Cloud important to 96% of channel partners strategy - Akamai

Research released by the cloud company Akamai Technologies has revealed that 96% of channel partners in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) agreed that cloud is important to their customers' 2023 strategy, with 48% of respondents estimating that 21-40% of IT budgets would be spent on cloud.

The results are based on a survey of 386 respondents across ANZ, Japan, China, India, Singapore, and South Korea.

The results align with 95% of partners in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region who agreed that cloud computing would be key to their 2023 strategy.

However, spending results vary, with 27% of APJ businesses planning to spend below 20% of their IT budget on cloud, with 33% planning to spend above 40%.

"In our conversations with partners, we see that organisations are walking the fine line between investing in cloud as well as being frugal in light of the macroeconomic headwinds. We believe the solution lies in working with a developer-friendly cloud and compute ecosystem that can offer them both flexibility and cost-effectiveness, while avoiding bill shock," says Tatsuya Suzuki, Regional VP, APJ Carrier and Channel, Akamai.

"Even as the industry landscape continues to evolve and increase in complexity, Akamai seeks to accelerate the ambitions of our partners as they help their customers harness the potential of the cloud. We will offer expanded product roadmaps in the new year, across the areas of cloud, security, and delivery to achieve the overarching goal of making life better for billions of people, billions of times a day."

APJs cloud priorities

Despite overarching agreement on the necessity of cloud technology, the willingness to spend on cloud varied between country-specific data.

Vietnam (31%), Indonesia (27%), and India (23%) had the highest percentages in terms of respondents who said the proportion of IT budget spent on cloud would be 60% and greater.

Conversely, Thailand (50%), Japan (49%) and Taiwan (40%) had the highest percentages for respondents who indicated that the proportion of IT budget spent on cloud would be below 20%.

"While most organisations acknowledge the importance of cloud, many are apprehensive about investing their IT budgets in this technology, given concerns of costs and how this will affect other overarching IT priorities. These sentiments are clear from the latest insights we have gathered from our partners, and this is why Akamai is investing heavily in scaling our cloud computing capabilities," continued Suzuki.

"We believe that organisations need more options for their cloud needs, particularly those that are easy to use and developer friendly with transparent, attractive pricing, and we are able to provision for these needs with Akamai Connected Cloud."

Priorities in the ANZ region

Cloud is a key focus for the ANZ region, but security is too, especially with the rise of data breaches in the past months.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre's (ACSC) third Annual Cyber Threat Report revealed that the agency had received over 76,000 cybercrime reports in the last financial year, a 13% increase from the year prior.

"In the coming months, we are likely to see an increase in the number and sophistication of cyber-attacks and larger scale data breaches, causing more disruption. There is also a risk of complacency from breach fatigue. Many organisations will focus on improving the security of their supply chain as part of ensuring positive business outcomes," explains Mark Trumble, APAC Head of Portfolio Cyber Security, Fujitsu Australia, and New Zealand.

Akamai announced its Connected Cloud edge and cloud platform for computing, security and content delivery in February. With such a diverse product came a wide distribution, with Akamai planning to launch four new enterprise-scale core cloud computing sites across APJ in Chennai, Osaka, Jakarta and Auckland by the end of 2023.

"Akamai is supporting our customers and partners with our security solutions, including Edge DNS, a global, highly scalable domain name system (DNS) service offering security, resilience from Distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) events, and high DNS responsiveness. As a result, we are able to observe trillions of DNS requests daily and have clear visibility on the latest developments in the threat landscape," adds Dean Houari, Director of Security Technology and Strategy, APJ, Akamai.

"We remain committed to protecting our customers and partners and staying ahead of attackers by blocking requests leading to domains serving malware and phishing sites that could steal data."

Akamai has also identified more than 50 cities globally in which it plans to begin rolling out distributed sites this year. This will bring basic cloud computing capabilities into remote locations currently unserved by traditional cloud providers.