premise application refresh projects, CIOs are now taking a SaaS first strategy and selecting best of breed solutions, opposed to the monolithic application architectures of the past.
Finally, we are seeing an accelerated adoption of cloud infrastructure platforms from organisations that are seeking to drive business continuity services with everyone now working at home.”
Wanigatunga believes CIOs across APAC are now immersed in a Hybrid Cloud world.
“This means CIOs no longer employ a one size fits all model, rather, they have applications and data sized to fit different cloud and on-premise architectures,” he said.
“This creates interesting challenges for CIOs, as they now need to juggle a management platform that can stretch across all architectures, while being able to secure them and back them up in order to meet their organisation’s service level agreements.”
According to Wanigatunga identifying tools that can enable workloads to be securely backed up across these hybrid architectures will also become a bi-product of enabling the organisation to mobilise their workload to other clouds.
“We are seeing more of this being actioned as businesses leverage external cloud platforms to enable business continuity workload expansions. Customers are also leveraging their backup solutions to provision and burst these workloads into public clouds for capacity requirements,” he said.
Also data is growing so rapidly through all platforms and applications across hybrid architecture, having a robust Backup technology platform that can oversee all of this while protecting and automating is becoming essential, said Wanigatunga.
Some of the key cloud IDC predictions that will impact both technology buyers and suppliers of IT include:
- Multicloud Management: By 2022, 55 per cent of APEJ enterprises will deploy unified virtual machines (VMs), Kubernetes, and multicloud management processes and tools to support robust multicloud management and governance across on-premises and public cloud.
- Automated Dev Life Cycle: By 2022, 60 per cent of A500 will have invested in automation, orchestration, and development life-cycle management of cloud-native applications and platforms.
- Managed Cloud: By 2024, 60 per cent of large APEJ enterprises will rely on third-party SPs for help with containers, open source, and cloud-native application development.
