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NTT Communications has warned that nearly half (44 per cent) of all Asia Pacific (APAC) enterprises are proceeding with implementing a hybrid cloud without a formal strategy in place.
These findings are part of a new 451 Research survey whitepaper, Going Hybrid: Demand for Cloud and Managed Services Across Asia-Pacific, which was commissioned by NTT Communications in partnership with VMware.
The survey was conducted across six APAC countries, namely, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Australia during the third quarter of 2018, analysing the prevailing technology choices, service provider preferences, service priorities, and measures of hybrid cloud strategy and execution.
“Alarmingly a significant portion of large enterprises lack a formal hybrid-cloud strategy,” said Dave Scott, solutions director, NTT Communications Managed Services.
“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."
Furthermore, 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, despite this nearly 44 per cent have begun implementing hybrid cloud pilots without an overarching hybrid strategy in place, as mentioned.
The survey also 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 are focused on the public cloud for net new applications.
While enterprises are considering this hybrid cloud model as an effective intermediary steps in their business transformation, in the long run many enterprise are found to be actively considering an off-premises cloud as a critical component of their business modernisation strategy
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.
Managed services
Another key consideration to drive hybrid cloud migration is security and compliance, which 95 per cent of enterprises rated as their top requirement.
In addition, nearly half of respondents pointed to improvements in the consistency of security policies across environments and better management of risk – challenges that can emerge as businesses begin to employ multiple cloud environments.
Enterprises embarking on a hybrid cloud strategy must ensure they build in security, but designing and applying security for hybrid cloud is challenging, and a task that is sometimes outside the capabilities of an organisation’s own security team.
More than 50 per cent of enterprises pointed to the fact that they use managed services at some point in their cloud journey.
Beyond security, enterprises are also turning to managed services providers that support both the initial design and implementation of hybrid cloud, as well as its ongoing operation, to continually optimise workloads between various infrastructure environments for the best mix of performance, availability, security and cost.
“End-to-end managed services and compliant-ready security management are increasingly becoming a strategy to future proof a company’s business growth paths,” added Scott.
