Cloud adoption accelerating across ANZ enterprises

Australian and New Zealand enterprise customers are accelerating their cloud transformation initiatives, with a four-fold increase in the amount of data moving from on-premises environments to the two leading public clouds being seen over the past year alone.

According to enterprise data protection and software-defined infrastructure firm Veritas Technologies, this is in addition to a dramatic increase in the number of NetBackup workloads that have moved to the cloud in that same time frame.

The cloud as an enabler of modern digital business is a primary driver of this acceleration, Veritas says.

"As dependence on the cloud increases, it requires organisations to employ data management strategies that are robust, yet flexible enough to aid their transformation, while mitigating risks. This has become abundantly clear in a world of evolving data regulations, ransomware, and virtually zero tolerance for downtime," it says.

Movement to the cloud accelerates

The results of the Veritas' latest Truth in Cloud Report — a recent survey commissioned by Veritas on the challenges of cloud data management, reiterate the industry's shift toward cloud. The research found 45% of Australia and 41% percent of New Zealand respondents characterise their company's current infrastructure state as an even split between the public cloud and the data center. However, 63% of Australia and 73% of New Zealand businesses indicate their desired end state is to run most or all of their applications on public cloud infrastructure.

Respondents are moving quickly to make this happen for non-production systems and dev/test environments, as well as mission-critical production systems. The increasingly distributed nature of IT systems is likely one major reason many companies are also increasing their investment in the technology used to protect and secure them, the research says.

Nearly 81% of Australian businesses and 53% of New Zealand businesses have allocated budget to purchase new solutions to address cloud data protection in the next 12 months, and a majority expect their budget for backup and recovery to increase substantially over the next three years. However, where respondents had responsibility over both on-premises and cloud-based workloads, almost half of Australia's respondents and 40% of New Zealand respondents would rather do so with a single backup solution.

"The cloud is driving Australia's economy today, resulting in a cumulative productivity benefit of $9.4 billion over the last five years. Our customers are overwhelmingly choosing the cloud for new workloads and advanced deployments," says Howard Fyffe, managing director, Australia - New Zealand, Veritas Technologies.

"Today, many ANZ organisations benefit from disaster recovery orchestration and cloud data protection in hybrid on-premises and cloud environments," he says.

"Our integrated Enterprise Data Services Platform helps customers abstract IT complexity, making it easy to extend enterprise-grade protection from on-premises to the cloud and ensure data is always available, compliant, and secure.