Nearly half of APAC enterprises are employing hybrid cloud without a formal strategy

NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), announced that 44 per cent of enterprises in Asia-Pacific are going ahead with implementing a hybrid cloud without a formal strategy in place, according to a new 451 Research survey.

The survey "Going Hybrid: Demand for Cloud and Managed Services Across Asia-Pacific", was commissioned by NTT Communications in partnership with VMware, Inc. and conducted in six countries (Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand) in Q3 2018.

It analyses prevailing technology choices, service provider preferences, service priorities, and measures of hybrid cloud strategy and execution.

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, NTT Communications Managed Services.

Three different 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 is 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.