Cloud advancements maturing beyond cost and operational gains

Cloud advancements in the Asia Pacific region are maturing beyond cost and operational gains, according to a new survey from the International Data Corporation.

According to IDC Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) cloud survey and Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey (2022), organisations are slowly considering the next advancement of cloud adoption in terms of technology and services to reap benefits beyond cost reduction and IT productivity.

"With the multicloud environment becoming more manageable, organisations are loving the openness towards having workload portability and getting the best out of their cloud strategy without worrying about challenges of complexities, vendor lock in, data privacy or governance," says Shahnawas Latiff, Research Manager at IDC Asia Pacific.

According to the analyst firm, organisations in Asia Pacific are experiencing transformation from a technology and services implementation point and are advancing their investment considering the future innovation needs. 

Cloud and cloud service capabilities are imminent investments that enable organisations to differentiate themselves and give them competitive edge, it says. 

Ecosystem partners and professional service providers offer specialised capabilities to cloud service providers, who are otherwise getting commoditised with their bare minimum solutions or service.

IDC's survey findings and spending guide indicates different levels of cloud maturity in terms of country's adoption, investments, capabilities and expected business outcomes. Though many organisations have a multicloud strategy, they are not using the full capability of those cloud investments, the guide says. This is now starting to change with messaging and service support around issues concerning data privacy, security, governance, complexity, skill availability and workload portability between different cloud.

The IDC report, "Market Analysis Perspective: Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Public Cloud Services, 2021 " provides a view and insights for technology suppliers and technology marketing leaders to understand the adoption and buyer needs, competitive analysis of key players, and essential guidance for the cloud market. Moreover, this report extracts the key information from IDC's 2021 Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey, 2022 and APEJ cloud survey, 2022, detailing cloud maturity patterns, its scope, expectation and outcomes and some future prospective investments plans in the digital transformation era.

"Cloud providers are exploring several areas to create both competitive advantage and new opportunities in APEJ,' Latiff says in the report. 

"These expanding areas of opportunities are around the extension of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) beyond infrastructure and platform offering, edge computing, multicloud integration, cloud governance, and deeper cloud ecosystem partnership. Changing service-level agreements (SLAs) arising out of a complex cloud environment needs closer integration among cloud, managed and professional SPs, ISVs, and technology consultants to better manage IT and business outcomes."