THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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Almost half of Asian enterprises lack strategy for hybrid cloud, survey shows

Almost half of Asian enterprises lack strategy for hybrid cloud, survey shows

SOME 44 per cent of enterprises in Asia-Pacific are proceeding to implement a hybrid cloud network without a formal strategy in place, research shows.

A survey, entitled Going Hybrid: Demand for Cloud and Managed Services Across Asia-Pacific, was commissioned by NTT Communications in partnership with Vmware and conducted in Thailand, Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore in the third quarter 2018. It analyses prevailing technology choices, service provider preferences, service priorities, and measures of hybrid cloud strategy and execution.
The research carried out an independent study of 464 IT decision-makers representing Asia- Pacific's largest businesses in vertical markets. The businesses surveyed had as many as 100,000 employees or more, and more than three-quarters had annual revenue of more than US$1 billion. Based on the results of that study, the subsequent report provides insight about hybrid cloud planning and management, drivers and inhibitors, and factors that are influencing the choice of platforms, tools, technologies and managed services.
Multi-cloud has become the norm for most enterprises across Asia Pacific. Over 90 per cent of businesses surveyed have multiple cloud environments with varying degrees of interoperability, and more than half said they are already using a hybrid cloud. However, nearly 44 per cent have begun implementing hybrid cloud pilots without an overarching hybrid strategy in place.
 “Alarmingly a significant portion of large enterprises lack a formal hybrid-cloud strategy. While they recognise the potential benefits, they underestimate the technical complexity which may derail their business modernisation efforts if they do not have a future-proof hybrid cloud plan,” said Dave Scott, solutions director for NTT Communications Managed Services.
 He said there are three paths to hybrid cloud migration: cloud-first, lift-and-shift, and refactor-and-shift
 Enterprises are found to be actively considering an off-premises cloud as a critical component of their business modernisation strategy, while a hybrid cloud offers intermediary steps in their business transformation. The survey found that more than half of enterprises primarily emphasise migrating workloads from their internal environments when deploying into a public cloud. However, there is no predominate approach to their cloud migration - currently 28 per cent are focused on a 'lift and shift' approach and another 28 per cent are refactoring before moving. Another third are focused on the public cloud for net new applications.
 In terms of hybrid workload deployment plans, there is little uniformity across all the businesses. In the next two years, CRM/sales and marketing (49 per cent), database and data warehousing (48 per cent) and file and content storage (47 per cent) will be the key focus for workloads to be shifted to hybrid cloud environments, up from 25, 28 and 28 per cent respectively. The strong traction indicates enterprises' growing confidence in hybrid cloud to support their full spectrum of business requirements and application portfolios.
 Scott said that for managed services, course-correction required for enterprises often lacks a well-thought-out hybrid cloud and security strategy 
 Another key consideration to drive hybrid cloud migration is security and compliance, which 95 per cent of enterprises rated as their top requirement. 
In addition, nearly half of respondents pointed to improvements in the consistency of security policies across environments and better management of risk - challenges that can emerge as businesses begin to employ multiple cloud environments.
 “End-to-end managed services and compliant-ready security management are increasingly becoming a strategy to future proof a company's business growth paths,” Scott said.
 All enterprises are at different stages in designing, implementing and operating their workloads or systems in a hybrid cloud environment. NTT Communications' Managed Services is well positioned to offer smart, reliable and secure IT solutions through their full spectrum of managed services.
 For instance, enterprises can immediately tap into NTT Communications' global resources and capabilities such as high-speed networks, a global footprint of data centre and cloud services, with only a single contract and one service-level agreement (SLA).
 

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