Cloud adoption in ANZ gathering pace

The move to the cloud is gathering pace in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), with a four-fold increase in the amount of data moving from on-premise environments to the top two public clouds, a survey has found.

According to the Truth in cloud survey commissioned by Veritas, 45% of Australia respondents and 41% of New Zealand respondents reported that their infrastructure was split between the public cloud and on-premise datacentres.

But in the longer term, a majority of respondents in both countries expect to run most or all their applications on the public cloud. These include not only non-production and development and testing systems, but also mission-critical applications.

Along with the shift to the cloud are growing investments in data protection to secure data and applications. Around eight in 10 Australian businesses and about half of those in New Zealand have allocated budgets to protect their cloud data in the next 12 months.

A majority of respondents also expect their budget for backup and recovery to increase substantially over the next three years.

Among those who had responsibility over both on-premises and cloud-based workloads, almost half of Australia’s respondents and 40% of those in New Zealand would rather do so with a single backup software.

“The cloud is driving Australia’s economy today, resulting in a cumulative productivity benefit of $9.4bn over the past five years,” said Howard Fyffe, managing director for ANZ at Veritas. “Our customers are overwhelmingly choosing the cloud for new workloads and advanced deployments.

According to the Business characteristics survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), adoption of public cloud services grew across companies of all sizes in 2017-18, with larger firms of 200 or more employees being the keenest adopters.

But the study also revealed that insufficient knowledge of paid cloud computing services was the greatest factor limiting or preventing its use, as cited by 17% of businesses.

In addition, the ABS noted that over three-quarters of what it deemed as innovative businesses (78%) indicated that cloud technology was of some importance, compared with only 53% of non-innovative businesses.

Australia’s growing cloud adoption rates are also well documented by industry analyst firm Gartner, which expects the local cloud market to grow by 20.6% to reach A$5.6bn by the end of 2019.

Major global public cloud players, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, have established key datacentre facilities in the country, including those catered to the needs of public sector agencies.