Understanding the state of cloud journey in Asia Pacific

This year we hosted a series of Cloud focused events in the region and were fortunate to be able to connect with a number of customers. In this blog, I would like to summarize where those customers are, in terms of their Cloud shift, and wrap up with some of regional characteristics.

China – Beijing & Shanghai

In May, we had the opportunity to talk to the local market analyst research firm. In our discussion, they’ve confirmed that the cloud shift is happening and all of modernized applications and architectures are driving these changes. A good example is the payment evolution happening in China. Everywhere you look in China, the sidewalks are filled with parked bicycles. Anyone with an app can unlock one of these bicycles with a swipe of their phone, and pay at the same time. You are able to share huge data files for the event via the local online storage services. This digital economy and modernizing of applications are pressuring local enterprises to move to new architectures, also known as Micro Services Architecture.

Japan

We had the luxury of having one of our key customer present their recent cloud journey at our morning keynote session. During his session, he spoke about how they moved from on-premise data center, to Private Cloud, and finally they also deployed Public Cloud. The Multi Cloud is happening, and we are honored to be part of the Cloud journey with this large enterprise. To find out more, click here.

Indonesia

We did an experimental survey at the Agility Jakarta session and gathered a good amount of feedback from delegates. The details can be found in the up-coming blog for Indonesia event !! The key summary is that, although Indonesia enterprises in general are relatively known as a conservative to emerging technologies, the sentiment of the cloud journey in the country is growing and becoming serious now. 34% of delegates told us Private Cloud is strategically important for them. 90% of respondents are seeing in between 25% to 75% of their apps to be move to the cloud within less than 2 years. Both of these stats are quite close to the same question conducted in our worldwide end user base. And of course, Indonesia being known as mobile centric, Mobility is the key driver here as well.

Australia

We conducted a similar survey in our Agility Sydney. The responses gathered were not surprising at all! Close to 80% of the respondents said that are using both Private and Public Cloud. What was interesting though, was when we asked if they were using Hybrid cloud, the response with “YES” went down to less than 70%. In addition, more than 35% of respondents told us that they placed more than half of their applications in Private cloud, while only 10% in the Public Cloud. Based on these findings, together with another question “Are you worried about being [locked in] to a public cloud provider?” which got “YES” response from 50% of them, the key takeaway is that, customers are struggling to manage and operate the cloud even after they have started using those solutions. Security and management are the major concerns that we have identified from the survey in Australia, which was beyond our assumption from typical image of customer base sentiment in this “Cloud-Advanced” country.

In conclusion:

For sure, each country has their own character, color, and market driver. However, no matter how diverse these Asian countries are, the business challenges for these enterprises remains the same and therefore the solutions they look for would be similar.

To harness the full potential of cloud, enterprises must take measured approach to prepare your architecture for the cloud. Consider these six steps to get you started.

Finally, I would like to thank all of the people who attended our Agility Series in Asia Pacific and Japan and for taking time out to have a chat with me. Your feedback is highly appreciated.

Till our next event!