Organisations in Asean countries adopt hybrid cloud approach

Asia-Pacific (Apac) organisations are increasingly moving applications to the cloud, adopting a hybrid cloud approach, with no sign of the trend abating. The same trend is prevalent among Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) countries – although their adoption of cloud deployment lags behind that of Asian countries as a whole.

Enterprises in Asia are increasingly embracing a cloud-first approach, according to F5’s The State of Application Delivery in Apac 2015, which surveyed 3,200 IT decision-makers across the Apac region.

About half (45%) currently deploy 1-200 applications in the cloud, while almost 10% of organisations deploy more than 3,000 applications. The study showed that at least 41% of IT decision-makers are open to moving up to 24% of their applications to the cloud by 2016, while almost 24% are keen to move between 25-50%.

“As applications continue to be a critical part of the business strategy, organisations are seeking the same confidence level in cloud deployments that they’ve seen in the data centre,” said Emmanuel Bonnassie, senior vice-president, Asia Pacific, at F5 Networks.

Sandeep Bazaz, industry analyst for ICT at Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific, agreed that organisations in Asean countries are going through a similar cloud adoption trends, albeit at a lower level.

“Cloud computing adoption in Asean is low, when compared to mature economies in Asia, but adoption levels are almost similar with other developing economies in Asia,” said Bazaz. “However, cloud adoption is quite fast in more mature markets like Singapore.”

"These findings suggest a growing hybrid environment across the region, with a mix of on premise and off premises solutions increasingly being adopted by enterprises,” said Bonnassie.

Some 29% of organisations in the survey attributed slow adoption to a failure to identify a comprehensive identity and access management policy. A total of 35% admitted the lack of internal knowledge as an impediment to adoption.

Bazaz agreed Asian organisations are adopting a hybrid approach to cloud adoption, using a mix of on-premise and off-premise systems, with most large enterprises in the Asean area going with private cloud deployments.

“Most of the enterprises are concerned about the security and privacy of their critical data. Hybrid cloud gives the option to use private cloud for critical applications and use public cloud for less critical applications. Hybrid cloud also allows enterprise applications to burst into public cloud, when the demand for computing spikes,” said Bazaz.

The survey also revealed that security is top priority for Asia-Pacific organisations, outranking the importance of availability and performance when it comes to applications, where 42% of survey respondents believe that application services cannot be deployed without security. Yet, a further quarter had no plans to deploy DDoS protection.