Trends impacting the APAC cloud computing market

In a market as fast paced and constantly
evolving as cloud technology, it’s no surprise that trends can change overnight
or that CIOs are kept up all night thinking of ways to strike the balance
between keeping systems ticking-over and continuing to innovate. There have
been some important changes in the market this year – some incremental and some
major leaps – that I expect will continue to impact the regional cloud
computing market well into next year.

There has been a big shift in IT consumption
models for enterprises, with many CIOs becoming more aware of the benefits of
cloud based applications and increasingly exploring Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS). The evolution of traditional licensed based software moving to the
cloud has had an impact on the delivery of applications, and facilitated in the
creation of application based user interfaces that can be accessed from a range
of devices.

As such, enterprise CIOs are leveraging SaaS
models to create opportunities, pick and choose the best applications for their
market and to manage them through a single pane of glass. I expect to see both
hardware and software providers trying to tie in to the SaaS market, either by
establishing reference designs or evolving software packages to become more
demand subscription based.

With certain platforms providing direct access
to SaaS providers, there are now easier ways in which applications can be delivered,
such as bypassing the Internet to alleviate security and performance
concerns.  For example, Office 365, which
was available only via the Internet, can also be accessed now by private
connections via Azure Expressroute.

Corporate networks are currently strained
by the global dispersion of workforces (75% of enterprise employees reside in
locations outside of a company’s headquarters) and the proliferation of
multiple users who access the network via multiple devices in multiple
locations. Centralized, siloed IT architectures, often trapped in on-premise
data centers, can’t scale to get closer to end users and deliver the
high-performance connections users demand.

Meanwhile, interconnection via the public Internet
will continue to be plagued by reliability and security concerns. For all these
reasons, enterprises are increasingly designing interconnection-oriented infrastructures
to enable direct and secure links to cloud and network providers and various
other partners. In this interconnected era, companies will increasingly rely on
instantaneous interconnection with each other to create new value and succeed.

The benefits of this interconnection are
real and quantifiable. According to the “Enterprise
of the Future” report by Equinix, more than
a third of respondents who have already deployed interconnection solutions
report greater than $10 million in value created, with 58% reporting this value
came from increased revenue opportunities.

In the early days of cloud, enterprises
would work with one cloud provider for one application, but over time these
providers started to innovate at varying paces and offer different features.
This led users to look at how they could integrate multiple clouds into a
system to best suit their needs, which has led to the adoption of multi-cloud platforms.

However, this interoperability requires
orchestration to ensure users know where to divert and how to manage their traffic.
Companies are looking for a central switching point that offers access to these
clouds, while service providers would want to be part of an ecosystem where
they can rapidly connect to enterprises and carriers. This makes orchestration
across providers increasingly important, with hardware vendors responding by
creating solutions that can interoperate between cloud providers.

Security platforms in the cloud and cloud
security will be a focus for next year, along with how integrators can create a
centralized billing system for multi-clouds. With providers offering a bundle
of services and subscriptions to their customers, they will have to work out
how to measure and bill for these. With services coming from a range of
vendors, CIOs need
to make sure their selected service providers are capable of handling accurate and timely billing data.

Hyper-convergence gained considerable ground
in 2015, as solutions continued to shrink and come together, and enterprises
have continued to explore hybrid cloud architectures in 2016.

In the hardware market, hyper-convergence
has led to smaller footprints and brought servers and storage together in one
box along with additional new functions.  Some enterprises are now looking at how to best
integrate legacy infrastructure with public cloud providers, while others are
exploring new equipment designed and optimized to work with cloud solutions.

We are seeing more CIOs of small and
mid-size enterprises focusing on hyper-convergence, in particular ‘cloud in a
box’ – integrated virtualization, storage and compute resources – that enable
them to easily and nimbly migrate to the cloud.

As ever,
the cloud market may be difficult to pin down
sometimes, but it sure is exciting to be a part of.