By 2026, 40% of total revenue for top Asia-based 2000 organizations will be generated by digital products, services and experiences, according to market researcher IDC. This will drive the need for managing an explosion in applications and data, and the systems that bring them to life.
It can no longer be “business as usual” for any operation running on traditional data center technologies. And the rush to cloud services isn’t always the best reaction. That became clear as business adjust after the disruption caused by COVID, said Aaron White, general manager and vice president of sales, APJ, for Nutanix.
"It's time for organizations to take a step back and abandon their patchwork information technology in favor of more permanent, scalable solutions that will truly stand the test of time," said White.
Increasingly, that path is leading many businesses to adopt and build out hybrid multicloud IT operations.
He sees customers across APJ are prioritizing digital transformation and data center modernization, going beyond their hurried use of public cloud and databases during the pandemic to settle on a more permanent and stable solution.
“They’re grappling with an exponential increase in the number of applications they need to manage and they’re dealing with database sprawl,” he said. “This is driving several significant trends across IT teams in the region.”
IDC noted that in the months ahead, companies in the area will also be investing heavily in IT solutions as a way to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Likewise, beyond their efforts to manage their apps and databases, they will also be making more IT investments as a way to offset going concerns such as talent shortfalls, supply chain issues, inflation, cybersecurity challenges, and recession-related risks, the research firm noted.
Historically though, tackling these challenges has led many enterprises to piece together various cloud technologies. Demand for cloud solutions in the APAC region accounts for roughly 14% of global cloud spending – a figure that’s only continuing to grow, according to researchers at Canalys.
“The future is in the cloud… and demand and adoption of cloud in the Asia-Pacific region are forecast to exceed the rest of the world,” stated the Boston Consulting Group in its The Future of Cloud in Asia Pacific report released in 2021. The group explained that:
- There is no singular, static path that organizations will travel to the cloud in the future. Rather, different IT requirements, operating resources, and strategic objectives, like each company’s different individual circumstances, will instead demand more personalized and flexible IT solutions to match.
- Cloud adoption often comes in stages. Most organizations will need to leverage a mix of public and private cloud technologies in phases as they work to deploy and experiment with new solutions, scale their offerings, and then operate more efficiently at scale.
- Business strategies will play a greater role in shaping digital strategies in the years to come. Accordingly, cloud planning and preparation processes will increasingly have to account for operational workloads, distributed computing needs, regulatory compliance, and other wide-ranging organizational imperatives.
- Key areas that APAC enterprise leaders will look to cloud-based offerings to help drive growth in coming years will also include innovation, speed-to-market with new solutions, improving organizational efficiency and security, and boosting corporate resilience.
Businesses are therefore looking to cloud capabilities as a “force multiplier” that drives added value, according to the Deloitte US Future of Cloud Survey. That can come from streamlining and enhancing operations, deriving more value from the data they generate, developing new applications, and limiting wasteful spending on unused resources.
Nutanix’s White pointed out that many are turning to hybrid multicloud strategies to control the growing complexity of managing more applications and data. It’s helping manage the sprawl of resources.
“Moving ahead with patchwork IT no longer seems feasible,” he said.
Findings from the 2023 Annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI), which surveyed nearly 1,500 global IT decision makers, illustrate his point. The Nutanix-sponsored ECI report revealed a notable increase in the use of mixed infrastructure, spanning private IT infrastructure (both on-premises and hosted), public clouds and edge locations. This is driving IT pros to seek a unified place to manage and secure their applications and data. The number of organizations leveraging more than one IT infrastructure is expected to grow from 60% in 2023 to 74% in the near future. Nearly 95% of respondents believe they'd benefit from having a single, unified place to manage applications and data across their diverse environments.
While a growing number of organizations in his region already benefit from hybrid multicloud IT, White said those who aren’t are at a crossroads. He recently told The Nation Thailand and other publications that he’s seeing three trends across the Asia Pacific and Japan region driving a pivot to this new model:
- Organizations are nursing their COVID hangovers as they reassess their IT needs – As they rushed to make things work to support remote and hybrid workers, IT teams created new challenges, costly, sprawling use of cloud that makes it hard to manage. They now want to create a more cohesive, scalable operating model for the future.
- Staying still is not an option — even to maintain the status quo. IT teams are trying to figure out how to build robust, adaptive organizations while controlling costs. Many of the technologies that worked through the pandemic may not support the explosion in the number of apps and databases that support their needs.
- It’s time to get ahead of the explosion in apps and reign in database sprawl – Having apps and databases across multiple clouds and environments means they must manage the sprawl, which includes security, governance, and operational concerns. More are adopting a hybrid multicloud approach to better control growing complexities. Having a unified environment, with the same policies and tooling, visibility across all clouds, and leveraging automation are all necessary for digital organizations looking to take control of their data to succeed.
Between 2022 and 2026, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity… at the edge or in the public cloud, according to research firm Gartner. To face this, White advised IT leaders to identify true cloud implementation requirements, remain vigilant and agile in the face of uncertainty, and keep ahead of the explosion in app development and reigning in database sprawl.
He explained how hybrid multicloud technologies are allowing IT teams to manage, move and scale their apps and data so they’re in the optimal infrastructure at any given time.
“Japan’s Sapporo City used Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) to enable seamless connectivity between on-premise infrastructure and AWS,” White said. “Sapporo City was able to reduce IT complexity and operational burden significantly.”
He gave examples of how companies in the region that already modernized their IT systems were able to operate through the challenges of the COVID pandemic. India’s Jhaveri Securities relied on Nutanix to manage its servers and remotely perform operations sans downtime and latency. Taiwan’s Fangliao General Hospital used Nutanix software to send large volumes of COVID testing data to the government to aid with real-time epidemic forecasting and get screening results back to patients more rapidly.
White said he expects hybrid multicloud technologies to play a vital role as more of the region’s economy goes digital.
“While changing familiar infrastructure is daunting, failure to act will result in inevitable decline,” he said.
“Adopting a hybrid multicloud approach gets them ahead of the curve before the patchwork tears at the seams. It’s preparing them for a future where apps and data live and move seamlessly across different environments.”
